It’s over for The Hunger Games, and it’s epic

Talk about war and peace. Katniss Everdeen rests. The fourth and likely finale in the Hunger Games franchise that started with the girl who fired an arrow into the hearts of so many in 2012 landed in America’s theaters this pre-Thanksgiving weekend with its snowballing success and great expectations for star Jennifer Lawrence and the…

The 33 allows you to root for the winner you know

If you had your ears open in 2010, you likely heard the tale of the miners stuck deep down in belly of that Chilean mine. It was the kind of event that moves the world’s talkers to tell all. The horror of the collapse. The despair of repeated failure to connect with the possible pocket…

The Peanuts gang happily circles around Charlie Brown

The kids, a whole bunch of them piled into a Saturday afternoon matinée in the biggest and plushest of Regal Cinemas’ Syracuse theaters in Syracuse mall Shoppingtown, admired The Peanuts Movie enough to sit still and at attention through 119 minutes. The adults, parents and grandparents and others who’ve grown up with the screen and…

Sandra Bullock doesn’t give a damn until she creates a Crisis

When Jane Bodine answers the door to the political operatives who want to win her sly services at the start of Our Brand Is Crisis, the campaign specialist is checked out, home alone “between two mountains” as she carefully explains to them. And even though she agrees to join the crew back in Bolivia, the…

Bill Murray finds himself taking a shot in Rock the Kasbah

There’s no doubt that agent Richie Lanz is playing among the lesser lights in the biz no matter how much he boasts about his connections and his past. He may have discovered Madonna at a hamburger joint and told Jimi Hendrix to play The Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock in The Day, but right now…

You can’t help but get pumped when he’s up on the wire for The Walk

When Philippe Petit is up there on his wire, I couldn’t help but love The Walk cowriter and director Robert Zemeckis made sure of that. The master of cool special effects made the most of the true tale of the French tightrope-walker, who had the audacity and nerve to pull what he calls The Coup.…

The Martian takes Matt Damon to lofty places

Left behind on Mars as dead, astronaut Mark Watney isn’t. And so, faced with scant food rations, among his many woes, the American astronaut goes botanist bonzai, using his wits and intelligence to come up with a way to grow a crop in, well, his own crap. That leads him to the second-best line of…

Who wouldn’t want to learn from a gentle DeNiro?

Ben Whittaker has done the travel thing, the exercise thing and the grandpa thing in his retirement world, and none of it is exactly making the 70-year-old widow from Brooklyn happy. Oh, he’s not complaining, mind you, as he faces the camera explaining exactly how he’s gotten to this point in life as we meet…

In Black Mass, Johnny Depp has evil down cold

Quite the block in South Boston that was that gave the world the Bulger brothers and John Connolly. Black Mass tells the tale with a deep and horrible chill. Directed by Scott Cooper by a script from Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth, this crime drama documentary is 122 minutes full of high ambition and low…

Next time a stranger offers to pay for that coffee …

Oh, her life looks so good. Big house on a beautiful street, with a slightly nosy neighbor who’s really just looking out for her. Great job, a decision-maker and rising star in a major lobbyist firm. But, wait. In this thriller written by Tyger Williams and directed by David M. Rosenthal, something has to shake…