After audiences reviled the artsy undertones of Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns in 2006, Man of Steel plays it safe with the most bankable superhero in the DC Comics pantheon. It sets out to deliver the darker, more action-packed Superman film for which fans have clamoured for years, and succeeds in doing just that
Author: Lance Harris
Call it the gift of lowered expectations, but zombie apocalypse flick World War Z isn’t as bad as you may have feared following reports of the expensive reshoots and on-set feuds that dogged the production. It’s not genre-redefining like the novel on which it is based, but World War Z delivers enough thrills to make it worth
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that Microsoft’s arrogance didn’t yet compare to the hubris of Sony with the PlayStation 2 circa 2006 and that the Xbox One reveal in May wasn’t its giant enemy crab moment. Nope, it wasn’t, but after the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) this week in Los Angeles, the company’s Xbox division
The early trailers for Star Trek Into Darkness made it look as if the film would be a slog through the generic grimness of all too many 21st century franchise films. In reality, the sequel to the 2009 Star Trek reboot is as breezy and likeable as its predecessor, a film that is hard to hate and even harder to remember once
If director Steven Soderbergh really means to retire from making movies after Side Effects, he leaves Hollywood behind on a high. His latest and supposedly last theatrical feature is Prozac laced with arsenic, a deadly cocktail that courses through the blood like a slow poison. Like many of Soderbergh’s
The most memorable image from Microsoft’s reveal of the Xbox One was an animated German Shepherd with Kevlar armour and a high polygon count. Motion-captured from a retired Navy Seal dog to serve as a player companion in this year’s iteration of Call of Duty, the pooch is an apt mascot for the console. The dog
The Avengers last year assembled four of Marvel’s biggest heroes in a single film, where an army of aliens led by a Norse god laid utter waste to New York City. That’s a tough act to follow, but Iron Man 3 does so by focusing on the character of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) rather than on the superhero firepower
Few topics inspire as much heated debate as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which makes it surprising that the subject should fuel a film as tepid as Promised Land. As much morality tale as green polemic, the film reunites Matt Damon with Good Will Hunting director Gus van Sant after 15 years
Serial killers kill serial killers in Seven Psychopaths, a Hollywood film about an Irish screenwriter in Hollywood written by an Irish screenwriter. It is yet another snarky movie about the movies, a meta-meta-film that borrows liberally from the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Charlie Kaufman and the Coen brothers
Bathed in celestial light, and with the wholesome aroma of carnival popcorn in its air, BioShock Infinite’s airborne city of Columbia is as far from the water-sodden Objectivist dystopia of BioShock in atmosphere as it is in geography. But under its turn-of-the-century fairground Americana, Columbia churns with currents