And there you thought it was going all nice and simple with a brutal — what else? — Russian general-turned-politician with a rough taste — what else? — in the ladies.

Super-rich men who have had accidents in super-secret labs and now live in super-size castles in super-solitude are rarely up to any good.

Specifics don’t matter, and a thermonuclear bomb and CIA black ops are background noise in a film that’s about bullets, biceps, blasts and lot of blah.

Hercules would be little more than a series of wars and body pile-ups strung together — even if Ratner does manage to surprise once in a while.

This may be the best work from director Wes Anderson…

Unlike the flat Planes, Fire and Rescue has more of a storyline, even if it’s largely predictable and packs in unnecessary details such as an old RUV couple on their second honeymoon. The fires are as fierce as any in a real film about real people, and Fire and Rescue appears serious about portraying the heroics of the men its planes represent.

Begin Again is almost hopeless in the cliched characters and story plots it trots out. Music, Dan says, can lend even mundane things a meaning. It does, it does.

The sequel to 2011′s well-received Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not just an astounding achievement in special effects — though there’s that too, from how the apes communicate to emote to swing from trees to wield weapons to ride horses and battle. It does one better in propelling the story towards its inevitable war and its inevitably bleak finale. In the mindless destruction they wreak on each other, the men and apes can’t be told apart — a fact that the film underlines unfailingly, at the threat of repeating itself.

Any woman put in that situation of “sacrifice” can understand what Kelly is going through. And despite all the pancake, the cornball dialogues, the cheesy “royal decorum training” and the unabashed distortion of historical facts, Kidman realises and conveys that.
It is Grace of Monaco’s only strength.

The story soars and the Vikings go further and higher to newer and well-imagined lands with details doing justice to the film’s 3D branding, more characters come in, including strong women roles, and the film again packs in a fair amount of surprisingly tender scenes and touches. It doesn’t even have to throw in a joke, so smooth does this tale run. The scene where a masked creature in blue glides into view over clouds is breathtaking.