Welcome to Marwen Is Too Enamored With Empty CGI Spectacle To Go Beyond The Valley, Er, Town Of The Dolls

Gotti. Life Itself. Red Sparrow. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. These are the worst movies of 2018 and their newest companion is none other than a brand new Robert Zemeckis directorial effort. The man responsible for making toons and humans interact, for taking us to places that don't require roads and for making us all cry over a volleyball can also now be known as the filmmaker guilty of bringing Welcome to Marwen into the world. Clearly meant to be a stirring inspirational drama, Welcome to Marwen is instead a staggeringly inept endeavor, a whole bunch of motion-capture animated nonsense that doesn't even try to be thoughtful or introspective regarding the experiences of its lead character.

Back To The Future: Part III Show A Million Ways To Have Fun In The West

Since watching Back To The Future: Part III for the first time and then discussing the film and the larger franchise it belongs to, I've learned something extraordinary: the low esteem I hold Back To The Future: Part II in is considered a "hot take" of sorts. While I love the first Back To The Future to pieces, the second entry in this series just never clicked for me, Marty McFly's journey into the future and various events of the first movie never filled me with all that much excitement. Back To The Future: Part III doesn't get things back to the quality level of the first movie but it does manage to create a movie that's actually fun to watch and fun was certainly something in low supply in the prior Back To The Future outing.

A Load Of Pointless Computer Effects Trickery Can't Boost The Serviceable But Substance-Free Beowulf

For a good chunk of the first decade of the 21st century, Robert Zemeckis devoted himself to being the first filmmaker to dabble in the world of full motion-capture animation (a process whereby actors wear special suits and have their movements put onto CGI characters) movies, a subgenre that basically died off after 2011, though motion-capture animation itself has become quite the frequent presence in live-action movies like the two most recent Star Wars movies. Two of those three efforts were The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol, a duo of family-skewing Christmas movies. Naturally, in between those movies, Zemeckis also used the motion-capture animation artform to create one of only four American computer-animated movies to get an MPAA rating harsher than PG: Beowulf.

What Lies Beneath Review

What Lies Beneath is a departure for Robert Zemeckis, a director whose inhabited many different genres in his multiple decades as a filmmaker, but only delved into the world of horror two other times in his career, with the 1992 horror/comedy Death Becomes Her and the feature that traumatized me as a youth, The Polar Express. What Lies Beneath may not be as terrifying as his 2004 Christmas-themed motion picture, but hey, it works on its own merits as a spooky ghost story with some appropriately bombastic twists that feel like they should be told around a campfire via an adult holding a flashlight under their face.

The Walk Review

October 2015 may go down in the history books as the "Dramatic Movie Massacre", a period where a horde of dramatic features debuted in a short window of time and basically trampled on each other, reducing the majority of the movies released in this time period to being major box office duds. Two of my favorite films of last year (99 Homes and Steve Jobs) ended up tanking big time thanks to the insane amount of competition, and one other victim of this brutality was the newest endeavor from director Robert Zemeckis in his 37 year long career in Hollywood.

Go For A Walk With The New Trailer For Joseph Gordon-Levitts Next Movie

Well, just as I was talking about Robert Zemeckis and his fascination with motion-capture in the 21st century, here comes the new trailer for his next movie, The Walk, which arrives in October. I thought Sony might hold off on a new trailer until Pixels and Ricki And The Flash, but our most extensive look at the film yet, which you can look at below, has arrived much earlier.

My Most Terrifying Cinematic Experience? Why, The Polar Express Of Course!

Here's another exciting entry in this Holiday themed column, 25 Days Of Christmas Pop Culture! From now until Christmas Eve, I'll be tackling one piece of Christmas pop culture! It could be a book, movie, TV special, song....so long as it's festive for this time of the year, it'll be checked out in this daily column!

We all have that one movie we watched as kids that terrified the living hell out of us. When you're 6, it's terrifying, but when you're older it's not only good material for a compelling yarn but a testament to the kind of power film can have over a person. Some have The Goonies, my brother has Gremlins, but me? I've got the scariest movie of them all: The Polar Express.