Over the course of the 15 years between Toy Story and Toy Story 3, Pixar Animation Studios underwent a monumental evolution from a computer firm taking its first steps into animation to an industry-changing powerhouse. Over the nine years between How to Train Your Dragon and the new trilogy-capper How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, DreamWorks Animation went through […]
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Real science takes as much of a beating as Scrat, everyone’s favorite sado-masochistic rodent, in “Ice Age: Collision Course.” So much so, the filmmakers behind this fifth character-jammed and decidedly jumbled outing in the glacial animated franchise felt the need to recruit astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson (both as a narrator and in weasel guise, complete with […]
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Aamir Khan stars in Nitesh Tiwari’s film based on the true story of a former Indian national wrestling champ who battles the status quo to train his two young daughters to be world-class contenders. Director Nitesh Tiwari wisely waits until the final moments of Dangal to bring out the big guns. Where another Indian filmmaker might have […]
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A somewhat unlikely animated megahit in 2010, the first Despicable Me took a great concept and watered it down just enough to make it family-friendly. The supervillain protagonist, Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), looked the part, with his Blofeld-like bald head, circular torso, and spidery legs, but the villainy itself was mostly abstract, almost poetic — Gru […]
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Blade Runner 2049
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Finally, I have gone and seen “Aquaman,” which came out four weeks ago, and now I will let everyone know what I thought about it. Graeme Tuckett started her review out by admitting, “I walked out of 2017’s needlessly tedious Justice League into a frigid northern winter night thinking Jason Momoa’s Aquaman and Ezra Miller’s Flash […]
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James Franco and John Lithgow star in director Rupert Wyatt’s prequel. Some old potion is served up in a reasonably spiffy new bottle in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Resurrecting a lucrative franchise for another go-round 43 years after Charlton Heston first found himself on the short end of the evolutionary pyramid, Fox has wisely steered […]
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This stunning, sublime visual accomplishment is must-watch television even for those with jam-packed DVRs and no time. A decade ago when Planet Earth hit television screens in the United States, it was nothing short of a revolution in nature documentary filmmaking — a breathtaking, high-definition work, a magisterial moment that had people slack-jawed while learning about life […]
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A popular topic that has been bobbing about the internet these days: Will the summer of Hollywood’s sequel and prequel box-office discontent bounce back with the arrival of “Finding Dory,” Pixar and Disney’s double-dip back flip into the same animated pool of undersea beings that propelled 2003’s wondrously endearing “Finding Nemo”? Therefore, it is a […]
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The “Harry Potter” prequel “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” is a big-budget, holiday-timed blockbuster about … racism, which may not exactly be the joyful, escapist entertainment families are looking for this time of year. Certainly, J.K. Rowling’s entire literary and cinematic empire is based on a foundation of serious, moralistic themes, explored through an […]
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