Michael Bay

Since Michael Bay decided to make Transformers: Age of Extinction his last directorial outing with the franchise, it’s been unclear just where the series is heading. We’d heard talk of Mark Wahlberg returning to continue the storyline that began with last summer’s film, but little else since then. Taking a cue from Disney’s Star Wars plans (along with every other major studio’s “expanded universe” attempts), Paramount has hired Akiva Goldsman to create a “writers room” and brainstorm new sequel and spinoff ideas.

Woe be unto humanity if teenagers discover time travel. That’s the main takeaway from the entertaining new found-footage thriller ‘Project Almanac,’ in which a quintet of adolescents find a time machine, and do exactly what a bunch of adolescents would do if they found a time machine: Party, prank, and screw around with no thought to the consequences of their actions. These kids know and cite ‘Looper’ and ‘The Terminator,’ but the movie they should have paid attention to was ‘The Butterfly Effect,’ because they seem caught off-guard when their innocent misadventures in the timestream begin to ripple out in dangerous ways.