Join TJ and Clark to talk about one of the better summer block busters: ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’. Sure, ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ may have been a pretty decent film, but this one far surpasses it. It’s intelligent sci-fi with a lot of emotional resonance and great story telling. Also up for discussion are ‘Edge of Tomorrow’ performing better than initially thought over its lifetime, the trailer for ‘Exodus: Of God’s and Kings’ which is the upcoming film from Ridley Scott, Disney’s upcoming live action ‘Dumbo’ which sounds about like its name implies, and Jon Favreau’s upcoming live action ‘The Jungle Book.’

Edge of Tomorrow was a pretty fantastic film (my review here, and Chad’s and my podcast review here), but it just didn’t seem to have a lot of steam at the box office. This has been a great source of distress and discouragement to me about the state of cinema in general. When great films come out and movie goers do not see and supporr them, we all loose.

Well, turns out, while it’s still not the biggest hit here in the U.S., overseas it has had a very different life — raking in $256 million so far. That brings the worldwide total up to $350.4 million. As much as I complain about sequelitis…

The marketing material for this film is practically pouring out at this point. They must be worried that the film won’t do well and are trying to pump as much interest in it as they can. As far as I know the film is not based on any pre-existing franchise and that may be part of the paranoia for putting this much out for it in advance. The studios believe these days that sequels, reboots, retellings and the like are far more likely to make them money. And unfortunately it’s hard to argue with the numbers that back up those assumptions.

I’m willing to give this film a good solid chance…

“This city can be hard. When I was young, I asked my priest how you could get to heaven and still protect yourself from all the evil in the world. He told me what God said to His children. ‘You are sheep among wolves. Be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves.’”

In a world of page-to-screen adaptions gone oh so wrong, Gone Baby Gone is proof of the good that can come from sticking close to the source material. With little deviation beyond the dictates of its own two hour running time, the film brings Dennis Lehane’s powerhouse novel to life with intelligence and grit to spare.

The story…

Biting sharply into Michael Bay’s box-office hegemony, 20th Century Fox’s “Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes” took the #1 spot this weekend with an extremely healthy $73 million opening. That’s up around 33% from 2011’s “Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes,” a surprise hit that veered very close to $500 million worldwide. A lot of components factored into its success: extremely positive reviews (here’s ours), great word of mouth and little competition And considering Matt Reeves’ sequel is darker, more adult and nowhere near as “crowd-pleasing” as the average blockbuster (at least not in the…

From drug mule to super powered scarcy chick in no time flat, Lucy is quite an intruiging looking film. Although in the last couple of clips, she looks pretty scary. Here she drive through head on traffic, causing wrecks and crazyness without a care in the world.

Godzilla was a supremely disappointing film to me and maybe that’s what makes this so good. Spot on with the Bryan Cranston character. The plot of Godzilla made the amount of sense it would have made if a bunch of monkeys with typewriters typed up the plot…

So yeah, I enjoyed this.

Seven years after the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final installment of the series, the boy wizard is back for more adventure. Only he’s not a boy anymore.

In a new Harry Potter story posted this morning on Pottermore, J.K. Rowling sends Harry, now 34, to the Patagonian Desert for the Quidditch World Cup. Naturally, Ron, Hermione, Neville, and Luna are there with him — as is The Daily Prophet‘s Rita Skeeter, who still has plenty to say about the gang.

I’m really sad that I’ve been way to busy to check this out yet. I want to read this very badly. My…

Released in 2011, Rise of the Planet of the Apes showed that there was still life in the venerable Apes franchise. It looks like that was no fluke; the critics say Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes is everything a sequel should be: visually striking, emotionally resonant, and intellectually weighty.

Yay! Currently at 92% critic rating. I’m pretty optimistic about this one. We’ll be talking about it next week on The MovieByte Podcast and I am betting you won’t want to miss it!