The bitter cynic within me — located just left of the pancreas, if we’re being precise — would want nothing more than to rip into the manipulative emotional rollercoaster that is Cameron Crowe’s We Bought a Zoo, the kind of on-rails Hallmark drama where every ascent is followed by a predictable fall. Yet preventing such a scathing report is my inner romantic, a resident of the heart who shows up [...]

Let’s start off with the good news: Iron Man 2 is just as good as Iron Man. But don’t celebrate just yet, as I haven’t told you the bad news: I never thought much of the original.

Most will be quick to disagree, but I found the first to be a middling superhero film, lightly entertaining for sure, but unforgivably formulaic and extremely anticlimactic. Arriving in the same year as the ground-breaking The Dark Knight, it also didn’t take long for Iron Man to feel like an out-dated model. However, the one thing the film certainly had going for it was, of course, Robert Downy Jr. His charming and wry personification of billionaire Tony Stark oozed a unique and entertaining quality the rest of the film simply couldn’t match.