Andrew Lapin

The Marvel Cinematic Universe whirrs along with Avengers: Age Of Ultron, which is a true sequel to 2012's The Avengers but also a reward of sorts for making it through the four smaller superhero flicks released in the interim. This is the social contract comic book fans have signed now, ...

In 1935, a 27-year-old Californian named Adaline was struck by lightning after driving off a cliff during a snowstorm. Thus, according to the magical properties of movie lightning strikes, she became immortal. More specifically, as The Age of Adaline's narrator says over the inky-dark rendition of her fateful incident, she ...

What scares teenagers?

The question has haunted horror movie producers ever since scaring teenagers became its own cottage industry, and the answer usually involves finding them where they live. Decades ago, the idea of psycho killers infiltrating suburbs (Halloween), dreams (A Nightmare On Elm Street), summer camps (Friday The 13th), ...

The Australian crime caper Kill Me Three Times feels like a throwback to the country's "Ozploitation" genre films of the 1970s: bloody, low-budget romps through the commonwealth's seedier side. But in its half-hearted attempt to weave a tricky narrative structure, the film also has shades of the mid-'90s Pulp Fiction ...

The novelty of Lambert & Stamp comes from the fact that it is a rock-n-roll documentary about band managers. Aren't they the ones who are supposed to quell the excesses of their outsized clients? Not Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp. If anything, according to first-time director James D. Cooper's film, ...

Get Hard, a new Will Ferrell-Kevin Hart buddy comedy about a white-collar investor about to enter prison, is funnier than the poster image of a white man in cornrows makes it appear. In an era where most comedies are either obsessed with genre self-awareness (think Phil Lord and Chris Miller) ...

In addition to being both a two-time Oscar winner and the director of the fantastic Into The Wild, Sean Penn is also heavily involved in an assortment of humanitarian causes. The second bullet point, more so than the first, may explain Penn's attraction to The Gunman, a dum-dum action picture ...

We are past the era of asking "why?" when encountering a reboot of a beloved franchise. When the fairy studio godmother sees a ripe pumpkin, never mind how many times it's been trotted out: she's still going to cast that spell. It's the way of the world now. Besides, the ...

After The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a comedy about a group of British pensioners who take an eccentric travel package to Jaipur, India, became a surprise hit in 2012, we now have a return trip. The most admirable thing about The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is the nose-thumbing delight ...

There is a golden rule of movie plans that goes double for con and heist films: When the characters spell out their playbook ahead of time for the audience ("I'll pose as a dot-com billionaire while you rewire the security cameras"), something will inevitably go wrong. But when the audience ...

As long as hearts still beat in America, there will be a place for the big, gooey Disney sports movie. Like its forefathers Remember The Titans, Miracle, and countless others, McFarland, USA is a based-on-truth myth in which a maverick coach leads a ragtag team of misfits to victory against ...

Midway through the hip new spy comedy Kingsman: The Secret Service, ultra-classy secret agent Harry Hart (Colin Firth) infiltrates a sermon at a hate-spewing rural America congregation clearly modeled on the Westboro Baptist Church. Their sign out front proclaims "America Is Doomed," and their pastor leaps across centuries' worth of ...

Larry and Lana Wachowski have a rare ambition for big-budget filmmakers matched by their consistent inability to follow through with it. The siblings squeeze gigantic philosophies and mythologies into the toothpaste tube of mass-appeal sci-fi, and more often than not, they make a mess. Following their exhilarating The Matrix, its ...

The James Marsden thriller The Loft is opening nationwide with little fanfare, arriving at January's tail with no press screenings. Yet three months ago the movie, a remake of the highest-grossing Flemish film in history, was the gala opener to Film Fest Gent, a major international film festival in Ghent, ...

Gabe Polsky's richly entertaining documentary Red Army asks American sports and movie fans to do the hardest thing they may ever do: root for that eternal repository of villainy, the Russians. The film follows the Soviet Union's superhuman ice hockey squad, the winningest team in the sport's history and the ...

Paddington, British literature's lovable anthropomorphic bear named after the train station where he was found, has always been a funny sort of fellow. For nearly 60 years, Michael Bond's creation has enjoyed harmless adventures with his adopted Brown family in London, noshing on marmalade and allowing his good manners to ...

The sci-fi thriller Predestination is pretty intriguing when it's not being a sci-fi thriller. A twisty time-paradox movie in the vein of Minority Report or Primer, the film is certainly one of the biggest ever to feature an intersex protagonist. The unnamed character is played as both a man (in ...

Abel Morales needs people to see him as a good guy. As the heating oil salesman in A Most Violent Year grows his mini-empire in 1981 New York City, he has several encounters with people he clearly despises — corporate rivals playing dirty, federal investigators, bankers denying loans — where ...

When producers were laying track for the Hunger Games series years ago, they couldn't have foreseen how discomforting author Suzanne Collins' descriptions of a war-torn authoritarian state would look on the big screen in 2014. In The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part One, Jennifer Lawrence witnesses and/or learns of: towns ...

As a filmmaker, Laura Poitras is not a grandstander.

This seems worth pointing out because her documentaries deal with subjects of mass consequence, including her new Edward Snowden chronicle Citizenfour. If she wanted to preach, the matters at hand would allow for it. In her previous films My Country, My ...