Movies starring Benedict Cumberbatch

12 Years a Slave, sure to be a heavy hitter when the 2014 Oscar nominations are announced, is a powerful and compelling adaptation of Solomon Northup's autobiographical account of the dozen years he spent as a slave on Louisiana plantations from 18...

August: Osage County is all about the acting. That makes sense because the storyline doesn't offer much that could be considered new or remarkable. It's as big a downer as the pills popped by matriarch Violet Weston (Meryl Streep) but the quality ...

Minimal spoilers. There are some vague references to things that happen and the usual discussion about plot elements available via trailers and pre-release clips, but I have tried to remain as “spoiler-lite” as possible. As always, however...

For Black Mass, Johnny Depp has dusted off his A-game, which has lain dormant for far too long. The actor's transformative portrayal of Whitey Bulger reminds us that Depp, when motivated, can do impressive work. By inhabiting the character rather...

To this day, there remains uncertainty as to the value of the intelligence information provided by Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Was he, as the official narrative asserts, the highest-ranking Sov...

You may have seen a trailer for The Current War a couple of years ago – that’s because, in its original incarnation, it was expected to reach theaters during the 2017 Oscar Season. One of the planned year-end releases of the now-defunct Th...

Strange comic book fans, rejoice! Your hero has finally made it into the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse and with that comes the potential of reboots aplenty. The shenanigans we saw in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek movies and the X-Men series may now lie ...

Spoiler Note: The review is “spoiler lite” with nothing beyond what has been shown in the trailer and other officially sanctioned pre-release material. However, although I don’t reveal any cameos that are in the film, I mention some that are...

Louis Wain (Benedict Cumberbatch), a product of late 19th Century England, drew pictures of cats. All sorts of cats – big cats, small cats, wild cats, tame cats. Most were anthropomorphized, although some more than others. Wain’s cat drawi...

Perhaps the most curious and counterproductive aspect of The Fifth Estate, the so-called "Wikileaks movie," is the decision by director Bill Condon and screenwriter Josh Singer to establish the film as a thriller. The material covered in the produc...