Television veteran Chadwick Boseman gives a fine, canny performance as Jackie Robinson, the man who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Well, except for when he talks to his wife and infant son: then, writer-director Brian Helgeland’s script drives him into speechmaking about the …
A dip in the frigid briney compounded by a bolt of lightning endows Blake Lively with eternal youth, and all she does with her super power is dress well and fall for some rich schmo with whom she shares no chemistry (Michiel Huisman). So little happens in the way of …
The President's plane is hijacked by reactionary Communists out of Kazakhstan, and only one man can stop them: the President himself. As a valorous Vietnam vet and a Medal of Honor winner ("He knows how to fight!" effuses his former commanding officer), he stands roughly the same chance of beating …
Two of the more socially conscious of cinematic genres — science fiction and the detective story — have been mated to produce a future-generation Los Angeles (A.D. 2019) that looks like Tokyo or Hong Kong gone to seed. The detective work is somewhat scamped, except for a good scene (echoing …
Two of the more socially conscious of cinematic genres — science fiction and the detective story — have been mated to produce a future-generation Los Angeles (A.D. 2019) that looks like Tokyo or Hong Kong gone to seed. The detective work is somewhat scamped, except for a good scene (echoing …
Harrison Ford stars opposite a computer generated dog... or is it a live-action dog working with a replicant? Time will tell.
Slow-to-start and long-to-end espionage thriller (or the further adventures of Dr. Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy's CIA guy from Patriot Games), detailing a covert and illicit military action against the Colombian drug cartels. There's a well-staged ambush at around the hour mark (sole survivor: Harrison Ford), and an exciting rescue near …
A dud. The big team of writers pile up cheap violence, icky aliens, corny rustics, a ha-ha Mexican, a mystery woman reborn in a fire, a hummingbird, a boy and his dog, silly special effects, and a sense that both the Western and the sci-fi invasion genre are being buried …
Unctuous liberalism and clumsy manipulation on the broad subject of illegal aliens: Mexican, Australian, Iranian, Korean, Nigerian, the whole rainbow, in multiple plotlines with a Crash-like incidence of coincidence. (The physical beauty of the female aliens helps, of course, to fuel liberality.) Embarrassment eclipses enlightenment. Harrison Ford, Cliff Curtis, Ray …
An IRA lad (Brad Pitt) is set up with room and board at the suburban New York address of an honest Irish cop (Harrison Ford) -- "safest place in the city" -- while he awaits a shipment of Stinger missiles to combat Brit helicopters back in Belfast. The ashen color …
Leather-jacketed Brit literally bumps into an old schoolmate (bike bumps into cab), but the boy once known as Karl is now a prim and proper young lady named Kim. The course of romance thereafter is right-mindedly, none too humorously, rather boringly instructional ("So you're telling me Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson …
Makes the case that the medium isn't just the message, it's the magic. Specifically, there's a reason why a painting on a movie poster can do a better job of capturing the spell-casting power of cinema than a photograph can. At least when the painter is humble workaday genius Drew …
Wherein we learn a little something more about The Force and a big something more about Luke Skywalker's parentage, but the main idea seems to be to lay the groundwork for another Star Wars sequel rather than make any real headway. The moviemakers pretty well annihilate all narrative in a …
Brilliant young tactician Ender Wiggin is called upon to defend earth from nasty foreign invaders — and you know what they say about what makes the the best defense. Not for nothing does space commander Harrison Ford say that "What we need is a Julius Caesar, a Napoleon." But while …
Pedestrian disease-of-the-week movie (Pompe Disease by name, a form of muscular dystrophy), typically “inspired by true events” and aptly produced by CBS Films. Giving it big-screen cred is Harrison Ford as the crusty Cornhusker who provides the breakthrough in treatment: a bass-fishing eccentric at the University of Nebraska, listening loudly …