Edge of Tomorrow

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.

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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40. Night Moves Since 2006, Kelly Reichardt has found a way to reach inside of the hearts of her audiences, plucking out strings one by one with desolate re-imaginations of the American Pacific Northwest, seen through the eyes of people not so different than ourselves. With Meek’s Cutoff, she departed from her typical genre and moved …

There exists a myriad of reasons why it often feels so terribly easy to aim criticisms at these so-called motion picture events. Some of them are related to the perceived quality, others have to do what certain cinephiles with attuned tastes expect from their movie going experiences as patrons. Movies for which so much money and effort are necessitated in order to produce demand, for perfectly legitimate reasons, important dividends in the form of paid tickets at the theatre and subsequently profits via home viewing platforms.

    15. Stranger by the Lake Directed by Alain Guiraudie Written by Alain Guiraudie France Though Stranger by the Lake premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival (and appeared on Sound On Sight’s best of 2013 list), it finally reached North American audiences in January of this year. Alain Guiraudie’s stunning noir-tinged thriller is …

Picking the best movies that come out in any given year is no easy feat. For film fans, a quality feature can come out at any time, from any one, and discovering an enjoyable and well-crafted feature is truly a pleasure. As we reach the halfway point of the year, many excellent films have already …

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 …