R-rated cartoon from Japan, a comic-book-in-motion about a mop-haired, saucer-eyed, slot-mouthed, nubbin-nosed, isosceles-faced Tokyo teenager of indeterminate race, who has the power to affect the outcome of the Final Battle for the Fate of the Earth. Despite (or because of) the gore, the cheesecake, and the dreamy, druggy, wiggy mentality, …
The strife between humans and mutants edges up to the brink: a bombastic, apocalyptic yet tensionless live-action Marvel comic, thanks (for the tensionlessness) to the anything-goes capabilities of the motley heroes. (A bullet in the brain will heal up in a jiffy.) Rebecca Romijn-Stamos rather upstages and outshines the others, …
Old-fashioned musical of the kind where the intervals between musical numbers are slow, uninspired, lifeless, and bland, and where the musical numbers themselves are all of those things and worse. And the latter are hardly made better here by the electric music, the psychedelic color, or the ersatz-Disney animation sequence. …
A between-seasons supplementary summer installment which, through its inflated scale and cost, calls into question the integrity and self-respect of the ongoing TV series. As on the small screen, David Duchovny's Mulder seems as awful as Gillian Anderson's Scully seems wonderful. The quest for the truth with this actor always …
Six years after the termination of the TV series (ten years after the mid-run movie), we find that Mulder the Believer and Scully the Skeptic have cut all ties to the FBI, the latter now a practicing physician at Our Lady of Sorrows, the former in retirement as a bearded …
Fifteen hundred years after the war of gods, Yang Jian, the God of Erlang, makes a living by working as a catcher. One day, Yang Jian is ordered to hunt down a young man, his own nephew. Full length animated feature from Light Chaser Animation directed by Ji Zhao and …
Simple tale, and sentimental, and sad, of a good girl of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and her ill use by her superiors, while assigned to learn horseherding under the tutelage of Tibetan eunuch. Directed, with a real eye, by actress Joan Chen (The Last Emperor, Twin Peaks, etc.), the movie …
In a bit of pre-emptive metacriticism, this third entry in the “early X-Men” series that began with First Class and hit its stride with Days of Future Past sends its young, ‘80s-era mutants to the mall to see Return of the Jedi, whereupon one of them declares that third entries …
After an opening that feels like a chunky blend of The Matrix, Terminator 2, and even Thor (hello, Destroyer!), Bryan Singer's return to the world of "Mutants are people too, only better" settles into a '70s-style actor's showcase. To wit: Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, musclebound and muted; James McAvoy's Charles Xavier, …
An ambitious superhero movie, one willing to invoke the Holocaust in its treatment of a feared and persecuted minority. This time it’s mutants instead of Jews, except for one mutant who is also a Jew, and who is looking to avenge his mother’s death at the hands of the Nazis, …
The prequel seeks to answer all your questions, assuming you had any, as regards where and when and why the titular superhero got his switchblade knuckles, his leather bolero jacket, his pent-up rage, his blank memory, among other esoterica. Starting back in 1854 (heavy sigh), two mutant brothers, aging up …
The third installment (to be less melodramatic about it), and despite the deaths and genetic alterations of several key mutants, it offers no assurance that it is indeed the last. (After all, the key mutant who perished in the previous installment returns here as an upgraded Class Five mutant: "The …
In the 1960s, the road to a paycheck for most superstar remnants of Hollywood’s Golden Age forked in two directions: big screen fright or the even more terrifying network drama. Ray Milland would go on to appear in an abundance of schlock horror titles (Frogs, The Thing With Two Heads, …