Columbia Pictures

Six strangers. Seven different rooms all capable of providing severe maiming or instant death. Sounds like the latest in the Saw franchise, yes? Welcome to Escape Room, which is, essentially, “Saw-lite” for the PG-13 crowd. Minus the gore, swearing, and the excessively-green-tinted photography, Escape Room comes off genuinely heart-palpitating, with more than its share of […]

It would be easy to begin with the sentence which both begins and ends Stephen King’s eight-part “Dark Tower” saga. However, it bears no weight since it has very little to do with the film itself. The Man In Black, a.k.a. Walter o’Dim (Matthew McConaughey) is not fleeing from anything or anyone. The Gunslinger, Roland […]

It seems the space movie has become a requisite for this season: “Gravity”, “Interstellar”, “The Martian”, and now “Passengers”, a celestial romance starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt as star-crossed couple Aurora and Jim. Along with 5,000 other passengers aboard the spacecraft Avalon, they are en route to Homestead II, a planet owned by a […]

“You seek revenge?” “I seek righteousness… but I’ll take revenge.” — Sam Chisolm (Denzel Washington) and Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) With those words, so begins one of the most bloody and violent Westerns I have ever seen. More violent than Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, in which the violence was not only handled well, but startling in […]

A million debates about a deflated football, but you’ll hardly hear anything about Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the controversy at the center of Peter Landesman’s sports-med biopic “Concussion”. I suppose a testament to America’s obsession with the sport, it took an immigrant with no real knowledge of it to expose what should have been obvious: that thousands of blows to the […]

I can almost hear the song “Pac-Man Fever” as I write this: “I got Pac-Man Fever… it’s drivin’ me crazy!” (And if you want to hear it, too, click here.) This 1982 song by Buckner & Garcia and a tune about “Space Invaders” my eldest sister and her friend wrote and recorded on a cheap […]