Ivory Tower is a competent, slickly-produced documentary that takes a hard look at the cost and perceived benefits of higher education in the United States. That the price of college has been on a steady rise for decades hardly qualifies as new news, but the toll it is taking on… Continue reading
The Other Woman plays like a movie that was made by people that actively hate the script. It is a grotesque, shrill, never-ending effort that always finds a way to sink a little lower just when you’re positive there’s no way it can. Not only is it wholly damaging in its… Continue reading
If I Stay is an above-average tear-jerker that hits all the notes one would expect. Bumping it up a few pegs is a splendid lead performance from Chloe Grace Moretz and one of the more convincing teenage romances of recent memory. Moretz stars as Mia, a cello prodigy who’s well on… Continue reading
Expectations are usually set in concrete by the time the third entry of a franchise is reached, and The Expendables 3 is no exception. You know you’re in for a lot of action, cheesy one-liners, and the kind of plot that can be hung from a clothesline. On that level,… Continue reading
Bringing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the big screen has been one of the more interesting cinematic case studies of the past twenty-plus years. Whether live action, animation, or, in this case, motion-capture combined with live action, it’s pretty much impossible for the turtles not to be some combination of… Continue reading
The superhero genre has become so dark and self-serious, not to mention over-saturated, that it’s rapidly becoming a parody of itself. Guardians of the Galaxy seems aware of this and succeeds as a largely character and script-driven experience. Hardly any of the story is original, right down to the MacGuffin that… Continue reading
It’s really amazing that it’s taken this long for Need for Speed, a popular and never-ending video game series, to get the big-screen treatment. On the heels of the mega-popular The Fast and the Furious and its sequels, there is a built-in audience for this kind of vehicular anarchy. And… Continue reading
There are going to be a lot of people wanting to know what kind of hallucinogens writer/director Luc Besson was on when he came up with Lucy. This is one bonkers movie, filled with enough sci-fi concepts for an entire series and just enough grisly action to get by during its… Continue reading
Desperado, released in August of 1995, is basically a big(ger) budget remake of director Robert Rodriguez’s first film, El Mariachi (1992). Many are familiar with the lore surrounding El Mariachi‘s production. It was made in twenty days on a budget of $7,000 (or roughly the cost of afternoon snacks for today’s… Continue reading
20 Years Ago It pretty much goes without saying that True Lies encompasses just about everything a thirteen-year-old boy could want in a movie. It has a sense of humor, lots of cartoonishly over-the-top action scenes, and even a racy striptease because, well, it just feels like it. I knew… Continue reading