X-Men: Days of Future Past movie review: time for hope
With its time-twisting plot, sci-fi soapiness, powerful humanism, and to-die-for cast, this is the summer blockbuster done with elegance and heart.
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Godzilla movie review: sympathy for Gojira
Elegantly updates the King of All Monsters for the 21st century… but Hollywood’s tedious myopia means the movie as a whole isn’t quite so beautiful.
Sabotage movie review: DEAd end gang
Feels like a cheap action flick and plays like an unintentional call to end drugs prohibition and the idiotic war between cartels and law enforcement.
Plastic review: movie declined
Preposterous and charmless, this heist flick purports to be based on a true story and hopes to invoke a Robin Hood vibe, but I’m not buying any of it.
Brick Mansions review: bombs away
This absurd and pointlessly convoluted remake of a decade-old French action flick feels dated and out of step in more ways than one.
Pompeii rating: yellow light
Instantly forgettable but more than passable as a diversion; solid B-movie cheese that’s like Titanic-lite meets Gladiator-lite.
The Legend of Hercules rating: red light
Kellan Lutz is the demigod’s density in Renny Harlin’s MST3K-ready retelling of the classical legend. Think Jesus with muscles, by the power of Greyskull.
The Love Punch review: below the belt
The jokes are as creaky as the aching bunions and bad backs onscreen, but Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan are incandescent together.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 review: black and white and web all over
Suffers badly by comparison with the cogent, witty Avengers flicks. This feels like a campy Saturday-morning cartoon left over from the 1970s.
Divergent review: girls just wanna do everything
No, it’s not wildly different than other science fiction, hero’s journey, and adventure movies. Sometimes we call such stories archetypal. Mythic, even.
