Search for Cien

There's a fine line between giving homage to something and stealing from it - and the division is usually defined by how creative and enjoyable the final product is. Using that distinction, Stargate is on uncertain ground. This new big-budget sci...

Whenever a motion picture tackles a literary classic of any genre, fans of the written work hold their collective breaths, hoping for the best, but dreading the worst. On rare occasions, something like The Godfather emerges -- a movie that not onl...

Movie-goers and critics alike have come to associate science fiction motion pictures with noisy space battles, grotesque aliens, and budgets that excel the GNP of a small country. Often, these sorts of films are characterized by scripts that could...

December 30, 1999: the penultimate day of the penultimate year of the century (the 20th century doesn't officially end until the close of 2000). In Los Angeles, the "biggest party of all time" is already underway. Crime is flowing as freely...

In recent years, "science fiction" has become synonymous with titles like Star Wars, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica. And, while there's nothing wrong with these movies and TV shows (in fact, they're predominately entertaining), they should be...

Super 8 is an homage by its writer/director, J.J. Abrams, to its producer, Steven Spielberg. It's also a love letter to all those with a passion for filmmaking that emerges at a young age. Super 8 is the kind of high-profile movie we so rarely se...

Surrogates was not pre-screened for critics. Most of the time, I understand when a studio takes this route - it's a way to avoid undue negative publicity before the release of a movie that is recognized behind-the-scenes as being a turd. Once in ...

Christopher Nolan loves playing with time and the fabric of reality. A majority of his non-Batman films have featured mind-bending excursions through the fourth and fifth dimensions and Tenet is no exception. In fact, despite downplaying the s...

When James Cameron crafted The Terminator in 1984, the concept of a sequel was far from his thoughts. The film's box office performance, while more than justifying the movie's understated $6.5 million budget, did not result in studio executives ru...

Terminator 3 is the summer movie of 2003 that hard-core action fans have been awaiting. It's not ponderous and incomplete like The Matrix Reloaded. It's not steeped in characterization and modern-day mythology like Hulk. And it's not vapid and f...