July used to be all about who got the coveted 4th of July slot, but now that May has stolen a lot of the record breaking thunder, July is more or less the last big month for summer movies to try and make a splash. With not a ton of geek offerings in June, July has stacked the deck with three movies that got their start as comic books; one movie each from the sci-fi, western, and horror departments; and a bunch of family movies that are all basically fantasy films. And there’s a new Adam Sandler movie.

Welcome back to our preview of all the big summer movies. For some reason June is a month where the potential blockbusters don’t always hit it big. There is no long holiday weekend like in May and July and there is still competition from the strong May releases. It will be interesting to see if this year can buck that trend. So here is Part 2, covering North American releases for June. This time I’m including trailers for all the films, so I won’t be touching on the plots in my analysis.

Here on VOG there is a definite focus on the sci-fi and fantasy genres in film. And why shouldn't there be? It's the geek bread and butter after all. But I wanted to shift the spotlight a bit, and focus on what I believe to be the most difficult genre to pull off and have universal appeal: the comedy. What’s great about comedies though is they can take place in any setting, be it a fantasy world, outer space, or even a convenience store.

Can the first third of a story be entertaining and epic enough to stand alone as its own movie? That’s the question the Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, recently released on Blu-ray, DVD, and digital download, asks of its viewers. When Peter Jackson took the huge risk of adapting the Lord of the Rings novels into three epic films, there were questions then if moviegoers could stick with it for the long haul. At least each movie was about one book. With this adaptation of The Hobbit, a book only one quarter the size of the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Jackson needed to be able to stretch out the book without making it feel stretched out. I had my doubts, which is why I skipped seeing this prequel in the theater, but now I believe it can be done.

It’s that time of year again, May, when Hollywood forgets how the calendar works and declares summer movie season underway a whole month before the kids actually get out of school. For well over a decade now summer movie season has shifted to mean May-July, but I’ll still cover August because I’m a purist. So let’s get on with part 1, featuring the major North American releases of note for May, 2013 (Click More... for More)

Time travel stories are hard to pull off. There will always be nitpickers who love to point out plot holes, citing scientific theories that they subscribe to that they believe null and void the entire plot. While I do appreciate that it gets people involved and researching theoretical time travel, just debunking the plot because it doesn’t fit your definition of how time travel should work means you may never like a time travel story. My only prerequisite for these stories is that they explain their time travel rules and as long as they follow those rules they clearly set out, then it works for me. (Click more... for more)