Their Finest (2016)
Set in 1940, around the time of the London Blitz during World War II, Their Finest stars Gemma Arterton (The Girl with All the Gifts, Gemma Bovery) as Catrin Cole, a fledgling screenwriter from Wales who has...
Category: War
Kong: Skull Island (2017)
A quintessential popcorn flick, Kong: Skull Island doesn’t try to go deep with important themes or get entrenched in lots of set-up or explanation, built on the premise that audiences want lots of action and humor...
War Dogs (2016)
Loosely based on a true story chronicled in a 2011 “Rolling Stone” article and subsequent 2015 book (“Arms and the Dudes”) by Guy Lawson, War Dogs follows two lifelong friends, struggling massage therapist and bedsheet salesman...
13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016)
13 Hours takes place during a volatile time in Libya, shortly after the overthrow and murder of their dictator, Muammar Gadaffi, in 2011. Various factions began their scramble for power, starting with raiding the...
’71 (2014)
At its heart, ’71 is a standard caught-behind-enemy-lines story of someone trying desperately to make it back home alive, yet encountering trouble at seemingly every turn. The sparsely worded script by Gregory Burke ups the...
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)
This is the one that finally broke me. J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” has the secondary title of “There and Back Again”, which certainly rang true for many readers, who enjoy going back to the...
300: Rise of an Empire (2014)
Readers who’ve seen my review of Zack Snyder’s 300 won’t be surprised to learn that its prequel/sequel, 300: Rise of an Empire, doesn’t meet well with me. It’s more of the same poorly scripted, intensely jacked-up, copiously...
Predator (1987)
A leaner-than-customary Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as Major “Dutch” Schaeffer, who, along with his crew of elite special ops commandos, is sent to the jungle of a hostile Latin American country on a covert hostage...
Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Zero Dark Thirty, or ‘oh dark thirty’, the military’s way of saying ‘sometime in the middle of the night’, (here, it alludes to the local time of the attack on the compound in Pakistan reenacted...
Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)
Tora! Tora! Tora! is a $25 million budgeted (big money, for its time) collaborative effort, years in the making, between the U.S. and Japan film-making industries to craft an accurate dramatic telling of the events...