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Best Movie Villains (1970s to Present)

Villains are an essential part of genre cinema.  Though scores of filmmakers have attempted to create truly great villains throughout the history of film, only a few have succeeded in achieving this difficult goal. Best Movie Villains 2000s The criteria for this article is the villains must be from live-action films only, and must pose …

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The 2015 Action Hero Power Rankings

There have been a lot of very dope action scenes this year – the church scene in Kingsman: The Secret Service, the fight between The Rock and Jason Statham in Furious 7, and basically everything in Mad Max: Fury Road, to name just a few. Basically, we’ve gotten some incredible action sequences this year. This …

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Box Office Sabermetrics: Tom Cruise’s Batting Average

Box Office Sabermetrics is a weekly column that will attempt to apply the statistical analysis Sabermetrics, used in Baseball, to the box office results each weekend. One of my favorite books, and favorite movies of the decade, is Moneyball. Telling the story of how A’s General Manager Billy Beane and his front office used statistical …

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Tom Cruise: A Retrospective

Anyone growing into pop culture consciousness during the mid-2000s will be familiar with a certain type of Tom Cruise, one labeled with some criticism in a recent Buzzfeed article as “Tom Cruise 2.0.” To them, Tom Cruise may have first become familiar as Ethan Hunt in the first Mission: Impossible movie, as an action star who, in spite of fearful insurance agents and publicists, prefers to do his own stunts—especially if they include declaring maniacal love for Katie Holmes atop Oprah Winfrey’s couch. He was probably their first introduction to the alien world of Scientology, or perhaps already known as the face of another hero thrust into the supernatural, having once served as the model for the titular character in Disney’s Aladdin.

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‘Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation’ is possibly the best in the series

‘Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation’ continues to up the ante for spectacular set pieces. More importantly, this is the fourth script penned for Tom Cruise by McQuarrie, who understands how to maximize Cruise’s particular skill set. Their collaboration, along with stunning cinematography and a solid supporting cast, makes this, arguably, the most entertaining entry in the series.

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‘Mission: Impossible’ – Breaking Christopher McQuarrie out of Director’s Jail

This Friday, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation will be released. It’s the fifth film in the iconic franchise, but sadly stands as only the third film of its director Christopher McQuarrie in 15 years since he got behind the camera. That’s a real shame, because Christopher McQuarrie is Hollywood’s best-kept secret when he really should …

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‘Edge of Tomorrow’ reunion coming via an ’80s drug film

UPDATE: The New York Post has spoken to “sources” who claim that Tom Cruise will gain significant weight to portray Barry Seal, whose nickname was “Fat Man”. The real Seal weighed nearly 300 pounds, so if all is true, expect Cruise to stray perhaps the furthest out of his comfort zone he’s ever been. **** …

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‘Edge of Tomorrow’ replicates the video game experience without the bad aftertaste

The premise seems familiar enough: it’s the not-too-distant future and Earth is under attack by aliens. The “Mimics” arrived by an errant asteroid and now they have taken over half of continental Europe. To help combat these hyper-intelligent aliens, humans wear armored combat suits fitted with rocket launchers and side-guns. One might even confuse the …

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Tom Cruise: The Man Inside the Machine

Believe it or not, it’s not easy being Tom Cruise. Over the weekend, Tom Cruise’s latest big-budget scifi-actioner Edge of Tomorrow opened. To be polite, the box office returns left this $178 million picture well over the edge of being a box-office bomb with just over $29 million domestically, coming in 3rd place. In the …

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Script Matters: ‘Risky Business’ – Creating the Teen Sex Noir

  Genre mash-ups may be commonplace these days, but it took a mad genius to even consider combining film-noir and teen sex comedy back in 1983.  Paul Brickman’s wildly successful experiment, Risky Business, not only launched the career of Tom Cruise, it set a new benchmark for substantive sex comedies.  Here, we had an observant …

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Protecting Their Precious Bodily Fluids: Male Impotence in Kubrick’s Filmography

It’s both perfectly fitting and a darkly wry punchline that the last word in Stanley Kubrick’s last film is “fuck,” utilized in its most literal definition. The word is spoken, in both direct and slightly imploring fashion, by Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman) to her husband Bill (Tom Cruise) at the end of the still slightly …

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‘Narc’ a blisteringly powerful and sublimely raw thriller

Narc Directed by Joe Carnahan Written by Joe Carnahan US, 2003 It’s a bitterly cold early morning in a slum neighborhood in Detroit, MI, but that doesn’t stop two men from braving the conditions in sparse clothing. They’re high as kites and running at full pelt anyway, plus they have more pertinent things of their …

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‘Oblivion’ a visually stunning but too familiar Tom Cruise vehicle

Oblivion is a science-fiction Frankenstein, stitched together with the parts of older, better, films within the genre. If you have seen the seminal sci-fi movies, the ones everyone calls to mind when considering the best the unknown and supernatural have to offer, then you will be familiar with the angles of Oblivion, its many nooks and crannies. This Tom Cruise vehicle boasts striking visuals and a weirdly claustrophobic plot structure, but the familiarity it engenders only winds up doing it harm.

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‘Oblivion’ is familiar but well-executed, enjoyable sci-fi

Oblivion is what one might classify as an amalgamation sci-fi. Though many a contemporary feature in the genre is in clear debt to a prior work, Oblivion is one such example where the narrative similarities and likely intentional visual references cover a particularly wide array of films and literature, including La Jetée, WALL-E, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mad Max, Jin-Roh, I Am Legend, and one particular sci-fi of the past decade that simply mentioning would probably provoke likely guesses of a major plot development in one’s mind before seeing the film.

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Wish List: Things We Want to See in 2013

With the turn of a new year, the uncomfortably futuristic sounding 2013, comes twelve more months of cinematic gold, silver and bronzed offal. There will be Supermen, more Hollywood remakes of cult Korean cinema, at least one memorable meltdown and the continuation of Marvel’s epic campaign of terror against bewildered audiences. But amidst the blockbuster …

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‘Jack Reacher’ is a very enjoyable, stripped-back thriller

Jack Reacher Written for the screen and directed by Christopher McQuarrie USA, 2012 Jack Reacher opens with a point-of-view sniper sequence in which a lone gunman causes panic, killing multiple citizens from afar. This impressive, tense scene, as well as a few immediately following it, adds up to a completely dialogue-free opening stretch of roughly …

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‘Rock of Ages’ is a seemingly never-ending chore to sit through

Rock of Ages Written by Justin Theroux, Chris D’Arienzo and Allan Loeb Directed by Adam Shankman USA, 2012 Generally a provider of terrible studio product (Cheaper by the Dozen 2 and The Pacifier among others), Adam Shankman did direct 2007’s surprisingly good Hairspray, the big-screen version of the Broadway hit that was itself based on …

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Tom Cruise Returns As Maverick

Tony Scott revealed to Entertainment Weekly that Tom Cruise is in talks to star in the sequel to Top Gun, returning in the iconic role of Maverick. “We have been talking with Tom, definitely,” he said. This comes after screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects, X-men Origins: Wolverine 2) sent an email to Vulture stating, …

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Tom Cruise Scales The World’s Tallest Building In An Incredible Stunt For ‘Mission Impossible 4”

These incredible pictures on the set of Mission Impossible 4 appeared online courtesy of Daily Mail. This weekend Tom Cruises who always insists on doing his own stunts, proved once again he is still very much the adrenaline junkie. The 40 year old actor dangled almost 2,717 ft in the air from the world’s tallest …

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The Auteurs: George A. Romero’s Original Dead Trilogy

Night of the Living Dead For a horror film, Night of the Living Dead (1968) is set in an usual local; not Transylvania, but Pennsylvania. Almost universally panned by critics when released, the film eventually developed a cult following, playing on the midnight movie circuit for more than a decade and becoming one of the …

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