ReelViews for PG movies

Middle episodes in trilogies have the potential to be fundamentally dissatisfying. Thankfully, George Lucas has managed to avoid that pitfall for Episode II of the Star Wars saga, Attack of the Clones. Admittedly, the primary purpose of this film...

Indulge me for a moment as I time travel back to 1980. Historically, it was a signficant year -- the Iran hostage crisis raged, Ronald Reagan won the Presidential election, and the United States boycotted the Moscow Summer Olympics in response...

There's an old saying that states something about leaving the best for last. George Lucas certainly didn't follow that adage when crafting the original Star Wars trilogy. Return of the Jedi, the final installment of the series, is easily the ...

When one examines the roster of the tens of thousands of motion pictures produced since the late 1800s, not many stand out as trailblazers. One of the few inarguable members of that select cadre is George Lucas' soaring 1977 space opera, Star ...

The movie referred to since 1981 as A New Hope has two separate identities. As Star Wars, it’s a stand-alone coming-of-age tale of a farmer who follows his destiny to rescue a princess and defeat an evil empire. As Episode IV, it’s the fo...

Attack of the Clones suffers from "middle episode syndrome" - the tendency of the second volume in a trilogy to feel incomplete and, as a result of that incompleteness, to fail to satisfy. (A problem George Lucas was able to avoid with The ...

For many years (16 in particular), Return of the Jedi was considered the weakest of the Star Wars films. Then, in 1999, along came The Phantom Menace to displace it in the minds of many. Left unrealized as the prequels began their theatrical tour is ...

When I was sitting in a theater during the summer of 1977 enthralled by the spectacle that was Star Wars, never did I imagine that, some 31 years later, I would find myself wishing it would go away. Overmerchandising, fan unfriendliness, and greed...

For three years, we waited. As bits of news filtered through the Hollywood grapevine into the trade papers and Starlog, we gobbled them up. Still, by early 1980, not much was known about Star Wars 2 (officially retitled The Empire Strikes Back by the...

Not since the days of Bond-mania in the early 1960s had the release of a movie been as anticipated as the first of George Lucas' Star Wars prequels. Before The Phantom Menace reached screens, Lucas was geeks' Golden Boy and the term "pre...