Movies in the Drama/Adventure genre

When it comes to historical epics from director Ridley Scott, you never quite know what you’re going to get. On the one hand, he has crafted such gripping, compelling films as the Oscar-winning Gladiator and the tragically overlooked Kingdom...

First Man, a workmanlike bio-pic of astronaut Neil Armstrong, is at times compelling and at times maddening. Although inferior in its depiction of the early days of the space program to such riveting productions as The Right Stuff, Apollo 13, ...

A ragtag column of men, many dressed in full armor and others lugging an enclosed sedan chair, wend their way down a treacherous mountainside path. This is the first image we see in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God. He holds it for n...

Adrift, like many competently-crafted survival films, chronicles the ultimate underdog bout: Human against Nature, where the odds are stacked against the former by the sheer power of the latter. Most survival tales come with a “based on a tr...

The Lost City of Z is an adaptation of David Grann’s non-fiction book of the same name. Expanded from the author’s 2005 New Yorker article, the 2009 hardcover became a New York Times bestseller and garnered over a half-dozen major awards ...

What begins as seemingly an old-fashioned war film set during the waning years of the Ottoman Empire quickly turns into a dark exploration of the Armenian genocide. This litany of atrocities, unknown to many today and denied by the Turkish gov...

It has been a number of years since I have read the story of Noah in "Genesis" but I'm reasonably certain there are some discrepancies between the canonical account and the one related by director Darren Aronofsky in his new movie, Noah. For exampl...

The ghost of Mark Twain looms large over Jeff Nichols' Mud, a modern-day homage to the settings and characters popularized in some of Twain's best loved works. The protagonists in Mud, a couple of 14-year olds, are named Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Ne...

Life of Pi is a curious juxtaposition of the mundane and the majestic; a film that strives for something grander than what it perhaps achieves. At times, the simple story - one of spirituality and survival - exudes a quiet, hypnotic power, but ther...

Chasing Mavericks feels like two completely different movies that have been mashed together. The first, a derivative and unsatisfying coming-of-age story about a Santa Cruz boy and his adopted father figure, seems uncharacteristically weak for the ...