Behold Trumbo and his superhero power of … Writing!

Behold the newest member of the Marvel Universe. He wears big glasses and a bushy mustache not as a disguise but as part of his everyday Hollywood attire. Trumbo slays the evil empire by … Wait. I’m mixing studios and genres here, obviously. But director Jay Roach certainly took John McNamara’s script based on Bruce…

Does the world need a pretty good movie about Roberto Duran?

No question that Roberto Duran, he of the Hands of Stone, was one of the best fighters in the world, the scrappy soul from Panama who threw his first professional punch in 1968 and remained relevant in the ring way into the 1990s. The man could hit. That’s evident in the tale of his life…

In War Dogs, everybody waits for the magic bullet to go off

Miles Teller and Jonah Hill are all grown up in War Dogs. Director Todd Phillips, too. Teller left any signs of his snide teen dystopia days and Hill the goof from Superbad and the pair of 21 Jump Street flicks, while the only thing Phillips brought along from his going, going, gone Hangover trilogy was…

Spotlight delivers what we needed

Hooray, daily journalism. Boo, Catholic Church. That would be the easy way to review the award-winning Spotlight, directed by Tom McCarthy from the script he co-wrote with Josh Singer about the true tale of how Boston Globe’s investigative team painfully and pain-stakingly put together the series that once and for all brought the decades of…

How awful that Meryl Streep can even act like she can sing like Florence Foster Jenkins

Back in the high society days when newspapers ran popular opinion, soldiers fought and relaxed en masses and something called records were played on a gadget by the name of the radio, there was a woman by the name of Florence Foster Jenkins who lived for music. But the circumstances of her life conspired against…

There’s a lot to like about the rotten heroes of Suicide Squad

What happens when you go to the tightest jail to collect a handful of the baddest people — that last word used loosely, for this is the comic book world, after all — to save the world? A divide between critics who pan the movie and diehard fans who rally behind Suicide Squad, it turns…

As a sexy superhero movie, Deadpool wins on both accounts

The Marvel Universe wins me over more and more each movie I see. With the timing (and expense) of one-a-week in the big-screen theaters, I didn’t get to join in on the Deadpool hysteria. I pulled it out of the Orange MediaBank machine with my card at the Liverpool Public Library – where you don’t…

Matt Damon is Jason Bourne again, so people must die

To say that things get heavy when old connection Nicky hunts down former operative Jason Bourne on the streets of Greece to let him know that she’s hacked into the agency’s files to find the secrets about his past he’s been longing to discover doesn’t quite put the reunion of main man Matt Damon and…

Latest Star Trek feels a lot like TV days, and that’s OK

Would Justin Lin make my favorite Star Trek crew members faster or more furious? Yes, but it may take a while. And, well, maybe a little. And in the case of Star Trek Beyond, the work of the director of the Fast and Furiousfranchise turned out to be a pretty nice touch for James T.…

New Ghostbusters won’t let you forget the original

Will this new Ghostbusters stand on its own? With the small-print tag line Answer the Call added to the famous sequel to the 1984 comedy blockbuster, that’s even more of a natural question. Could it? Some originals become so ingrained on a culture’s psyche over time that a sequel stands little chance. And No. 1,…