While I am generally not a big fan of movies in which nothing is as it seems and nobody is who they seem to be, I do appreciate filmmaking that genuinely fools me with strong plotting, characterization and intelligence.  Focus is […]

I’ve seen a lot of movies like this over the years, wherein crime syndicates are ripped apart by internal strife, questions of honor and family, and violent wrongs perpetrated by people who don’t know any other way to survive.  There […]

There are few visionaries in science-fiction cinema, but one of them is Neill Blomkamp, the South African writer-director behind District 9, Elysium and now Chappie  (and soon, the next installment of Alien, which plans to dispense with Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection, […]

Dominance.  Submission.  Trust.  While the movie Fifty Shades of Grey purports to be all about kinky sex — and it has several softcore sex scenes — it is less about the kinky stuff than it is about trust, which I found […]

I liked the first film, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, pretty well, and watched it last night again because Barbara had never seen it.  Today we saw the sequel, which, like most sequels, just isn’t quite up to the level […]

I don’t watch a lot of family-friendly children’s films any more but I’m glad I spent some time watching Paddington, the story of how an English-speaking bear from “darkest Peru” arrives in London searching for a new family.  I was […]

Space operas, in movie parlance, are fairly rare these days.  They are science fiction stories that involve other worlds, intergalactic romance and adventure, mighty feats of derring-do, intriguing technology and epic parameters.  The most popular of all space operas is, […]

Many, many movies have attempted to cash in on the James Bond cinematic phenomena over the years by emulating, parodying, copying, satirizing or, as in this case, outdoing the Bond cadre.  Some of those imitators and descendants have been pretty […]