ReelViews for PG-13 movies

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...

X-Men: Days of Future Past doesn't feel like a superhero movie, at least not in a traditional sense. There are action scenes but many are suffused with a sense of futility. Battles turn into massacres with the "good guys" on the wrong side of the c...

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, ...

When the original xXx was released 15 years ago, it was designed as one of several potential franchise properties for a new hot-shot action star named Vin Diesel. In its August 2002 run, the film did respectably at the box office but fell short of th...

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...

Two weeks ago, I wrote that, while watching Land of the Lost, I felt a sense of depression. That feeling revisited me during Year One, an inexplicably unfunny comedy made by two people who have proven they can do much better: director/co-writer Ha...