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Film

Passengers delivers the Christmas turkey

Friday, 23 December 2016 05:43 By Glenn Kay For the Sun

Rating: « out of 4 stars

Running Time: 116 min.

Occasionally, you see a bad movie with so much talent in front of and behind the camera, you begin to wonder where exactly it all went wrong. There’s plenty that is calamitous with the big-budget, sci-fi/drama, Passengers. My only guess is some kind of interference or unnecessary rewrites on a script to make it more genial threw this project off the rails. Whatever the case, one couldn’t have possibly read this screenplay and not believed that there weren’t major problems.

One of the biggest is the main character, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt). He’s a technical engineer (essentially, a mechanic) resting in a sleep chamber on an...

DVD/Blu-ray Roundup for Dec. 23, 2016

Friday, 23 December 2016 05:42 By Glenn Kay For the Sun

Welcome back to another Blu-ray and DVD roundup. Just because the holidays are here, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t a number of interesting new releases. You’ll find them all listed below. As always, click on any links you see to read full reviews. So if you can’t make it out to the movies this week, be sure to give one of these titles a try!

Big New Releases!

31 - The latest from musician/filmmaker Rob Zombie is another gritty grindhouse effort. It follows a group of carnies in the 1970s who are kidnapped by maniacal killers, taken to a remote location and forced into a deadly game of survival. Reaction was extremely split for this effort. Those who didn’t care...

‘Sing’ hits too many sour notes

Friday, 23 December 2016 05:41 By David Pinson For the Sun

Rating « out of 4 Stars

Running Time: 110 minutes

This is a weird flick.

Judging the cover, Sing should be at least decent. Great cast [McConaughey, Witherspoon, Johansson…], a Christmas opening date and it’s a cartoon about talking animals from the studio that brought you Minions and Despicable Me.

Sounds good. But now let’s discuss what it’s about. There’s this koala bear named Buster Moon (an excitable McConaughey) and he owns a theater. He needs a hit so he puts on a singing competition. Right there is the first major misstep. Singing competitions reached peak popularity about 7 years ago. Old news. So right out the gate, the film seems dated.

So Buster holds...

‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’ stuns visually, but fails dramatically

Friday, 16 December 2016 10:15 By Glenn Kay For the Sun

Rating: «« out of 4

Running Time: 134 min.

If you’re a fan of the new slew of Star Wars films, I have some good news. Based on the reaction of the audience at a preview screening, you’re probably going to enjoy Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. It is a very slick and well-produced film that looks even more spectacular than last year’s Episode VII: The Force Awakens. However, it’s also unlikely to do much that will hook those (myself included) who aren’t already big aficionados of this cinematic universe.

Set just before the events of Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope, this story revolves around a mission to discover a design weakness in the villainous Empire’s Death Star...

DVD/Blu-ray Roundup for Dec. 16, 2016

Friday, 16 December 2016 10:14 By Glenn Kay For the Sun

It’s another busy week filled with a wide variety of releases arriving on DVD and Blu-ray. So if you can’t make it out to the movies this week, be sure to give one of these titles a try!

Big New Releases!

Ben-Hur - This lavish and expensive remake of the of the 1959 Charlton Heston classic tanked at the box office and with critics. It uses a great deal of CGI to update the tale of a prince falsely accused of treason who returns to his homeland to seek revenge. Critics suggested that while the spectacle was still grand, the movie was otherwise unremarkable and dramatically flat. Now viewers can make up their own minds. It stars Jack Huston, Tony Kebbell, Rodrigo Santoro...