Village Roadshow Pictures

Here’s the key to enjoying Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One: Realize the film’s $175 million budget covered the filmmaking and what rights to various properties they could afford. Were they to include every little detail of the book, the film’s budget would have been at least triple that. So right […]

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 […]

The Wikipedia entry for Collateral Beauty prior to its release summarized the film thusly: “When a successful New York advertising executive suffers from a great tragedy, he retreats from life. When their business suffers, his coworkers conspire to make him look crazy, in an effort to discredit him and keep their jobs.” The first sentence […]

Exquisitely acted, masterfully edited, beautifully scored, and strikingly shot, Sully is Clint Eastwood’s best directorial effort since Unforgiven. Given the subject matter – the emergency water landing in the Hudson River executed by Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and First Officer Jeffery Skiles in January 2009 – it could have easily turned out as a “rubbernecking movie,” where […]

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 […]

While doing some metal grinding in his workshop, Mike Lane (Channing Tatum) hears Ginuwine’s “Pony” start blasting over his Pandora feed. Alone and unobserved, what’s a former stripper – excuse me, male entertainer – supposed to do when his old signature song comes on his shop speakers at random? Keep working, or launch straight into […]