Robert Zemeckis

Director Robert Zemeckis has called What Lies Beneath his "Hitchcock" picture, and if we accept that increasingly preposterous notion, the picture most called to mind by the film's first hour is not Rear Window, despite superficial plot similarities, but The Birds.

Just look at the major Hollywood releases this summer: First "Mission: Impossible 2" borrows a plot from "Notorious," then "X-Men" takes a Statue of Liberty climax from "Saboteur," and finally we have Robert Zemeckis’ "What Lies Beneath," which cribs from so many Hitchcock thrillers it’s impossible to mention them all, but the chief victims are "Rear Window," "Rebecca," and "Suspicion."

Alfred Hitchcock was very good at directing this kind of movie, where a nosy neighbor gets involved in someone else's business ("Rear Window").

Based on the theme park ride, “Jungle Cruise” is a celebration of the ride; a cheeky, frolicky fun homage to “The African Queen,” “Romancing the Stone” and then throw in all what Disney does best.

For long time adventure fans, this really is the throwback blockbuster we’ve been waiting for, with plenty of nods and homages to greats such as Romancing the Stone , The Mummy and Indiana Jones.

Their relationship is reminiscent of Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in “Romancing the Stone.”

Two people fall in love in Nazi-occupied Casablanca - stop me if you've heard this one before.

Allied is more intimate than epic, so the grandiose moments tend to stand out like a sore thumb, clashing with the Casablanca-esque tone the film works so hard to replicate.

Directors Anthony and Joe Russo and writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely gleefully unpack some of the persistent myths of that particular device, ripping apart the plotholes of iconic chrono-cinema stories like Back to the Future and The Terminator.

The Russos have always been big fans of popular culture, so I loved the references to all of the time travel films including Back to the Future and Hot Tub Time Machine .

The nature of the quantum realm is more sophisticated than in, say, Back to the Future (which gets a razzing, Stark preferring the theories of Planck and contemporary egghead David Deutsch), but the film echoes Robert Zemeckis’s farce in how characters encounter their former selves from previous films.

With definite nods to Suspiria (1977), The Entity (1982), and What Lies Beneath (2000), The Night House is a creepy suspense thriller that is ultimately too twisty for its own good.

During the most crucial summer for studio theatrical releases in film history, The Night House (coming to a theatre near you from Fox Searchlight) is a thing that Hollywood rarely makes any more: a terrifying and emotionally moving horror movie for adults, recalling a time when a film like What Lies Beneath could be a summer blockbuster.

Invoking fond memories of watching “What Lies Beneath,” David Bruckner’s atmospheric thriller “The Night House” sees an excellent Rebecca Hall playing a widower searching for answers and unearthing shocking discoveries about why her late husband decided to take his own life.

Su primera parte recuerda al cine clásico fabricado por Hollywood, sobre todo a Casablanca (1942), y, la segunda, propone un viraje que se aleja de dichos elementos para acercar el convoy a los thrillers hitchcockianos (Notorious, Suspicion).

The more Zemeckis strains to re-create the romanticism of the wartime films of the 1940s, the more I wished this one was being made by Alfred Hitchcock, who effectively made a variation on this theme with "Suspicion" (1941).

Instead, we get a play-it-safe thriller with a plot that recalls that of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious and Suspicion yet fails to muster a fraction of either's suspense.

MacFarlane has a bevy of cameoing stars, their very presence aimed to elicit laughs, but again, what's a "Back to the Future" nod with Christopher Lloyd got to do with anything?

The many unbilled cameos, some of which are witless references to other, better movies (e.g., “Back to the Future” and “Django Unchained”), would work better if the good-natured performers had been given any decent material to work with, though it’s hard to imagine that even Shakespeare could have come up with anything that might save Gilbert Gottfried’s impersonation of Abe Lincoln.

There’s an excruciating Peter Griffin moment late in Million Ways where Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown shows up for absolutely no reason other than to high five the audience for having seen Back to the Future (“Bro, remember Pepsi??”).

At the same time, it's kind of always obvious that the film doesn't really look on Forrest as the unambiguously noble fool that the film's reputation implies: the character's broad, molasses-slow accent and the improbable naïveté he brings to every one of his encounters with world history are certainly meant to absurd if not wholly ridiculous, and for every moment where his solemn pronouncements of folk wisdom are framed in Don Burgess's widescreen cinematography (he and Zemeckis can't figure out what do with with the 2.35:1 frame, though there are some potently beautiful landscapes here and there) and cradled by Silvestri's delicate score to be some kind of gravely significant Pronouncement of an Untarnished Soul, there's one where the film adopts a smirking, "this rube sure is a moron, and only in a country of morons could he impress so many people and have so much success" attitude that would be barely indistinguishable from Being There , if Being There was broken and atonal, and if Peter Sellers was mu…

Like the gardener in "Being There," Forrest benefits from a below-average IQ and an even temperament.

That's the cinematic formula for "Forrest Gump," which combines the most interesting elements of "The World According to Garp," Woody Allen's "Zelig" and "Being There."

We go for years without a great survival movie a la “Cast Away” or “Touching the Void,” and suddenly we have two at the same time (“Gravity” is the other).

Not even Tom Hanks’s impressive turn as a survivor on an island in Cast Away (2000) counts since his lengthy sojourn as the lone soul on screen is bookended by sequences before and after that feature other characters.

Certainly, the plot will make it easy for some to tag this Life of Pi without the tiger, Cast Away without the volleyball, Gravity without George Clooney.

“Project Almanac” isn’t “Time After Time” (1979) or “Back to the Future” (1985) or “12 Monkeys” (1996), but the new release does turn out to be a surprisingly jaunty trip for jaded Gen-Y kids.

Maybe every time-travel movie can’t use a souped-up DeLorean, but “Project Almanac” may leave you wanting to pull out your old copy of “Back to the Future” instead.

Yes, the kids are primarily inspired by the footage of David's father, but they're just as fueled by "Back to the Future"—to them, it's all movies.