Tom Cruise returns as Ethan Hunt, taking on his greatest mission… making audiences forget that The Mummy happened a year ago. Well, mission accomplished. While Mission: Impossible – Fallout left me both giddy and incredulous, I had a great time watching Hunt and his remaining IMF team take on a series of villains with ties […]
Summer Movie Preview 2018
Let’s talk box office. The amount of money a movie makes doesn’t always mean the film is good (case in point, the wretched $300 million-grossing Suicide Squad). Summer movies tend to draw more attention to their typically massive opening weekend gross than their quality. On occasion, the movies are as good as the money we […]
AMERICAN MADE New Movie Review
The ability to board your own aircraft, operate it with the ease of an automobile and go wherever you want, whenever you want and over vast fields and towns below, is just so cool. It’s one thing to be a passenger who enjoys looking out the window and actually enjoys air travel (especially now, when […]
Your MauiTime 2017 Summer Movie Wrap-Up
A baffling summer at the movies started strong, until the good choices were too widely dispersed over the course of four months. The bad movies were in such abundance, audiences managed to wisely put their foot down and voted with their pocketbook. Instead of saying, “Oh, why not, I saw the other four….,” filmgoers actually […]
THE MUMMY New Movie Review
Tom Cruise is the king of summer movies. Just look at Risky Business, Top Gun, Days of Thunder, Far & Away, The Firm, Minority Report, Collateral, War of the Worlds, Tropic Thunder and Mission Impossible 1-5 if you don’t believe me. His image as an action hero movie star has overshadowed what a great, risk-taking […]
MauiTime Summer Movie Preview 2017
A critic recently stated that movie theaters are overloaded with examples of “Corporate Cinema” and little else. There’s truth to that, especially in the thrill-seeking summer movie season. Between now and September, I’m not looking forward to catching the dueling look-how-hip-and-ultra-violent-we-are Baby Driver and Atomic Blonde. Nor the desperate, dueling Girls Gone Wild farces Girls Trip […]
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE–ROGUE NATION New Movie Review
The best scenes in Mission: Impossible–Rogue Nation have not been spoiled by the coming attractions trailers, a nice surprise in an age where previews work overtime to summarize (rather than adequately promote) a movie. In fact, the much publicized bit with Tom Cruise hanging outside an airplane (a stunning but actually brief scene) comes at […]
2015 Summer Movie Preview
One of the biggest summer movie seasons in memory is about to unspool. Of course, the report from last year wasn’t encouraging. Despite the blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy, box office was down and the movies were mostly a bust. But this year, the long line of blockbusters-to-be–even the sequels and remakes–are more promising and diverse than […]
Summer 2014 Movie Preview
It’s been 25 years since the landmark Summer of Sequels swept America. The movie season of May-September 1989 had a then-record eight sequels in theaters (including Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) and created lines that famously stretched far outside the theaters. Most memorably, Bat-Mania took over the world, as Tim Burton’s Batman set the standard […]
First Light Film Festival Bonus: BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR New Movie Review
Let’s get it out of the way: this movie is three hours long, in French with English subtitles and has graphic sex scenes that resulted in an NC-17 rating. It caused a huge stir at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palm D’or (best picture award) and, since it’s the story of two […]