POSTED // May 24,2012 - If dying is easy, and comedy is hard, science-fiction comedy is even harder. In this tiny subgenre, 1997’s Men in Black—about extraterrestrial refugees living among the population of New York City

POSTED // May 18,2012 - Space nerds send a signal to a distant star system that looks a lot like ours in Battleship—and, like, days later, here’s the away team from Planet Facehugger come to steal all our bubblegum.

POSTED // Apr 27,2012 - Those who crave the usual Jason Statham experience—as seen in Death Race, the Transporter flicks, etc.—will still love Safe; it’s brutally violent, and features lots of bloody mayhem

POSTED // Mar 30,2012 - The Hunger Games is on track to be one of the most successful films—critically, as well as financially—of 2012, but even before it opened, caveats were being lobbed.

POSTED // Feb 10,2012 - Woo-hoo, it’s CIA action porn when Safe House finally gets going, all mysterious black SUVs and “kill the surveillance cameras” and stoic badassery all around.

POSTED // Jan 20,2012 - We’ve seen this movie before: Secret agent/gun for hire/covert badass gets burned. Who did it? The bad guys? The colleagues? The boss? Our Hero has to work hard and fast to pull his own ass out of a fire

POSTED // Jan 9,2012 - It’s the most wonderful time of the year—when we movie lovers try to second-guess the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

POSTED // Jan 6,2012 - I haven’t read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John le Carré’s iconic novel of Cold War espionage and—if this sleek, elegant film has it right—repressed male emotion.

POSTED // Nov 4,2011 - For a critic, there are few pleasures more satisfying than ripping into a bad movie. But one of those few is discovering that a film that you were expecting to hate

POSTED // Oct 21,2011 - There are luscious possibilities in the notion of a gearpunk Three Musketeers. This movie posits a secret hiding place in Venice in which Leonardo da Vinci hid all his plans for cool crap