Films featuring
Tim Robbins

Zathura

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You know, when I was six-and-three-quarters, if I’d gotten the family home sucked into space and nearly blown up by robots and flesh-eating alien lizards, not to mention flash-freezing my sister, I would have been grounded for, oh, at least a week.

Zathura is an adaptation of a children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg, who also wrote the books for Jumanji and The Polar Express. As a story, Zathura is similar to Jumanji, in that a game plunges a family into in adventure that seems to take over their house. As a movie, I enjoyed it far more than Polar Express. The young heroes in this movie are much less passive and lacked the creepy thousand-yard stares of Express‘s computer-generated characters.

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War of the Worlds

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Stephen Spielberg‘s career seems to have gone in three different directions lately. There are the serious, mature films that began with Schindler’s List and continued with Amistad, Saving Private Ryan and this year’s Munich. On the flipside are the lightweight comedies that always seem to star Tom Hanks, like Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal. Somewhere in the middle are the edgier science-fiction films like A.I., Minority Report and now his take on H. G. WellsThe War of the Worlds.

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