Gods of Egypt

If you’re expecting top-notch scholarship in Egyptology, you’re probably going to be disappointed in this flick. But if you approach this with the right frame of mind--namely, it’s a popular story using the familiar characters of the Egyptian mythos, in much the same way that Greek and Roman myths have been mined for movie materials for decades (think of all the iterations of Hercules in film)--then you may have a chance of seeing this film as a fun bit of entertainment. Nothing wildly great, and certainly with its flaws, but not much better or worse than the kinds of stories people have been telling each other for thousands of years...or at least since movies were created. It’s splashy and entertaining, and that’s really all one should ask from this kind of movie. It works.

Oblivion

This one seems to be a near miss. There’s a lot to like here: Cruise is good (he never isn’t, really), the look of the thing is wonderful, the twist is pretty good as movie twists go, and there’s even some good science that’s important to the movie’s reality (i.e., the presumed effects on Earth if our Moon were destroyed). But there’s one bit of dumbness that cancels out that good science: the story relies on the by-now well-worn clone fallacy (that clones would somehow share memories with the original organism). Probably not a bad rental, now that it’s out of theaters, certainly worth watching for free. But no surprise this wasn’t a big hit at the googolplex.

Enigma

You start off watching this flick, and you think you may have made a mistake. The lead-in is flat, there's a little too much Britishness...and then, amazingly enough, it kicks in, and "engrossing" is the word that springs to mind. Ultimately you get a tight, entertaining drama for your two hours. One distracting note: Dougray Scott spends the entire movie looking like he's been mugged by pipe-wielding bikers; hardly classic leading man material.