Movies in the Adventure genre

2008 was the year in which the comic book superhero came of age. Films like Iron Man and especially The Dark Knight illustrated what was possible when a motion picture dared to take its characters out of the comfortable box in which too many super...

If there’s an obstacle to the potential box office success of X-Men: Apocalypse, it’s the growing sense of superhero movie fatigue. Counting Deadpool, this is the fourth superhero movie to reach screens in the last three-plus months. With...

The easiest way to summarize my reaction to X-Men: First Class is with a shrug. The movie is competently made (and not in 3-D, thankfully), has some nice action sequences, tells its story with workmanlike efficiency, and will probably please fans o...

For X-Men viewers, this is probably as straightforward as it gets: if you liked the first two, you're likely to appreciate the third. X-Men: The Last Stand isn't as taut or satisfying as X-Men 2, but it's better constructed and better paced than t...

The problem with X2 is essentially the same one that plagued X-Men: too many characters, resulting in too little screen time for each one. X2 may be the most ambitious superhero motion picture to date, but it doesn't work quite as well as Spider-...

For Vin Diesel, starring in XXX is a wonderfully smart career move. Too bad neither "wonderful" nor "smart" are applicable adjectives to describe this film. XXX is proof positive that it's easier to fail than succeed with the James Bond formula, ...

Where's the Kryptonite? What many movie producers fail to realize is that one of the keys to making a superhero interesting is to give him an Achilles heel - Kryptonite, so to speak. And one of the big problems with XXX: State of the Union is t...

Of all the great foreign film directors to obtain U.S. releases for their movies, Akira Kurosawa can arguably boast the highest number of viewers. One of the reasons for this is that Kurosawa was heavily influenced by Hollywood - as can be seen in...

Spoiler Alert for any live-action movie with the words “Justice League” in the title.It’s bigger and longer and features a lot more slo-mo, but is Zack Snyder’s Justice League better than the hybrid Snyder/JossWhedon version that Warner...

Calling Zathura the "space version of Jumanji" wouldn't be far off. Like the 1995 film, this movie is based on a children's book by celebrated author Chris Van Allsburg in which a group of people plays an amazing board game. (Van Allsburg doesn't...