Movie Review: The Martian (2015)

by Tony Dayoub


News this week that liquid water has been discovered on Mars and that actor Matt Damon has repeatedly lodged his foot in his mouth (discussing whether gay actors should come out of the closet or not) almost begs for some kind of bad joke about outfitting a spacecraft and exiling the actor to the red planet ASAP. At worst, the news kinda overshadows promotional efforts for Damon's latest, The Martian, based on the novel by Andy Weir. At best, the two soundbites—one overwhelmingly positive, the other decidedly not—cancel each other out and give way to more discussion about this unlikely crowd-pleaser. I'm hoping for the latter, because The Martian fully deserves to be appreciated as a front-runner among the top films of the year.

4 Reasons Fantastic Four Is Anything But

by Tony Dayoub


I take no pleasure in piling on a bad movie, but a lot of us who grew up reading "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine," as Fantastic Four was sub-titled for many years, are mystified by the fact that not one of its movie iterations has been successful. It shouldn't take rocket science to re-calibrate the property to reflect what made the Marvel Comics' flagship title and a template for the superheroes that would follow. Take one look at director Josh Trank's version, though, and one starts to wonder if even the team's gifted scientist, Reed Richards (Miles Teller), could work out the formula needed to make Fantastic Four truly live up to its name. Here are four reasons Fantastic Four was anything but:

Movie Review: Transcendence (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

Remember that Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk has to free some aliens on a planet controlled by an all-powerful, omniscient computer? And those aliens have these tiny antenna on their necks that allow them to be networked with that computer, Vaal, essentially making them physical instruments for it to conduct whatever activities necessary for a planetary makeover suited to his specifications. That's Transcendence in a nutshell, only with even more hokey, far-fetched ideas thrown in to complicate the simplistic story a bit.