Teaming (arguably) the most successful director of all time with a story that plays on both the current obsession with gaming and pop culture nostalgia would seem to be a no-brainer. It has to be good, right? Well, kinda. Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One is a visually stunning spectacle at times, but it’s no E.T….
Do you love giant robots? How about huge slobbering monsters? Buildings being smashed to pieces? The world being saved? If you said yes to any of these, then Pacific Rim: Uprising is exactly the movie for you. Director Steven S. DeKnight brings this muddled tale to the big screen with a lot of spectacle, but…
It’s hard to believe it’s been 17 years since Angelina Jolie made the role of Lara Croft her own in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Jolie was in her mid-twenties at that time. Now we see generational change, with 29-year-old Alicia Vikander stepping into the role. In Tomb Raider – an origin story – Lara is the fiercely independent…
Antonio Banderas will never succeed in emulating the role he played in Desperado. There was a flare-up in Automata and The 33 a while back, but for the most part he only plays in standard films which deserve the label “B-Film” most of the times. Usually the acting isn’t the cause, because that remains of…
Every American adult knows exactly where they were on the terrible morning of September 11, 2001. But until recently, only a handful knew about the extraordinary events that unfolded in the immediate aftermath. With the country still reeling, 12 members of the US Army’s elite Green Berets left their homes and loved ones to take on a…
Marvel Studios’ latest superhero flick, Black Panther, tells the tale of T’Challa, an African prince who takes on the mantle of king and the centuries’ old legacy that comes with it. Crossing racial and cultural lines, the groundbreaking Black Panther character is another creation of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. He made his first appearance in the…
The DNA of Michael Mann’s 1995 classic Heat runs through the gritty crime drama, Den of Thieves. Los Angeles is the bank robbery capital of the US, with one committed every 48 minutes on average. Merriman (Pablo Schreiber) leads a highly organised and efficient gang of robbers. A former special ops soldier, Merriman uses his training and skills to…
Maze Runner: The Death Cure concludes the generic dystopian saga based on the popular series of novels written by James Dashner. And unlike a couple of other YA adaptations, at least here the producers resisted the temptation to split the final film into two parts. We were first introduced to a group of heroes, known as…
A moral conundrum and the consequences choice are at the heart of The Commuter. This is the fourth collaboration between director Jaume Collet-Serra and Liam Neeson (after Unknown, Non-Stop and Run All Night). Neeson plays Michael MacCauley, a 60-year-old middle manager at a faceless insurance company. Like so many hard-working family men, he’s at financial breaking point. His son…
It’s the time of year when serious Oscar contenders swamp our screens. But sometimes it’s good just to sit back, disengage your brain and indulge in something silly. For that, there’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. This is a faux-sequel to 1995’s Jumanji, a film perhaps nostalgically remembered as better than it actually was. The nostalgia…
