sequel

The Secret Life of Pets 2 is an improvement in almost every way over its Toy Story-ripoff predecessor; it’s sweeter, kinder, and more open about its feelings. However, in trying to keep it short and effective – it lasts only 86 minutes – we’re bowled over by three distinct stories which barrel at us faster […]

I honestly didn’t want to see Pacific Rim: Uprising, much less review it. 2013’s Pacific Rim didn’t wow me, even with its larger-than-life, IMAX-sized monsters vs. machines WWE-style matches. Truthfully, films like these – even comic book films of late – are just rehashes of Irwin Allen disaster films. There’s not a whole lot of […]

(I apologize for the lateness of this review. The famed 24-hour bug hit my kids in sequential order during my screening of this film, then landed straight on me.) Kingsman: The Golden Circle picks up right where Kingsman: The Secret Service left off. Not as far as time elapsed between the stories each film tells, […]

It’d be one thing if the Despicable Me series had a story which needed to be told in its third film. What we have with Despicable Me 3 (or is it Despicable M3, as the film’s opening credits and promotional materials claim?) is a piece of relatively harmless, potty humor-filled fluff which feels more like […]

To quote the greeting song we sang in my father’s Cub Scout troop: “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here!” Reuniting on the screen and behind the camera after twenty years away are the main cast and crew of 1996’s seminal arthouse hit Trainspotting (read my retrospective here) a polarizing examination of addiction and its effects […]

There’s a reason why a character like Jack Reacher – either in the films or in Lee Childs’ novels – speaks to us. Here’s a man who’s free from all obligations, a former member of the Army Military Police Corps who wants to see the country he spent so much time defending, wanting to be […]