Fans of the original Star Trek TV series get ready to be blown away. The newest film in the J.J. Abrams rebooted series, “Star Trek Beyond,” feels like vintage Star Trek with plenty of big-screen action. At the same time, the film reaffirms the franchise’s core values of embracing the best parts of flawed humanity and finding hope in people’s goodness rather than despair in our human weaknesses.

The latest film in the popular X-Men franchise falls short of its immediate predecessor, "Days of Future Past," but fans still get the satisfaction of seeing the younger versions of their favorite characters. This time around, the graduates and students of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters band together to stave off world domination in "X-Men: Apocalypse."

There’s a parable in the Gospel about a man who owed a lot. Not being able to pay, he begged for mercy and it was granted him. Then he turned around a neglected to show mercy to someone who owed him just a fraction of what he had owed. Wrong way to go about things, don’t you think? When it comes to moral and ethical living, we Christians acknowledge there is a right way to do things and a wrong way. Kyle Budwell (Jack O’Connell) had a just demand but he went about getting his answer the wrong...

You can now add The Divergent Series to the number of film franchises that have suffered from studio greed and have failed audiences by unnecessarily splitting the last part of the story into two films. It happened to The Hunger Games and Twilight and the ridiculous trend backfires once again with the latest film in the Divergent series, Allegiant.With the death of Jeanine in Insurgent, Tris (Shailene Woodley), Four (Theo James), Peter (Miles Teller), Christina (Zoe Kravitz), and Caleb (Ansel El...

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice fits perfectly into the Easter Season, although I’m pretty sure the seasons of the Church year had absolutely nothing to do with the consideration of release dates by Zack Snyder and crew. The film is also the first in two comic book movies this year that are pitting the good guys against each other. Maybe the film industry is tapping into our culture’s difficulty with intelligent and mature conflict resolution.The darkness in Bruce Wayne’s (B...

Ethical dilemmas abound in "Eye in the Sky" and the filmmakers respect the audience enough that they don’t preach an easy conclusion. Although a course of action is finally decided upon, the viewer is left to wonder, “If I were in that situation, what would I have done?” or even, “What is the right thing to do in this situation?” There are no easy answers and I could feel the same tension that the characters experienced.

Humility. It’s a virtue that is sometimes misunderstood to mean that we should demean ourselves and consider ourselves as unworthy of another's esteem. Not so. True humility is being aware of our strengths and weaknesses and being honest about them. Humility is not letting our strengths over-inflate our egos or letting our weaknesses discourage us from trying to do better. "The Finest Hours" gives us examples of true humility in action.

Water, breath, fire, wind. Ice, snow, cold, wet. Pain and more pain. Violence, so much violence. Heartbreak, loneliness. Beauty and cruelty. Betrayal and treachery. Death, so much death. Whispers from beyond yet near and signs of hope. Body and soul, love and sacrifice. The natural and unnatural in a tension that hemorrhages blood and life. This is just a sample of what Alejandro G. Iñárritu's "The Revenant" is about.

Based on the book by Nathaniel Philbrick and directed by Ron Howard, "In the Heart of the Sea" recounts the true story of The Essex, a whaling ship out of Nantucket that was sunk by a huge sperm whale in 1820. The story became the inspiration for Melville’s Moby Dick.

The great delight of "The Force Awakens" is the melding of old and new seamlessly. We meet Rey (Daisy Ridley), a poor scavenger girl on a planet that seems to be full of nothing but sand and junk. She’s definitely more than meets the eye. We meet Finn (John Boyega), the stormtrooper with a conscience. Throughout the story, it’s obvious that these are the characters that will carry Star Wars into the next generation.