Perhaps Pixar should stick to releasing one film a year. While June’s Inside Out is easily the best children’s film of the year, the beloved animation studio has made a rare dud with The Good Dinosaur. The film starts by rewriting history. As dinosaurs are roaming around Earth, munching on plants and doing general dino-business, the giant meteor that we …

Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 showed us that war can be as much about propaganda and politicking as it is about death and destruction. Unfortunately, this made for an unexciting, albeit engaging film. Part 2, and the final entry in the Hunger Games franchise, shows that all of this political maneuvering does pay off in the end. Hunger Games: Mockingjay, …

For most of the 1990s R. L. Stine had the market for scary children’s literature. The current cultural preoccupation with the 1990s and the Halloween season make this a perfect time to revisit the Goosebumps book series and all of the characters it birthed. What better way to do this than a fun big-budget film? Goosebumps begins with a family …

Actions films do not need to be dumb. Blowing up an entire caravan or imploding a city block is all good fun, but doing only that without providing anything deeper does not engage the audiences on more than one level. Sicario is a different sort of action film; one that both raises the body count and asks the audience to …

The Intern is a product of our times. The film’s focus is on the relationship between a young start-up founder, Jules (Anne Hathaway), and her seventy-year-old intern, Ben (Robert De Niro). Though the film does not spend too much time calling attention to the absurdity of the situation, it does spend a bit too much time telling us about the …