Search for 2014

Has it come to this for director Nick Cassavetes? The son of acclaimed iconoclast filmmaker John Cassavetes, Nick has been toiling in mostly indie circles for the better part of his career, making some fine motion pictures in the process: Unhook th...

Pompeii is a big, glorious, cheesy mess. A fusion of Gladiator and Dante’s Peak, it can’t decide whether it wants to be an action film about coliseum combatants or a disaster flick. Predictably, by trying to be both, it ends up being good as ne...

Predestination is what is commonly referred to as a "mind-fuck" movie. A low-budget science fiction feature, Predestination has expectations of its audience related to attention span and concentration level. Whether or not the plot remains on solid...

Brassed Off. Billy Elliot. The Full Monty. When it comes to feel-good movies with a social conscience, no one does it better than the U.K. With Pride, they've done it again. Specifically, second-time director Matthew Warchus and first-time screenwr...

The success of 2013's The Purge took everyone by surprise, including writer/director James DeMonaco, who was immediately called upon by distributor Universal Studios to pen a sequel. The result is The Purge: Anarchy, a story set in the same world a...

Wow. For those with strong constitutions, The Raid 2 offers one of the most intense motion picture experiences available; it may also be the most violent movie ever to be released into theaters. It's somewhat astonishing that writer/director Garet...

Ride Along, the new action/comedy starring Ice Cube and Kevin Hart, defies the cliché that you can't judge a book by its cover. Nothing unexpected lurks beneath a bland and predictable exterior. Those who have seen a 30-second TV commercial (or t...

2014's iteration of Robocop is a kinder, gentler version of Paul Verhoeven's 1987 sci-fi orgy of violence. The storyline has been trimmed and reworked to allow it to slide under the PG-13 bar. That means a brutal torture/murder sequence is no more ...

Jon Stewart takes the true story of Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari, who was held captive and subjected to deprivation and interrogation in Iran for 118 days during 2009, and injects elements of wit and humor into an otherwise brutal tale. By det...

Sabotage, from director David Ayer (the writer of Training Day and writer/director of End of Watch), is a cop-centered thriller wrapped around a whodunit. It also attempts the significant feat of re-inventing Arnold Schwarzenegger now that his days...