Into the Woods is based on the award winning Broadway musical of the same name. The play is much celebrated and many love it, but it is by no means for children. It deals with very adult themes and content. As such, one wonders what Disney’s interest in the film is/was? Disney is not beyond making more adult content, but it’s almost always of a type that children can still watch and enjoy as well. Though I believe it was Disney’s intent to put this film in that later category, I certainly don’t think I would take any of my children (8, 6, 4, and 2) to see it — and therein lies one of the big…

Given the success Tak3n has enjoyed at the box office, it’s no wonder they’re rushing Taken 4 out the door. Jimmy Kimmel has an exclusive preview for us.

American Sniper was expected to do well this weekend after an impressive limited release, but not this well: The Clint Eastwood-directed war film took in an estimated $90.2 million—and broke a few records.

The Oscar-nominated film set a new record for a January opening by taking in $30.5 million on Friday, breaking the mark set by Cloverfield ($17.2 million on Jan. 18, 2008). January is a notoriously slow month at the box office, so Sniper‘s debut is particularly eye-opening.

Welp, I guess this proves the U.S. is still thoroughly self absorbed.

2014 was a pretty solid year for film. Until I sat down to write up this list, I thought 2014 may have been a down year in film, but I have been reminded that it’s been a long year with a lot of solid and engaging films– well worth viewing AND discussing.

I thought I would remind you all that my top films of 2014 is in dispute and my opinion does not (unfortunately) reign supreme. I disagree with a couple of these, but there’s a lot more cross over than I might have thought.

Obviously, I also have to quote his bit about my official favorite film from 2014:

A really great spy/thriller…

In the essay collection Harry Potter and History, there is an essay titled “Severus Snape and the Standard Book of Spells: Ancient Tongues in the Wizarding World” by M. G. DuPree that points out something you might have missed between your swishes and flicks:

There’s a linguist’s saying about English speakers that we go to work in Latin and come home in Anglo-Saxon. Meaning that much of our professional language (words like office, supervisor, colleague — even computer and telephone) comes from the Latin-derived French. While the language of home (house, hearth, fire) comes to us from the…

As far as Chris is concerned, the war he’s eventually asked to participate in is a simple one: there are a bunch of violent savages over there, and it’s America’s job to go over there and kill them before they kill us.

Based on what I’ve read, this seems like a fairly accurate portrait of Kyle’s mindset, but the problem is that the film itself seems to share the same mentality. It oversimplifies an incredibly complex war for the sake of permitting American Sniper to double as a propaganda film; the American equivalent of that fictional German sniper biopic featured at the end of Quentin…

SyFy (the channel) has been making moves to bring back sci-fi (the genre) on their channel. I’m skeptical because I’ve been burned more than once by this channel. They had their genre in their stupid name for crying out loud and they blew it. Fool me once and all that.

But, I’m a sucker for good sci-fi, and this series looks like it has the possibility to be that.

As far as I can tell, there’s no exact release date. All that we have right now is that it’s coming some time this year.

These instant delivery content providers are really jumping into the game with both feet. I have to admit that their previous offering — the one that’s winning so many awards — Transparent, did not look at all appealing to me. Just not my thing.

I don’t know that a crime drama is really my thing either, but it looks much more appealing to me and I might give it a shot.

The show is set in Los Angeles and follows homicide detective Harry Bosch. His mother was a prostitute and was murdered when Harry was a boy. This of course has ramifications for the type of man he is as we see him in the…

The Lego Movie Mystery: Somehow, the funniest, most inventive and (surprisingly) most soulful of this year’s mainstream animated features didn’t snag a Best Animated Feature nomination. Perhaps the fact that it’s fundamentally a live-action commercial was just too much for Academy voters to overlook? Then again, The Lego Movie is represented in the Best Original Song category (the intentionally obnoxious earworm “Everything is Awesome” is surely, for better or worse, the year’s most ubiquitous movie tune).

A good point, I suppose, about the idea that it’s a live-action commercial — though…