“Chappie” is the latest sci-fi effort from “District 9” and “Elysium” director Neill Blomkamp. Is it sappy? Yes. Will seeing it make you happy? No. Is it, overall, crappy? Unfortunately, yes. But “Chappie” goes way beyond these slightly above-average, yet obvious puns. In an attempt to sum-up what I watched for two hours, I quote […]
Will Smith hasn’t starred in a movie since 2013’s sci-fi disaster “After Earth”, a Smith family affair that also involved son Jaden as co-star and wife Jada as co-producer. Oh, and M. Night Shyamalan was the director. And…it laid an egg. If Smith believed, after reading the script for “Focus”, that this could be his […]
“McFarland, USA” is the latest “Based on a True Story” sports drama from the studio king of the genre, Disney. This time, the Mouse House employees had to go all the way back to 1987 to find their latest inspirational, underdog story. And, after using baseball, football, basketball, hockey, horse racing, golf, bobsledding, and even […]
I did not see the original “Hot Tub Time Machine”, which was released in 2010, but a lot people did and many consider it a modern cult classic comedy. Now, a whopping five years later, we get the just plainly ridiculous “Hot Tub Time Machine 2”, which joins the list of “Taken 3” and (while […]
In 2011 Colin Firth won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in “The King’s Speech”, which included many memorable scenes. Now, four years later, Firth stars in “Kingsman: The Secret Service”, director Matthew Vaughn’s follow-up to “X-Men: First Class”. “Kingsman” does provide Firth with the opportunity to appear in, quite possibly, the most memorable […]
“Jupiter Ascending” is the latest sci-fi/adventure from The Wachowskis. Since their “Matrix” trilogy wrapped-up in 2003, they haven’t had much success. 2008’s “Speed Racer” was forecasted as a summer blockbuster and instead ended-up a complete car-wreck. 2012’s visionary “Cloud Atlas” was interesting, but not the Best Picture contender everyone expected, nor a box office hit […]
Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? If you don’t know the answer to that question by now, you’ve been living under a certain sea star’s rock. SpongeBob SquarePants has been a worldwide cultural phenomenon since his debut on Nickelodeon in 1999. In 2004, the sea creatures of Bikini Bottom went from TV screens […]
Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard (“La Vie en Rose”) is nominated again this year in the Best Actress category for her raw and consistently believable performance as Sandra, a wife and mother of two, fighting to keep her job in the Belgian drama “Two Days, One Night”. That’s all the time Sandra has to find […]
This year’s group of five Oscar nominees in the Best Animated Short Film category is the strongest I’ve ever seen, so coming-up with a clear frontrunner is not easy. Here are the Nominees: “The Bigger Picture” (8 min., UK) – The style is groundbreaking, with a mix of life-size claymation figures and set pieces, as […]
The trailers that The Weinstein Company released for “Paddington” were noisy and slapstick-heavy, making this family adventure, based on the iconic children’s book character, appear to be dreadful. They also decided to push the US opening date back from Christmas Day to the middle of January, normally a move made when a studio realizes that […]