Partly an extravaganza of fireballs, partly a modern interpretation of the biblical Tower of Babel and partly a coming together of one of cinema’s most random casts (Fred Astaire rubs shoulders with O.J. Simpson), The Towering Inferno has the can’t-look-away quality of a car wreck. To celebrate the completion of the world’s tallest skyscraper in

George Lucas’ first film is a curious counterpart to his beloved space saga, at least in form if not in tone. If the Star Wars movies are adolescent joy rides, this is a joyless exercise in cinematic precision. For this director’s cut, Lucas has left the basic narrative intact – Robert Duvall plays the title

This remake of The Poseidon Adventure is an homage to the disaster movies of the 1970s that captures the genre’s awfulness all too well. Those pictures were usually pretty bad and Poseidon is, too. Josh Lucas anchors the ensemble cast as a former sailor turned professional gambler aboard a gargantuan cruise liner that is capsized

This politically charged adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel takes place in an England in which a fascist government has exploited fears of terrorism to put an oppressive vise grip on the nation. Arbitrary imprisonment, military torture, civilian surveillance – it’s all here except for Cheney’s hunting accident. This is ultimately a pulpy parable, though,

No one ever really expects a good disaster movie – quality seems – to be antithetical to the genre, but we can at least hope that a disaster movie should be entertainingly bad. One of the classics in those terms is The Poseidon Adventure – when a ‘sub-sea earthquake’ unleashes a mountainous tidal wave on

Shockingly amoral, Formula 51 follows a “master chemist” (Samuel L. Jackson) who’s trying to sell a new drug to the highest bidder. If you think that makes for a questionable hero, wait until you witness the callous and casual cruelty with which endless characters are killed off. A bullet to the face is considered a