m4ze.com

Shrek Forever After (2010)

The not-so-scary villain in “Shrek Forever After,” the fourth and supposed final installment of the “Shrek” franchise, is a sleazy mortgage lender for a bank that’s too big to fail. Well, not exactly.

He is actually Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohrn), the Brothers Grimm trickster, with spiky red hair and larcenous eyes rolled up to the sky, his thin lips twisted into a malevolent smirk. As the volatile king of the land of Far Far Away in an alternate universe, he dons…

Clash of the Titans (2010)

A remake of the 1981 cult classic of the same name, Clash of the Titans follows demi-god Perseus (Sam Worthington) as he seeks revenge against the gods after the death of his family. His quest will see him embark on a grand adventure where he must battle many fantastic and horrifying creatures in order to rescue Princess Andromeda (Alexa Davalos) and the doomed city of Argos from the wrath of the gods. That’s the story in a nutshell. Many characters…

Alice in Wonderland (2010)

Director Tim Burton’s motion-capture 3D Alice in Wonderland is a pseudo-sequel to Lewis Carroll’s classic tales. The film picks up 13 years after the events depicted in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, with a now 20 year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) being pressured into a loveless, arranged marriage to a nitwitted aristocrat by her widowed mother and older sister. Spotting the White Rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen) in the bushes, she gives chase, running away from her suitor…

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)

Greek mythology barges into the sanitized ethos of “High School Musical” in the frenziedly busy screen adaptation of Rick Riordan’s popular 2005 novel, “The Lightning Thief.” Because it is the first in the five-book Percy Jackson & the Olympians young-adult series, can a franchise be far behind?
I should add that although there is no singing and dancing in “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief,” the friendly scuffles at Camp Half-Blood, the lush, lakeside training ground for adolescent…

Legion (2010)

Angels are awesome! Not wussy angels like Nicolas Cage in City Of Angels, but real kick-ass angels like Christopher Walken in Prophecy, or, errr, other macho angels.
So, when presented with Legion, a film in which a gun-toting Michael the Archangel drops down to Earth to protect us from an army of evil, it can only be a good thing.
Michael (Paul Bettany) has come to Earth because God isn’t happy with the way that mankind is going about its…

How to Train Your Dragon (2010)

If ever a film was crying out for Brian Blessed, then surely How To Train Your Dragon was it. DreamWorks’ new animated opus is packed with beefy, hairy Vikings, and when the key character of Stoick first took to the screen, I was dying to hear Blessed’s booming tones. Instead, DreamWorks went with Gerard Butler, who did a decent job, but simply isn’t in the same league.
To be fair to the studio, it’s been less star-struck than usual in…

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim Vs The World is a great many things. It is a love story for the comic book age. It is the story of a slacker forced to grow up. It is a kick ass fight spectacle. It is a nostalgic glance back on the golden age of eight bit video games. It is a blazing soundtrack brought to vivid life on screen. It is a coming out party for a cadre of young stars. It is…

The Last Airbender (2010)

M. Night Shyamalan’s career has essentially been in freefall since 2004, after The Village started the slow process of sabotaging the goodwill that he had built up with moviegoers over the first half of the last decade. There aren’t many filmmakers who could survive three critical flops in a row, but he is still standing, and at least he has had the sense to finally switch gears and try something new. Instead of writing another original supernatural thriller with a…

Eclipse (2010)

The Twilight films may be as ruthlessly exploitative a franchise as Harry Potter; they may be devoted to a creepy ideological agenda to promote pre-marital chastity; and they may be simply retreading much of the high-school vampire shtick that made Buffy a TV hit more than a decade ago. But in a universe where almost all CGI-laden, blood-spilling tentpole movies are aimed at ensnaring the teenage male, there’s something to be said for a series of films aimed squarely –…

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)

First the United States invaded the Middle East, and now Hollywood has swooped in to finish the job: one day after the “Sex and the City” ladies landed in the Abu Dhabi doo-doo, setting off a dust storm of critical hate, “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” seems primed to raise huffy hackles with a swords-and-sandals-style spectacular in ancient Iran. Based on a gulf-war-era video game, “Prince of Persia” stars Jake Gyllenhaal as the titular warrior who, scrambling up…