Do The Crocodile Rock With The Delightful Crawl

Thank God, there are no human villains in Crawl. Unlike either of the Jurassic World movies, Crawl recognizes the lizard critters at the center of its story is enough to generate tension in a movie, there's no need to bend the plot over backwards so human enemies can also be incorporated into the proceedings. That's just one of many examples of how Crawl keeps things simple to delightful effect. Director Alexandre Aja, working from a script by Michael & Shawn Rasmussen, fuses together the underwater human-gobbling beasts element of his 2010 feature Piranha 3D with his 2007 feature P2's decision to confine its story to just one location to create something that's just so much fun to watch.

Though Plagued By The Same Problems of It's Predecessors, Maze Runner: The Death Cure Ends It's Series On A Decent Note

Divergent couldn't do it. The Mortal Instruments, The Fifth Wave and Beautiful Creatures, none of them got past one installment. But The Maze Runner did it, it managed to be one of the few movie adaptations of a young-adult book series adapted in the wake of the success of The Hunger Games to actually not just get a sequel but also adapt all the books it was supposed to adapt. Only Harry Potter, Hunger Games and Twilight have managed to do that, so take a bow Maze Runner, you earned it. Plus, unlike Hunger Games, this series ended on it's best entry yet, even if this newest adventure, The Death Cure, is still plagued by the problems that haunted its predecessors.

Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales Is Soaked In Tedium And Terrible Writing

Just like Bernie in Weekend At Bernie's, the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise is dead. The newest entry in this lame-brained saga, Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, brings a franchise that's always struggled with sequels to lows lower than the ones seen in the already anemic Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Yes, the one that committed the foul crime of wasting Ian McShane as an evil pirate is no longer the worst entry in this series, that's how bad Dead Men Tell No Tales is. Nothing can dull the glorious high-quality of that original Pirates Of The Caribbean movie, but at this point, this newest Pirates movie is like Terminator: Genisys; a nonsensically told story that's just around to provide "REMEMBER THIS FROM PAST MOVIES???" moments in place of anything even remotely of substance.

The Maze Runner Review

A-maze-ingly Mediocre

Last Fall, months before the first film even debuted, 20th Century Fox put a screenwriter in charge of writing the sequel to The Maze Runner, a film based on a series of YA novels. That kind of confidence seemed well founded once The Maze Runner debuted to $32 million this weekend. Right alongside the first box office numbers came a release date for the second entry, The Scorch Trials, which will arrive a year after this entry. Hopefully sequels are a bit more consistent in quality, as this one has promise, but winds up mostly squandering it.