Just serviceable bunker thriller that asks the question, “Would you want to survive The Big One if it meant being stuck in a windowless concrete cottage with the kind of guy who spent his life preparing to survive The Big One?” (Heck, his own wife and daughter couldn’t stand the …
Writer-director Rian Johnson sure is having fun these days. They let him into the Star Wars sandbox, and he built a monument to feminine genius that enraged a measurable portion of the fanbase and still managed to make over a billion dollars. (Sure, it was half of what J.J. abrams …
The throbbing Lalo Schifrin theme music from the original late-Sixties TV show is still the best thing about this third mission, as it was about the first two. It's hard to decide what's the worst thing. Tom Cruise would be a too-easy fall guy. Granted, he seems to be getting …
Enjoyable prequel, thirty years after the same-named debut of the series on the big screen. The chaotic and incoherent prologue might somewhat smother the emotional punch of the birth of James Tiberius Kirk at the same moment as his father’s death, but the reintroduction of the old familiar characters — …
File under: Returns, diminishing. Also under: Titles, misleading, as this entry in the rebooted sci-fi franchise is very much a circling back. Justin Lin has taken over the helm from J.J. Abrams, but he’s not about to change course, at least as far as reusing old material goes. So yeah, …
Director J.J. Abrams at his most J.J. Abrams-y. A lens flare light show. A Spielberg homage (the opening is taken straight from Raiders of the Lost Ark). Deft nostalgia-mining coupled with equally deft placement of the extracted gems in the crown of his new creation (a Tribble plays a key …
The kind view — the uncynical view, the generous view — is that director J.J. Abrams just wants to give the joy of childhood back to a generation that fell in love with Star Wars back in 1977. (Plus maybe win a new generation over to that story’s mythological power.) …
Well, that’s over. After Rian Johnson’s Episode VIII: The Riling of the Fanbase, Disney lets J.J. Abrams resume the Star Wars cockpit, and the man who gave new meaning to fan service with The Force Awakens wastes no time before initiating course correction. When we meet up with brash pilot …
Director J.J. Abrams’s spot-on remake of Steven Spielberg’s ’80s ode to the feeling of childhood, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. It’s all there: the broken home, the mysterious Visitor (more frightening this time, but as in Abrams’s Cloverfield, still somewhat beside the point), the looming shadow of grown-up authority. What is new …