Stephen Hopkins's ostensible salute to the Boston P.D. Bomb Squad frankly (and a tad hypocritically) hopes to hold its audience in their seats only with the promise of a forthcoming explosion. And another and another and another. Five major ones in all, padded a little by flashback replays. The bomber …
Back-to-basics African adventure, Great White Hunter and all, founded on fact: two man-eating lions getting in the way of colonial "progress" -- a British railroad construction crew -- in the last years of the 19th Century. Scary; gory; gorgeously photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond; nicely varied sequences of tracking and stalking; …
Boys' night out becomes boys' nightmare out, when they take a wrong turn en route to the boxing match and witness a gangland killing. An action film in the Walter Hill mold, a sort of combination of Trespass and The Warriors, but reduced even further: a Walter Hillock, if you …
That's where you end up when you go into hyperdrive without passing through an established Hypergate. The campy TV series from the Sixties serves as a frail scaffold on which to hang several smothering tons of special effects. Lacey Chabert, the spunky punky early teen in this Space Family Robinson, …
The monster still is a good one when seen from the outside (the psychedelic visions from within are another matter), and it doesn't, this time, keep us waiting so long for its arrival. But the urban drug war (Colombians vs. Jamaicans) is a distraction, and the dialogue a disaster: "You're …
Stephen Hopkins’ account of track and field legend Jesse Owens and the controversy surrounding US participation in the Berlin Olympics of 1936 is overstuffed, muddy-headed, heavy-handed, derivative, and weirdly sanitized — and yet it almost works, because who wouldn’t thrill to see a black man take on Nazi ideology on …
A miracle-debunker from LSU struggles to explain the sequence of Old Testament plagues visited upon a Bayou backwater called Haven. A sense of awe never arises, only a sense of awful. Hilary Swank and Idris Elba excepted and absolved. With David Morrissey, Stephen Rea, and AnnaSophia Robb; directed by Stephen …