Feb
19
In a pair-up as enticing as a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE combines the rich, nutty goodness of Nic Cage with the tasty junkiness of the Neveldien/Taylor directing team. Transporting Marvel’s tortured, soul-sucking biker to Eastern Europe, the sequel has him joining forces with Idris Elba and Violante Placido to save …
Feb
12
There was no shortage of curiosity when George Lucas announced that he was converting his STAR WARS features to 3D, and no little disappointment when it was revealed that the first film to undergo the process would be the almost universally reviled EPISODE I – THE PHANTOM MENACE. Nevertheless here we are at the longest …
Jan
23
The UNDERWORLD franchise’s relentless, death-dealing vampire, Selene (Kate Beckinsale), goes under ice at the beginning of UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING, and so does most of the series’ political intrigue, swapping out the power struggles from the previous entries in favor of even more chases, gunplay, and explosions — lots and lots of explosions. Awakened into a (nominally) …
Jan
02
So, there, that’s one New Years resolution out of the way for me. A few months after the theatrical release of KUNG FU PANDA 2, I was able to score an interview with its director, Jennifer Yuh Nelson. With the home video release of the film (in just about every format available, including Amazon Instant …
Dec
26
What says Christmas Spirit more than nuclear holocaust, life-or-death chases in an automated car park, and scaling the world’s tallest building? Maybe that’s why Paramount scheduled the release of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL for this most festive of seasons. Or maybe it’s that it’s just plain fun. Stripping the IM force down to leader …
Dec
20
Time to close the year off with some rip-roarin’ adventure, so why not throw in a little, continental flair in the process? Steven Spielberg has decided to take that route, and make his debut in the animation field, with THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN, a cg-animated film using AVATAR’s performance-capture process and based on the charmingly …
Dec
18
Abandon all propriety, ye who enter here. Once again, under the direction of Guy Ritchie and as embodied by Robert Downey Jr, the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes shakes off his tweedy cobwebs and gets down, dirty, and flat-out physical in SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS. Centered around the inevitable confrontation between Holmes and the …
Dec
15
You’ve got to admire the man who, having reached the highest pinnacles of human achievement, still finds it within himself to make the occasional descent and spend time with us lesser mortals. God knows, comedian and actor Judah Friedlander doesn’t need to bother with our petty activities; as universally acknowledged World Champion, he exists on …
Dec
12
A son goes in search of the father he never quite knew, and the CFQ crew gets introspective enough to take a nostalgic trip back to explore one of the formative influences on their sense of wonder, Gene Roddenberry’s STAR TREK. Come join our special guest, theofantastique.com’s John W. Morehead, as he joins Cinefantastique Online’s …
Nov
14
It’s a good week for lush, exquisite cinematography and vividly stylized worlds; maybe not so good a week for compelling narratives. In IMMORTALS, director Tarsem Singh Dhandwar uses Greek mythology as the raw material upon which to invest his skill with staging beautiful, beautiful actors in elaborate tableaux, all in the service of the tale …
