Gorgeously hand-crafted, this rich but approachable spectacle breathes new life into a franchise that has seen diminishing returns.
Peter Jackson’s The Battle of Five Armies lives up to its title with a epic extended battle sequence that goes on for nearly an hour
The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug provides a response to critics of the first film, opening and closing with two enormous action set pieces
Frankenweenie is a gorgeously animated feature-length version of Tim Burton’s (live-action) 1984 short of the same name
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey give fans the chance to spend some more time in Peter Jackson’s vision of Middle Earth
Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows is pretty much a blast until an underwhelming monster mash climax
Hugo, which is set in 1930s Paris, has been endlessly referred to as director Martin Scorsese’s “love letter to the movies”
The Resident is an urban psychological thriller with some light horror overtones and a vaguely familiar air
Season of the Witch might seem to legitimize the medieval witch hunting, or hey, take it a step further, the witch hunting in contemporary US politics
Alice in Wonderland for the Lord of the Rings/Chronicles of Narnia crowd, complete with a battlefield action climax
Star Wars: The Clone Wars does its best to alienate fans of the series by explicitly pandering to a younger audience
The Golden Compass takes us to a wonderful, original mythological world but fails to present any kind of isolated story to take us through