Simon's Movie Reviews

Christopher Nolan, easily one of the best directors working today, likes to play with his audience’s perception. In “Memento” the audience follows a character whose memory should never be trusted as it vanishes after 10 minutes. In “Inception” the characters navigate through a world that is an illusion within an illusion within another illusion. Even Batman in his Dark Knight trilogy has a flair for the theatrics. Hence it makes perfect sense for Nolan to have made “The Prestige” (2006) a movie about feuding magicians. In a film where two rivals try to outwit each other with the world’s best magic trick, don’t be surprised if the ending has fooled you. Released one year after “Batman Begins” and two years before “The Dark Knight,” “The Prestige” showed Nolan had more than one trick up his sleeve. I saw it during my first year at the University of Sherbrooke while spending one of my holidays with my mom in Quebec City. You know you have a good movie when audience members are disc...

The Indiana Jones franchise is one of those rare series where the third entry is just as good, if not better, than the previous two. It follows the same formula as the other movies, based in part on the plot of the James Bond movies: the dashing hero is given a mythical object to recover, he must get to it before an army of villains, many international borders are crossed in order to find the object, and there many chases involving cars, motorcycles, horses, and even a tank. In “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989) the villains are once again the Nazis, after the misfire of having Hindu cult leaders in the previous film. A wise choice, since everyone loves to see Nazis getting their butts kicked. An even wiser choice by director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas was casting Sir Sean Connery, James Bond himself, as Henry Jones Sr. Twice the Jones for the price of one. My parents introduced me to the wild world of doctor Jones the same way they introduced me to the ...

The film that launched James Cameron’s career into overdrive and made Arnold Schwarzenegger a global action star, The Terminator (1984) encompasses the ultimate technological nightmare. An action movie about a cyborg sent from the future to kill the mother of the man who would ultimately stop the rise of the machines, the first film in the Terminator franchise is still as relevant and thrilling today as it was 29 years ago. Over the past decades we have become increasingly dependent on technology, so what if one day those machines became sentient and decide to wipe out their creators? It was science-fiction in the 1980s, but today unmanned drones can fly in just about any airspace and wipe out entire villages. Just how much artificial intelligence do these things need before they get tired of taking orders from a man sitting in front of a computer? A megahit that would spawn three sequels (so far) and a TV show, The Terminator was part of popular culture in the 1990s. It came ...