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The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is fantasy-lite. With its PG rating and aversion to anything shocking or overly grotesque, it's the bastard stepchild of The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. A dull, meandering storyline an...

City of Ember has almost anything one could want from a science fiction-based family adventure film: likeable characters, an imaginative setting, and a fast pace. The third item on that list is notable. Recognizing that children often have limite...

When I first heard about The Counselor, it became one of my most anticipated titles of 2013. The talent alone made it seem like a "can't miss" proposition: Ridley Scott directing; Cormac McCarthy, the man responsible for the source material of No C...

It's often said that if you're going to borrow, borrow from the best. And, in motion pictures, one of the best is certainly Akira Kurosawa. His The Seven Samurai was remade as John Sturges' immensely popular The Magnificent Seven. His The Hidden...

When a movie invites comparisons to the work of James Cameron and Christopher Nolan, it’s apparent that the director (in this case, Gareth Edwards) has done something very right. The Creator may rely on numerous common science fiction concepts b...

The strange, surreal tone that permeates Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness is simultaneously its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Vaguely echoing the likes of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut ...

In the Pantheon of Marvel Comics superheroes, Daredevil is more of a demi-god than a full-blown deity. He's a notch below Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, and The X-Men. 20th Century Fox has acknowledged this when determining Daredevil's...

For longtime fans of the X-Men comic books, “The Dark Phoenix Saga” has been the Holy Grail. As crafted by Chris Claremont and John Byrne (with an assist from Dave Cockrum), the epic narrative, which was a major element of The Uncanny X-Me...

Call it The Golden Compass rule: No multi-part movie series should be started without a reasonable certainty that the story will be told in full. And, although The Golden Compass’ planned sequels were the first recent films to fall afoul of t...

There's a reason why so many action/comedies are failures. This is as true for more obvious misfires like The Bounty Hunter and Cop Out as it is for minor infractors like Date Night, an affable but ultimately forgettable example of the genre. In ...