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Director: Rupert Wyatt.

Writers: Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, and Pierre Boulle.

A lot has changed since the first Planet of the Apes film in 1968. Make-up effects have been substituted with CGI and Charles Heston is no longer a staple of these films. Instead, James Franco stars as Will Rodman, a scientist dabbling in a cure for Alzheimer's. The result is a more intelligent ape, who becomes the dominant species in this entertaining prequel. Released August 5th in theatres and still going strong, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is one part drama, one part science ficiton and one part thriller. This reviewer wishes there were more thrills early, but this film does not disappoint despite a foible or two.

Rodman is experimenting with chimpanzees in a sterile, privately owned lab. This scientist is using synaptogenesis to fight the degenerative progression of Alzheimer's. A secondary motivation, his confused father, is...

"Denis Villeneuve's Incendies — an operatic saga of intergenerational woe — is the cinematic equivalent of a Harlem Globetrotters game, with brazen contrivances and a preordained outcome repurposed as dazzling spectacle." David Ehrlich at Reverse Shot: "A strained melodrama that unspools like the bastard child of Homer and Alejandro González Iñárritu, Incendies devotes the brunt of its 130 minutes to earning the audacity of its resolution — it's a work of such unchecked ambition that it almost has to be excused before it can be appreciated at all. But if Villeneuve's film ultimately resolves itself as little more than a gaudy parlor trick, it's an expertly executed bit of chicanery whose punchline hits you square in the gut."

"It's a dual story," explains New York's David Edelstein, "of French-Canadian brother-and-sister twins compelled by the will of their dead mother to locate a father they thought died decades earlier and a brother they never knew existed; and,...