sequel

Friends of mine know I’m a sucker for magic; from even the simplest matchstick party gags to the most complex setups seen on Vegas stages, I appreciate good sleight-of-hand and misdirection. (You could probably correlate this with my film reviewing capabilities, but let’s be civil and not go there.) My first reaction to 2013’s magic-central […]

It is a red dawn. Strange things await us by the eaves of the forest. Good or evil, I do not know; but we are called. — Legolas, from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers Strange things, indeed, await in the forest in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Well, if you want to call […]

Of late, the second installment of franchise films all seem to have a common thread: go darker. Get sad. Get mean. Go deeper. And cut deeper, too. It’s kind of obvious that today’s filmmakers are no doubt inspired by what is heralded as one of the greatest sequels ever, The Empire Strikes Back, the game-changing […]

Jaw-dropping. Eye-popping. Astounding. Amazing. Let’s get those descriptors right out of the way immediately and get straight to the point: The Raid 2: Berandal is, in every way, a vast improvement over its predecessor, The Raid: Redemption, which was already a fantastic action film and one that (I would think) would be hard to top. […]