SPECIAL: The 50 Best Superhero Movies

Image: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Chris Luckett

Many lists that are predominantly populated by modern movies feel slanted to younger writers/readers who may not have an exposure to films older than they are or a contextual understanding of their importance.

The superhero movie is a unique beast, though. A few genres and sub-genres, like sci-fi, have been greatly helped by the advance of CGI over the last quarter-century. Sci-fi was still capable of brilliance with just ideas alone, though; superhero movies lend themselves so closely to goofiness, parody, or sublime farce that the modern age of computer effects has served largely to legitimize a type of film that often wasn’t taken very seriously before the new millennium, even when they starred icons like Superman or Batman.

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CORE STORY: Final Avengers movies getting renamed

Photo: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Photo: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Chris Luckett

Originally, there was just going to be one more Avengers movie in a conceived trilogy. Then in 2014, Marvel announced the final film would be split into two movies: The Avengers: Infinity War, Part 1 and Part 2.

Now, brothers Joe and Anthony Russo (directors of Captain America: Civil War and both remaining Avengers movies) revealed yesterday that Infinity War is no longer happening — at least, not in title. Continue reading

SPECIAL: The Best Movies of 2015

Photo: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Photo: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Chris Luckett

Last year, in my Best Movies of 2014 article, I commented on how weak a year we’d had. If only I’d known what 2015 would be like!

For the first time since I launched The Apple Box in 2011, I don’t have 25 movies to strongly recommend. I’ve always said the only movies that deserve to be on a “Best of the Year” list are 4½- and 5-star films, and standing by that, that leaves me with 17. Just 17 movies last year, out of the nearly 150 that I saw, were good enough to write home about.

There were far more average or mediocre movies compared to great ones last year, but that doesn’t mean 2015 was a wash, by any means. These 17 movies, in fact, feel all the more special by being surrounded by weaker fare than usual. These films reminded us all that no matter how bad a year’s cinematic crop, there will always be brilliant movies. Continue reading

REVIEW: The Avengers: Age of Ultron

Photo: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Photo: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Chris Luckett

Cinema has a long, storied history of computers running amok. From 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner to the Terminator and Matrix series, intelligent machines have become the new evolution of Frankenstein’s Monster.

The Avengers: Age of Ultron appears on the surface to be yet another superhero juggernaut, but what separates it from its Marvel brethren — and what elevates it above most of them — is that the villain isn’t a malevolent alien or a possessed scientist, but an artificially intelligent monster of our heroes’ own creation. Even Earth’s mightiest heroes aren’t invulnerable to hubris.

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RANKED: Marvel Studios

Photo: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Photo: Marvel Studios

Chris Luckett

Marvel continues its dominance of the superhero sub-genre with their latest chapter, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Despite it being only the second standalone Captain America movie (not including previous incarnations), anyone who’s watched a Marvel movie in the last six years knows the whole universe of their films are intricately connected.

Since 2008, when Marvel Studios exploded onto the scene with Iron Man, the studio has built an interconnected series of superhero stories that weave through and around each other, before occasionally culminating in an Avengers movie. The series – eight in all so far, not including Captain America: The Winter Soldier – hasn’t had a perfect track record, but it’s yielded more hits than misses.

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