The hype, the fan base, the skeptics—the skeptics created by the hype and the fan base—all of these make adapting an insanely popular novel anything but easy. Given the breadth of the age and gender demographics that Suzanne Collins’ young adult science-fiction story “The Hunger Games” has reached, there are so many niches to please. […]

What was the point of making a “21 Jump Street” movie? No, really, why bother remaking or rebooting re-imagining a short-lived cop series from the ‘80s, especially when you’ve targeted your movie at people born long after it went off the air? The way writer Michael Bacall along with Jonah Hill, directors Phil Lord and […]

When we think of science fiction, we so often think about the future. We expect it to stretch our imaginations in ways we never thought possible with groundbreaking concepts beyond our current understanding. “John Carter” appears to aspire to that level. Yet in spite of the film’s hefty price tag, use of latest in motion-capture […]

Animated sequels have yet to disprove that timeless adage about movie sequels, but they’re giving it a real go. DreamWorks Animation hasn’t always gotten the formula right (the “Shrek” movies got worse and worse), but even “Madagascar 2: Escape 2 Africa” had entertainment to offer. “Kung Fu Panda 2” marks the studio’s third try at […]

The humor of “Wanderlust” and hippie communes share a similar mantra: embrace it or get the heck out. “Role Models” director David Wain and comedian Ken Marino have written a genuinely funny movie, only one that’s kind of pasted together like a spontaneous collage of humorous characters and moments rather than strung together with any […]

We’re now more than a decade into the modern superhero movie era, folks. At this point, we’ve just crossed the threshold of the “reboot phase,” in which studios have either been forced or decided to re-imagine some of the 2000‘s major superhero properties. We saw “X-Men: First Class” successfully relaunch the “X-Men” franchise last summer […]

Since the Golden Age of comic books, folks have been imagining what it would be like if ordinary people came across extraordinary power. But not until 2012 with “Chronicle” has anyone truly attempted to capture this notion with a sense of realism. Josh Trank and Max Landis have done just that with their low-budget found-footage […]

Coming-of-age stories come in all forms, though one would expect a New York City drug dealer at the height of hip-hop in the mid ’90s to have already experienced a loss of innocence. For Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck), however, dealing pot is just a summer job, and for all his street cred, he’s a lonely […]

They say “time is money,” and so it seems filmmaker Andrew Niccol took them too seriously. “In Time” imagines a dystopia in which humans have been genetically modified to stop aging at 25 and at that point receive a year to live as indicated by timers on their forearms. The only way they can prolong […]

Few of us can truly grasp the economic fundamentals of the 2008 stock market crash—how it happened, why it happened. Most of what we understand are the after effects, the human consequences. Rookie filmmaker J.C. Chandor’s “Margin Call” attempts to merge those two understandings: the economics and the executive-level decision-making with the real-life impact and […]

Liam Neeson the gritty action hero. How unbelievable that at nearly 60 years old, an actor can redefine his career and become more bankable. Neeson has somehow re-channeled the seriousness he brought to dramatic roles into creating utterly convincing heroes in decent (at best) thrillers. 

Terrence Malick can’t count himself among the most popular directors working today, but he can certainly count himself among the most respected. His work tends to follow suit, and “The Tree of Life” is no exception. This meditation on life, death, God and the origin of the universe can be described as nothing short of […]

We are most often drawn to two types of great performances: the believable expression of extreme emotions in powerful circumstances and the impersonation. When an actor playing a person for which we have a point of reference convinces our imaginations so completely that this is in fact what the real-life figure was like, we are […]

  Global pandemics make for captivating science-fiction fodder — especially when the infected turn into raging zombies — but let’s say it was a tad more realistic. Let’s say that H1N1 had been as bad as we were prepared for and people were dying left and right. “Contagion” imagines that scenario through the extensive research […]

In an era when a lot of movies don’t know when to shut up, how nice to have “The Artist.” So much of Hollywood is the search for the next big thing (looking at you, 3D), yet the Silent Era and those who clung to its sinking ship back in the late 1920s understood a […]