You can officially stop wondering or hoping if the modern “Jurassic Park” franchise will ever re-capture what audiences felt in 1993. These desperate sequels will never have the effect on a current generation that Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster did on ours. That said, Colin Trevorrow’s 2015 “Jurassic World” came close. “Fallen Kingdom” unfortunately lives up to […]
While there is nothing inherently wrong with the latest “Star Wars” film, there is nothing intrinsically right with it either. “Star Wars” fatigue has set in for many fans a few episodes back. Fatigue that is likely to continue because the franchise which used to debut films once every few years, now delivers a new one every few
The 9th “Star Wars” film boasts not only one of the largest casts in the franchise history but also the longest running time (152 minutes). Fanboy director Rian Johnson (“Looper”) takes the reigns from JJ Abrams, delivering an entry that is categorically for the die-hard fan. The story picks up right where 2015’s “The Force
The ‘Fate’ of the series is secure. There will always be an audience for these films regardless of what implausibility they launch on screen or how poorly the actors deliver their lines. Universal’s mammoth franchise has even started to pull in Oscar winners like Charlize Theron (“Mad Max”) and Helen Mirren (“The Woman in Gold”)
This marks the 5th big screen adaptation of King Kong, and only twelve years after Peter Jackson (“The Lord of the Rings”) put him back on screen. Jordan Vogt-Roberts’s sophomore film is an enormous leap from the tiny independent movie “The Kings of Summer” (2013) to this nearly $200 million dollar monster flick. What works;
It really took some effort to make Jack Reacher 2 worse than the first one. Cruise is on autopilot, making one action movie a year, and this was just the next script in the pile. It’s not exciting, it’s not thrilling, it not only lacks anything new with Lee Child’s character, but it can’t even
The Bourne series which began in 2002 with director Doug Liman instantly became Oscar winner Matt Damon’s most successful acting venture. The 2004 sequel “The Bourne Supremacy” was handed over to director Paul Greengrass (“United 93”, “Captain Phillips”) who revitalized the series. Greengrass returned to finish out the trilogy in “The Bourne Ultimatum” (2007), but
After years of trying to get a third Ghostbusters film together, comedy director Paul Feig (The Heat, Spy) bypassed Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray, with a greenlight from the studio for an all-female Ghostbusters. The problem with this reboot isn’t the all-female cast, if I had my preference women would have all the leading roles
I went into this superhero movie, sequel, franchise with arms crossed. Annoyed that my summers are now filled with just one comic book adaptation after another. While X-Men Apocalypse (the 6th film in the series) hits theaters three weeks after Marvel’s other franchise Captain America debuted, they screened them for critics back to back. My
This is what a film looks like when it is directed by a studio. Sure visual effects supervisor Cedric Nicolas-Troyan worked on the previous “Snow White & the Huntsman”, but has never directed a single feature film in his life. “Jessica Chastain was contractually obligated to appear in this film, due to starring in a