Chris Klimek

At their high-school reunion, Dwayne Johnson's buffoonish super-spy draws his old hero, staid accountant Kevin Hart, into helping him thwart a possible terrorist plot.

In a new documentary Brian De Palma, director of both blockbusters (The Untouchables) and kinkily voyeuristic films (Dressed to Kill) looks back on a career of cinematic carnage with great candor.

The latest period installment of the mutant franchise gets the gang back together, but the time machine seems to be running out of juice.

"The Vibranium standard for superteam flicks" is reviewer Chris Klimek's take on the 13th Marvel Cinematic Universe movie.

Zack Snyder's follow-up to Man of Steel shows little inventiveness or spirit, and smells suspiciously like a studio's attempt to chase a rival, rather than a project allowed to develop creatively.

A moment of silence, please, for the many fictional lives lost and nonfictional careers sullied in London Has Fallen. It's the sequel to Olympus Has Fallen, the gnarlier and less funny of 2013's two (!) Die Hard rip-offs set inside the White House. Olympus was the 36th-highest-grossing film in America ...

Hail, Caesar!, the 17th feature from indefatigable screenwriting, directing and (pseudo-nonamously) editing brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, is rated PG-13 for "suggestive content and smoking." But save for one word — sodomy — and a few less clinical terms that have long been allowed on network TV, this genial farce ...

This week's show is about exactly what you might expect it to be about: Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Screening scheduling left Stephen and me without the delights of Glen Weldon, who will provide super-spoilery thoughts in a Small Batch a little later (stay tuned), but we welcomed Gene Demby ...

Remember Rocky? That cornpone boxing movie from 40 years ago starring (and written by) that oiled-up, headband-wearing buffoon who talks funny? The one that stole Best Picture away from Network, All the President's Men, Taxi Driver, and Hal Ashby's rather more obscure Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory?

Okay, on ...

A million years ago in the 1960s, the only mandate for each new James Bond film was that it be grander, stranger and more exotic than the last. But in the hands of director Sam Mendes, who made 2012's Skyfall and the new Spectre, there's a troubling new mission requirement: ...

Early on in Davis Guggenheim's tender celebration of women's education activist Malala Yousafzai, we see the bright-eyed Pakistani teenager working her laptop in her family's new home in Birmingham, England. Fending off accusations of bossiness and "violence" from her younger brothers, the Muslim girl who stood up to the Taliban ...

The filmmaker who did more than any other to bum us all out about space travel now wants us to feel inspired by it again.

That's the rough arithmetic behind The Martian, the feel-good (and real good), NASA-condoned, Damon-powered survival adventure flick from director Ridley Scott. More a visual stylist ...

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is a period adventure film. It has periods of international intrigue and periods of sexy comedy. Basically, it has a lot of periods. Even in this benighted age of wantonly colon-ized movie titles, U.N.C.L.E. stands out as the most punctuated picture of the year.

Robert Vaughn ...

Fantastic Four No. 1 arrived as a comic book on newsstands exactly 54 years ago this Saturday, August 8th. Written by Stan Lee and drawn by Jack Kirby, the comic book —priced at $0.10 — now looks hopelessly goofy. A dozen exclamation points punctuate the cover alone, which depicts a ...

The most mercilessly thrilling action sequence of 2015 is still the entirety of Mad Max: Fury Road. But a credible challenger has at last arrived in the perilously punctuated Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, a super-fun sequel that spends its best 15 minutes at the Vienna State Opera.

In this ...

Don't call it a comeback: The grimy boxing melodrama Southpaw is so old-fashioned and unsophisticated it's almost new. Initiated as a remake of 1979's sap-soaked The Champ with Eminem in the lead role, it morphed into yet another opportunity for Jake Gyllenhaal to prove he's a contender. When he finally ...

In 1984, a $6.4 million sci-fi chase flick by a skinny 29-year-old whose prior feature directing credit was a T&A horror flick called Piranha II: The Spawning became a surprise hit, launching the career of future King of the World and depths-plumbing oceanographer James Cameron. He'd sold his screenplay ...

Making the original Jurassic Park in the early '90s, Steven Spielberg told the visual effects superband he'd assembled — Stan Winston for full-scale puppet dinosaurs; Phil Tippett for miniatures; Dennis Muren and Michael Lantieri for the photorealistic computer animation — that their film would depict even its most predatory dinos ...

In the Universal Pictures release Earthquake, one of the biggest hits (no pun intended) of 1974, The Big One takes a big bite out of Los Angeles — God's vengeance, the film implies, for Charlton Heston cheating on Ava Gardner with Genevieve Bujold. You could expect Moses to be held ...

What's the half-life of a post-apocalyptic action film franchise? Potential ticket-buyers born the day the most recent Mad Max movie was released — summer 1985, one weekend after Back to the Future -- could be on their second marriages by now. The original Mad Max, from 1979, cost less than ...