Chris Klimek

What's the half-life of a post-apocalyptic action film franchise? Potential ticket-buyers born the day the most recent Mad Max movie was released — summer 1985, one weekend after Back to the Future -- could be on their second marriages by now. The original Mad Max, from 1979, cost less than ...

Didn't we just do this? Paul Verhoeven's 1987 futuristic satire RoboCop got a watery remake only a year ago. But if you took Chappie – the third trigger-happy dystopian sci-fi from Neill Blomkamp, the South African cowriter & director of District 9 – and slapped the title RoboCop on it, ...

Time is a circle, just like Matthew McConaughey said in True Detective. But it isn't flat. It's spherical.

Interstellar, Christopher Nolan's saline-and-starlight-streaked space-time epic, is so beautiful and ambitious and enveloping that to tick down its imperfections — drippy homilies about how love, especially the paternal kind, can transcend dimensions; ...

Fury, David Ayer's brutal, reflective, wholly absorbing World War II movie, is about tank-to-tank combat and the way war degrades everyone it touches, but for about a minute it looks like a Western. A rider on a white horse crosses a misty field in no great hurry, gradually filling the ...

No athlete has ever been more delightful to listen to than Muhammad Ali, the big-headed, big-hearted, irreducibly quotable heavyweight boxer who elevated trash talk to an art form and who was all of 21 when Columbia Records released his spoken-word album, I Am the Greatest. He defied sports-publicity custom by ...

"A feud is this way," Mark Twain wrote in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. "A man has a quarrel with another man and kills him; then that other man's brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the cousins chip in — and ...

Sean Connery was 53 when he downed his last vodka martini as James Bond (though he'd previously walked away from the role and been lured back twice). Roger Moore was 57 at the time of his last mission on Her Majesty's Secret Service (though he didn't look a day over ...

Just be glad it isn't The Expendables 3-D.

The third installment in Sylvester Stallone's jobs program for expired action heroes is easily the best of the bunch, which is not to say it's any good. The Expendables series -- basically what we'd get if Marvel released Iron Man, Thor and ...

What would you do if you could access 100 percent of your brain's potential processing power? Reverse climate change? Pick up new languages while you sleep? Pay your rent on time? Invent an iPhone capable of making and receiving telephone calls?

More important: Would you savor the salty, crunchy, hot-buttered ...

I've lived a dissolute life of cowardice and regret, but that's no biggie, because I was also part of a 13-critic jury — all staffers of or contributors to the superb website-for-movie-lovers The Dissolve — who chose, via three rounds of voting, the 50 greatest summer blockbusters, circa 1975-2013. The ...

It's no secret that X-Men: Days of Future Past — the fifth X-Men picture in 14 years, give or take a couple of solo Wolverine movies, and the fourth good one — is a time-travel movie. It borrows its title and much of its premise from a well-loved story by ...

H.R. Giger was the guy who made me sleep with the lights on for years.

The iconic Swiss painter and sculptor, who died Monday at the age of 74, reportedly suffered from night terrors for much of his life, so perhaps his inimitable art was his revenge upon the world. ...

The two best action pictures on offer at the moment are the Indonesian martial arts/crime sequel The Raid 2, which spills blood by the barrel, and the Marvel superhero sequel Captain America: The Winter Soldier, wherein most of the similarly high body count is kept just offscreen. They're officially both ...

The Retouchables is a column examining the recycling of pop-cultural properties. Future installments will discuss remakes in development, or that should be, or that were made but should not have been, or for which I have written several script treatments. Did you not get them? Call me.

Our inaugural ...

[Caution: contains pretty abundant spoilers about the Star Trek universe, but only fairly nonspecific ones about the new film.]

Star Trek, director J.J. Abrams' 2009 reboot of the ever-optimistic LBJ-era science fiction franchise, somehow walked the flaming tightrope of pleasing Trekkies and civilians alike. Brilliantly recasting the beloved and ancient-or-dead ...