Movies starring Ken Watanabe

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...

Emerging from the loud, overlong spectacle that is Godzilla: King of the Monsters, I was struck by the disheartening realization that what I had just seen owed more to Transformers than kaiju. Although the movie takes great pains to pay homage ...

Pokemon: Detective Pikachu isn’t a movie. It’s a cog in a multibillion-dollar media empire, a soulless feature-length example of product placement at its most blatant. The so-called “film” never bothers to tell a story worth telling or...

Where Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin failed spectacularly, Gareth Edwards has succeeded. Although the 2014 edition of Godzilla isn't the be-all and end-all of monster movies, it's a respectable big-budget effort. Most importantly for legions of f...

Undoubtedly, some reviews are going to describe Inception as confusing. Such a description confounds me, and may be more indicative of how accepting people have become of screenplays that allow for no ambiguity and traverse plotlines by blazing tr...

Is it too much to ask that a narrative film have a beginning, a middle, and an end? Apparently in the case of Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, a loose adaptation of Darren Shan's Vampire Blood trilogy, the answer is "yes." Developed with...

Of all the major comic book characters to transition to a less static visual media, none has been more mistreated than the Bat-Man. As originally envisioned by creator Bob Kane in 1939, Batman was a dark character who walked the tightrope between ...

Letters from Iwo Jima is a unique American-made war movie for at least two reasons: it depicts the battle from the perspective of the losers and it represents the United States as the "enemy." Coupled with Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Ji...

It's a recognized fact that many epic love stories of literature and cinema transpire around or during a war. Consider, for example, Casablanca (World War II), Gone with the Wind (the American Civil War), Dr. Zhivago (the Russian Revolution), and ...

It's a genuine pleasure to come across a motion picture like The Last Samurai - a rousing tale that combines high adventure with emotional effectiveness. This movie works because it never loses sight of the characters no matter how epic the scope ...