Movie Reviews

Review by Russ Breimeier

The 2008 summer movie season might as well be dubbed the Summer of Superheroes. Several of this year's flicks are based on or inspired by comic books and cartoon characters, all releasing within weeks of each other, beginning with Iron Man. He's a classic that dates back to 1963, nearly as old as Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, yet this is the first attempt to bring ole Shell Head—one of my all-time favorites—to the big screen.  Read more.

Review by Lisa Ann Cockrel

In Made of Honor, Michelle Monaghan plays a witty, artistic, and beautiful woman, who, when she gets engaged, asks her best friend to be her maid of honor. That best friend just happens to be a man. It's a case of art imitating life, given that when the actress got married in 2005, her "maid" of honor was also a man. She told USA Today that when she read the script she said, "I know all about this! Sign me up!"  Read More.

Review by Peter T. Chattaway

Martial-arts fans have been waiting for years to see Jackie Chan and Jet Li co-star in the same movie, and when these two living legends finally meet for the first time in The Forbidden Kingom, you can sense that the filmmakers wanted to make the most of this historic moment.

Chan plays Lu Yan, a slightly comic figure who is always drinking wine and does a lot of his fighting "drunken" style, while Li plays a mysterious figure known only as the Silent Monk—and their first encounter, in an abandoned temple, leads to a seemingly non-stop series of kicks and blows, choreographed by The Matrix's Yuen Woo-ping, that looks incredible but eventually begins to seem a little long.  Read More.

Ben Stein got his start as a lawyer and a speechwriter for Presidents Nixon and Ford, and in more recent years he has written books, offered investment advice, and hosted both a game show (Win Ben Stein's Money) and a reality TV show (America's Most Smartest Model). But he is probably still best known for playing the boring high-school economics teacher who took attendance in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  Read More.

Review by Russ Breimeier 

All you really need to know about 21 is shown in the (excessively) stylish opening prologue before the credits. It's a foretaste of what's to come later in the film—not just the general plot details, the narration, and the visual style, but even some of the "how" that will bring us to that point. You could say 21 reveals its cards too early.  Read More.

Review by Josh Hurst

There's a lot that can be said of director/producer Judd Apatow and writer Seth Rogen, but, more than anything else, they come across as two guys who really, really like comedies. And it's obvious from any of their collaborative efforts—The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad—that they've spent the majority of their adolescent and adult lives learning at the altar of every fratboy comedy since Animal House—everything from Ghostbusters and Stripes all the way through Anchorman.  Read More.

Review by Brandon Fibbs

The work of Dr. Seuss has an admittedly lackluster history when it comes to big screen adaptations.

While Chuck Jones' animated Dr. Seuss' The Grinch Who Stole Christmas is a beloved, generation-spanning holiday classic, Ron Howard's The Grinch proved to be an abomination, bereft of the original's magic and weighed down with an overabundance of additional material. Mike Myers' Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat, a ridiculous and, at times, downright creepy presentation of another Seuss classic, fared little better.  Read More!

Review by Peter T. Chattaway

It would be flattering a movie like 10,000 B.C. to suggest it has anything in common with Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, but, well, it does. Both movies concern men from primitive hunter-gatherer tribes who are captured and enslaved by warriors from an oppressive urban society, and both movies feature ominous prophecies and key sequences set at pyramid-like temples. But where Apocalypto is deeply informed by its director's obsessions with the nature of religion, family, masculinity, violence, and so on, 10,000 B.C. feels like a lame, generic pastiche of ancient heroic tales.  Read More.

Review by Camerin Courtney

Review by Russ Breimeier

In Spain, an American news team covers a public rally where President Ashton (William Hurt) is expected to announce his new counterterrorism plan to the world. As his motorcade pulls in to the plaza, protesters voice their disapproval outside, suggesting that Ashton is about as popular overseas as President George W. Bush. After a short introduction by the city's mayor, the TV cameras zoom in expectantly as he takes the podium.  Read More.

Review by Brandon Fibbs

There are two kinds of fantasy adventures—those that take place in another world (The Lord of the Rings, The Golden Compass), and those in which the fantasy world exists parallel to and often spills into our own (The Chronicles of Narnia, Pan's Labyrinth). The Spiderwick Chronicles, which embeds spiritual truth in the guise of mythology, belongs in the latter category. Much more fantastical and far more handsome than the trailers reveal, The Spiderwick Chronicles is a thrilling adventure for children of all ages.  Read More.

 Review by Rachel Groters

Editor's note: We wanted someone in the target audience to review this film, so we asked Rachel Groters, a high school junior and a freelance writer for Ignite Your Faith magazine, to be our guest critic. Rachel isn't all that big a fan of Hannah Montana, but Rachel's 10-year-old sister had definitely caught Montana Madness, and accompanied her big sis to the screening for a better perspective on the show.

When I saw commercials for this movie, I could take it or leave it. Part of me wondered why Disney would even make a movie of a concert. Wouldn't it be a letdown from the real thing? But then I learned that this 3-D production—which was advertised to be in theaters for one week only—had earned about $18 million in pre-sold tickets, and the few tickets left were selling out fast! I had to find out what all the fuss was about. (After the movie earned $29 million and landed No. 1 at the box office for the weekend, Disney decided to extend its one-week run and let theaters play it as long as they like.) Read More.

Review by Josh Hurst

The weekend before Valentines Day is prime real estate for a romantic comedy—the brief break from the late winter moviegoing doldrums when studios like to trot out the best of their date movies. The timing means the marketing pretty much writes itself, and only a spectacularly botched ad campaign (or a spectacularly lame movie) could squander what's usually guaranteed bank at the box office. (Still, Over Her Dead Body—opening two weekends before Cupid's big day—somehow managed to misfire in both regards.)  READ MORE.

Review by Russ Breimeier

We probably need another Rambo movie like a hole in the head … or arm, or chest, or neck, or … But then, the relatively young audience that saw Rambo No. 4 with me seemed to enjoy it. (I'll get back to them in a bit.)

No one's confusing the Rambo films with high art, but the first two are still classic entries in the "one-man-army" action genre. And though the franchise has remained dormant for 20 years, Sylvester Stallone's characterization remains one of the most iconic in film history. The name is practically synonymous with G.I. Joe. (Anyone else remember the '80s action figures and cartoons? Sing along now: "Rambo … the force of freedom!")  Read More!

Review by Lisa Ann Cockrel

A few days before I screened 27 Dresses, a friend asked me to take charge of decorating the reception hall for his wedding. And I was delighted to say yes. I don't exactly have 27 bridesmaid dresses in my closet, but I figure I've been behind the scenes on as many as 15 weddings in the last decade. It's work I'm happy to do. READ MORE!

Most monster or disaster films tend to have a story scale about the size of Godzilla himself. They chronicle their stories on the extreme macro level—from the perspective of scientists uncovering the origins of the situation, of military officers debating response strategy, of political leaders being briefed, and of the hero saving the day. You're the omniscient viewer seeing all sides.  Read More!

It's probably safe to say you've never seen kite-flying scenes like the ones that form the emotional and metaphorical core of The Kite Runner. The film, based on the best-selling book by Khaled Hosseini, is partly set in Afghanistan in the 1970s, and the simple act of flying a kite comes to represent a freedom of spirit that is lost when the nation is invaded by the Soviets in 1979, and then remains lost when the nation is dominated by the extremist form of Islam that characterized the Taliban.

But the two boys at the heart of this story do not merely fly kites, they "cut" them—by chasing other kites through the air and curling around their strings until they snap. Kite-flying thus becomes a form of competition—and with the help of modern special effects, the film sometimes uses aerial shots to show how the airborne kites pursue one another, like fighter planes hot on each other's tails.

These sequences are impressive, but their very impressiveness threatens to take you out of the movie. The aerial shots might be necessary, in some sense, since those who have never played these sorts of games would probably not know what to look for if the kites were shown from the distant, earthbound perspective of the boys themselves; but even so, given how naturalistic the rest of the film tends to be, the artificiality of the kite sequences does, unfortunately, call attention to itself.

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This is the third major film incarnation of the 1954 horror novella I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (writer of The Twilight Zone: The Movie and several sci-fi/horror stories). Considered a horror classic, it has influenced writers including Stephen King and films such as Night of the Living Dead, but its track record on film isn't as impressive.

The most well known version is the dated and goofy The Omega Man (1971) with Charlton Heston. Like that film, I Am Legend is more "inspired" by the book than a cinematic re-telling. The filmmakers weave their own story and themes (including all of the spiritual content) out of the book's basic premise that a virus has decimated the Earth. And only one man seems to have survived its effects.

The film begins with the TV news. A doctor (an uncredited Emma Thompson) explains how her team was able to mutate the measles virus. She tells the news anchor that measles is like "a fast car with a madman at the wheel" but her team believed it could be used for good if "a cop were driving it instead." And so, they mutated the virus and turned it into a successful cure for cancer. Flash forward three years: that mutated virus has killed 90 percent of the population and turned most survivors into Darkseekers—pale, hairless, zombie-like predators who feast on blood.

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As the story opens Stanley Phillips is a manager at a big-box home store, and his wife, Grace, is a sergeant stationed in Iraq. After a couple of brief set-up scenes we see him answer the door one morning to find a military officer and a chaplain on the doorstep. Comprehension and denial cascade simultaneously down his face. When the officer asks, "May we come in, sir?", the stunned man breathes "No."

When 12-year-old Heidi (Shelan O'Keefe) and 8-year-old Dawn (Gracie Bednarczyk) get home from school, Stanley gathers them in the living room and attempts to break the news, but the words stick in his throat. One procrastination leads to another, and before long he's impulsively decided to treat them to a trip to a Florida theme park. The biggest part of the movie concerns that journey, the days and nights on the road, as Stanley wrestles with his emotions.

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Noëlle is a good start. Decidedly and overtly religious in nature, it nonetheless manages to generally balance its message with its medium in such a way that should interest believers and non-believers alike.

Writer/director David Wall, who looks astonishingly like a young Robert Redford, also plays the lead role of Father Jonathan Keene, an emotionally aloof priest every bit as cold as the snow-draped Cape Cod fishing village he visits the week before Christmas. A "hitman" for the archdiocese, Father Keene is on a mission to do what he does best: shut down a local parish no longer deemed financially viable. The parish priest, Father Simeon Joyce (Sean Patrick Brennan), is a faithful but disillusioned, hard drinking priest who blatantly thumbs his nose at church regulations in deference to caring for his flock. Keene's classmate from seminary, Father Joyce's heart is in the right place even if he's lost the will or know-how to keep his church alive.

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Who could have foreseen that 2007 would be the year of the unplanned pregnancy at the multiplex? And who could have foreseen that, as the year progressed, the films dealing with this topic would be increasingly bold in expressing their implicitly pro-life—not "anti-choice," but certainly pro-life—sensibilities?

First there was Waitress, which starred 30-ish Keri Russell as a married woman who learns that she is bearing the offspring of her neglectful, even abusive, husband; deeply ambivalent about the pregnancy itself, she simply states that she recognizes the child's "right to thrive," and that is that. Then there was Knocked Up, in which Katherine Heigl played a single up-and-coming journalist in her 20s who keeps her baby partly because she is repulsed by her mother's suggestion that she "take care of" the pregnancy now and have a "real baby" at some point in the future.

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Written anonymously around 700 AD, Beowulf is the oldest and greatest epic in the English language. Despite the fact that its storyline encompasses Viking Scandinavia, the roughly 3000-line poem is the solitary major surviving work of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry. The story, required reading in most high school and college English literature classes, is the foundation for all our modern hero myths, from King Arthur to Conan the Barbarian.

Robert Zemeckis, the creative genius behind such films as the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, Contact, and Cast Away, here uses his charming but flawed The Polar Express as a technical springboard to re-imagine the epic myth of Beowulf for a 21st century audience. The reason filmmakers return to the well of animation time and again is simple: with animation, you are restrained only by your own imagination.

What makes Beowulf the best of both worlds is that it incorporates near photo-realism with animation's visual autonomy. Zemeckis and his team have tackled the hybrid medium in a manner that is surely the vanguard of things to come. To call Beowulf an evolutionary (though flawed) leap forward in cinema may not be too great a compliment.

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"I believe in music the way some people believe in fairy tales." So says a boy named Evan (Freddie Highmore) at the beginning of August Rush, and right from the start, it is clear that we in the audience are being asked to believe in both of these things as well. Evan says he can sense music in everything around him, and as he stands outside, closes his eyes, and waves his hands through the wind and blades of grass, the film invites us to experience the sounds around him not as so much noise but as delicate instruments in a subtle, graceful symphony that only Evan can hear.

If this film is guided by any one template, though, it is not that of the symphony or the fairy tale, but rather that of Oliver Twist. Just as the Charles Dickens novel concerned an orphaned boy who runs away, falls in with the wrong crowd, and then learns of his true heritage, so too August Rush concerns a boy, Evan, who was abandoned at birth but makes his way to New York City convinced that he can find his birth parents—both of whom, it happens, were talented musicians.

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The first two-thirds of Disney's Enchanted is sweet, charming, almost-perfect, can't-wipe-the-smile-from-your-face fun. Simply put, it's endearing and, well, enchanting. When I saw the film, the theater was filled with young girls buzzing with giddiness, laughter and wonder. What little girl wouldn't love having a princess—complete with big poofy dress—to sing with and go shopping?

But it's not just for kids. It's funny, inventive and clever. The movie also works on a second level by lovingly evoking Disney's classic canon. Enchanted references everything from Snow White to The Lion King with both gentle satire (like "Happy Working Song" where real-life rats and pigeons help a cartoon princess clean a New York apartment) and sly references (pay attention to little details and character names). If nothing else, it's worth seeing for the wonderfully cartoonish performances of Amy Adams (Junebug) and James Marsden (X-Men) as the real-life versions of a classic Disney princess and her prince charming. They are magnificent.

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beloved children's classic book. But that's exactly how it feels with its nostalgic mood, old-fashioned storytelling, childlike innocence, quirky delight, simple morals, and poetically bizarre dialogue like "It's strangely weird and weirdly strange!"

Unfortunately, it feels like a childhood favorite that didn't translate perfectly to the screen—like one of those stories where your young imagination's own take on this fantastic world could never truly be captured on screen. Watching Mr. Magorium, I was tempted to think, I bet that character is so much more developed and full in the book. You can only do so much in a movie.

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Lions for Lambs, the first film Cruise has starred in since he was unceremoniously booted from the Paramount lot and struck a deal to take the reins at United Artists. Cruise plays Senator Jasper Irving, a hotshot politician with a background in military intelligence who invites a journalist, Janine Roth (Meryl Streep), to his office for an exclusive interview, where he reveals that he is one of the masterminds behind a brand new military strategy that is unfolding in Afghanistan as they speak. Jasper tells Janine he is giving her a big scoop, and he clearly thinks the new strategy and his involvement with it will boost his own political ambitions—but he isn't exactly maximizing his exposure, or the strategy's.

Why is a mere senator and not, say, the Defense Secretary discussing key military tactics with the press? Good question. There is a brief line to the effect that Jasper is chummier with the president than actual members of the administration, but still, come on. It seems pretty clear that the meeting between Jasper and Janine has been contrived by the filmmakers simply to provide an opportunity for a lot of back-and-forth arguments about the so-called war on terror. And such a set-up would be forgivable, if the arguments were remotely interesting or enlightening.

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Lions for Lambs, the first film Cruise has starred in since he was unceremoniously booted from the Paramount lot and struck a deal to take the reins at United Artists. Cruise plays Senator Jasper Irving, a hotshot politician with a background in military intelligence who invites a journalist, Janine Roth (Meryl Streep), to his office for an exclusive interview, where he reveals that he is one of the masterminds behind a brand new military strategy that is unfolding in Afghanistan as they speak. Jasper tells Janine he is giving her a big scoop, and he clearly thinks the new strategy and his involvement with it will boost his own political ambitions—but he isn't exactly maximizing his exposure, or the strategy's.

Why is a mere senator and not, say, the Defense Secretary discussing key military tactics with the press? Good question. There is a brief line to the effect that Jasper is chummier with the president than actual members of the administration, but still, come on. It seems pretty clear that the meeting between Jasper and Janine has been contrived by the filmmakers simply to provide an opportunity for a lot of back-and-forth arguments about the so-called war on terror. And such a set-up would be forgivable, if the arguments were remotely interesting or enlightening.

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A spate of new documentaries has been shining a spotlight on the atrocities in Africa. October gave us The Devil Came on Horeseback, Last week was Darfur Now. Both films focus on the genocide in Sudan, mainly through the eyes of activists chipping away at the huge, complicated problems. Now War/Dance turns the lens on Uganda, where for the past 20 years the Lord's Resostamce Army has waged war on innocent tribes people. Unfortunately, the children have been the greatest victims, forced into sexual slavery, to become child soldiers, or to witness their parents being tortured to death in front of their eyes.

Instead of the redemptive power of activists seen in earlier documentaries, War/Dance focuses on the redemptive power of art. The students at Patongo Primary School, situated in a Northern Uganda refugee camp, have earned an unprecedented chance to compete in "The National Music Competition." This annual event, held in the capital city of Kampala, draws tens of thousands of students from around the nation to compete with instruments, dance, and song. The Patongo students have to travel 200 miles over two days through rebel territory to even get to Kampala, a place full of sights and attractions—such as airplanes and skyscrapers, electricity and running water—they've never beheld before. As one of the students says before the trip, "I can't wait to see what peace looks like."

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Remember how unfunny and derivative the original trailer for Elf was? Yet Will Ferrell's comedic charisma and the charming family-friendly story helped make it a successful Christmas flick.

Four years later, and there's a sense of déjà vu watching the trailer for Fred Claus, which clearly wants to cash in on the same audience that made Elf a blockbuster. READ MORE

Ridley Scott's crime drama American Gangster hinges on two men who are the exception rather than the rule when it comes to their respective occupations.When New Jersey police officer Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) finds $1 million in unmarked bills, he turns it in. It's the right thing, sure, but an act that marks him as a threat among the dirty cops around him. He and his partner become pariahs for doing their job while other cops sell confiscated dope out of the evidence room to make side careers. Roberts is a cop clearly in opposition to the film's average officer.Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), a Harlem drug syndicate heir, changes the way street dealers do business: he cuts out the middleman. Seeing the new convenience-store, fast-food culture of the late 1960s, he refuses to merely sell drugs for the Italian mob and instead buys pure, uncut heroin direct from Vietnam. Lucas becomes the Wal-Mart of Heroin. He buys low and passes the savings to the customer. Of course, New York mob kingpins aren't so happy with this spirit of innovation. Lucas is a gangster clearly in opposition to the film's average dealer.

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When was the last time you watched a morality play—much less one that deals with people battling incapacitating disabilities—that was also unabashedly, side-splittingly hilarious? If nothing comes to mind, perhaps that is reason alone to check out Music Within, a new independent film based on the true story of one man's quest to improve the lives of millions of marginalized Americans.

Richard Pimentel (Ron Livingstone) is born into a wildly dysfunctional family. So it is rather surprising when he arrives at adulthood having not just survived, but actually thrived. He is blessed with the gift of gab and the ability to weave stories (and even scathing insults) in a way that is irresistible to anyone within earshot.

When Richard tries out for a debate team college scholarship, his mentor Dr. Ben Padrow (Hector Elizondo) admits that he is the single most gifted student he's ever seen, but also rejects Richard on the grounds that he has nothing meaningful to say. "You must earn a point of view," he tells the ambitious but untested young man.

Stung and surprised, Richard makes an impulsive decision to enlist in the Army and promptly finds himself in Vietnam. One fateful evening, a mortar round explodes dangerously close. While Richard survives the blast, his hearing does not. He is discharged and sent stateside with what little hearing he has left replaced with the maddening shrill of tinnitus.

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John Cusack plays David, a widower whose wife wanted a family; now that she is gone, he thinks he should adopt a child and make his late wife's dream come true. He can literally afford to look after a child all by himself, because he is a best-selling science-fiction author, and Sophie (Sophie Okenedo), the social worker he turns to for advice, suggests that he take a look at Dennis (Bobby Coleman)—a six-year-old who has been through so many foster homes that, as a defense mechanism, he insists he is visiting from another planet and has come to Earth to study human beings and their ways. Perhaps David, with his sci-fi background, can connect with Dennis and bring him out of his shell.

It may or may not help that David himself was "weird" when he was young, at least according to his sister Liz (Joan Cusack), who has children of her own and often takes the opportunity to remind David that parenting is hard. In any case, the relationship between fantasy and reality, and the ways parents work through their own childhoods while raising their children, can be fertile ground for drama.

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You can actually tell a lot about Bee Movie from the way the film is being marketed. Just check out the trailers, the promotional spots on NBC, the copious amounts of interviews and splashy newspaper and magazine features. You probably won't find much, ahem, buzz over the computer animation, or the film's plot, or even the family-friendly PG rating. What you will find is that, even after nearly a decade of keeping a low profile upon ending his blockbuster sitcom, Jerry Seinfeld still has it in spades. He hasn't lost his brilliantly observational wit, and his Hollywood clout seems only to have grown. And the Bee Movie marketing campaign won' let you forget it; the whole thing is positively Seinfeld-centric.And, in many ways, so is the film. Never mind the fact that, after so many years flying under the radar, it seems a bit odd for the superstar comedian to resurface as the voice of an animated bee in a feature-length cartoon that he also had a hand in writing and producing. There's nothing like selling out or cashing in going on here; the entire movie drips with Seinfeld's personality, with his own unique sense of humor, with the subtle sense of subversion that characterized the sitcom at its edgy best. Oh, it's a cartoon all right, with anthropomorphized insects and a mostly family-friendly vibe, but make no mistake: This is Seinfeld's show from top to bottom, and there's nothing here that doesn't bear his mark—starting with the story.

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There comes a point in everyone's life—though for most of us, it is hardly a singular event—when we reach a crossroad and must make a decision as to which direction to proceed. Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is at such a place. What he decides will determine the course, both physically and morally, of the rest of his life.

Clayton is an in-house "fixer" at Kenner, Bach and Ledeen, one of the most powerful law firms in New York City. A former prosecutor from a family of blue-collar cops, Clayton now makes his living managing the firm's dirty laundry at the behest of co-founder Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack). If a client is involved in a hit-and-run accident, they call Clayton. If the wife of a high-profile politician is caught shoplifting, they call Clayton.But cleaning up others' messes has started to wear thin, and Clayton finds that after 15 years on the job, he is world-weary and burned out. "I'm not a miracle worker," he tells one of the scumbags he's sent to help, "I'm a janitor."

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Into the Wild is a pretty infuriating movie, because it insists on treating the central character as an escapee from Godspell. In Jon Krakauer's slim, fascinating, and disturbing book by the same title, Christopher McCandless is an ambivalent and somewhat pitiable figure. The son of a high-achieving couple, he did well at Emory University, but dwelt on courses concerning apartheid and the African food crisis. Chris became increasingly agitated by the gap between rich and poor, and revolted at his parents' hard-earned success, as well as their hopes for his life. In a letter to his sister Carine, Chris told how their offer of a new car as a graduation present outraged him. (Chris had significant problems with his father, as Krakauer had with his own father, all of this contributing to the power of the book.)The verb "to drop out" isn't heard much these days, but that's what Chris decided to do. He would disappear after graduation and travel around the country, living on as little as possible, a resistor to the conformity machine. He abandoned his car, burned his cash, and dined on nuts and berries. The impact on the African food crisis has not yet been reported.

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Steve Carell stars in this small treasure of a movie, a film so filled with heart and imagination that it's sure to be cherished by many. Carell—also a Burns, and the Dan of the movie's title—is a widower, raising three girls and providing for them with his salary as a newspaper advice columnist. But of course, writing about living wisely is much easier than actually doing it, and, after awkwardly breaking up a blossoming romance between one of his daughters and a classmate, then refusing to give his oldest a chance to get behind the wheel for practice driving the family car, Dan ends up at his clan's New England cabin and announces to his parents (Dianne Wiest and John Mahoney) that his own family hates him.

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The energy in the kitchen of an elegant Mexican restaurant in Manhattan is cranking up steadily, as the staff braces for the noon rush. One waitress, Nina, is running late, which is becoming a habit. She dashes in at the last minute, but Manny, the owner, tells her this is one time too many, and fires her on the spot.

As Nina storms out, the head chef, Manny's brother José (a mysteriously tragic guy, peeking out through a forest of beard and hair), follows her outside to make sure she's OK. When he learns that she is pregnant, he walks away from the restaurant and spends the day at her side, compelled for unknown reasons to try to help her. Over the course of the day, their conversations, encounters, and decisions will send changes rippling through many lives, over many years.

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Coach Fields (David Koechner) is pathetic. He has the distinction of being the worst coach in the history of sports anyone can recall. A loser of enormous proportions, the incompetent and seemingly hopeless coach is convinced by fellow coach Freddie Wiseman (Carl Weathers) to return to the field for one last shot. Assuring his long suffering wife (Melora Hardin) that he will not ignore his family, Coach moves them to Plainfolk, Texas where he hopes to redeem himself and his reputation. Here he begins yet another attempt to improve his abysmal record - this time as the coach of the football team at Heartland State University. But he is saddled with a team of misfits - most of whom don't know the difference between a line of scrimmage and a line at the cafeteria. Coach is in serious need of some real talent to beef up his line-up and finds his number one recruit on the university's baseball diamond. The ever-so-handsome Lance Truman (Matthew Lawrence) brings with him a distinguished award winning career - albeit for the most dropped balls - as well as determination.

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Tyler Perry has released his fourth film called “Why Did I Get Married?”, his second this year after last February’s “Daddy's Little Girls,” based on his stage play of the same name following the lives of four married couples as they share a week-long vacation together as they try to work out any problems between them and build a stronger relationship. On a trip to the Rocky Mountains in Alaska for their annual weekend retreat, four couples reexamine their lives shared together. Terry (Tyler Perry) wants to spend some time with his workaholic wife Diane (Sharon Leal), who is too busy to sit down and spend time as a family, not even with her own daughter Kenya; Marcus (Michael Jai White) wants his wife Angela (Tasha Smith) to stop talking smack and embarrassing him in public, and wants to make their relationship work; Sheila (Jill Scott) is trying to repair her marriage to Mike (Richard T. Jones), unaware of the fact that he is sleeping with Sheila’s friend Trina (Denise Boutte); Patricia (Janet Jackson) and Gavin (Gavin) are considered the perfect couple as Patricia was the one who organized the annual event, but suffers from her own setback when their son was recently killed in a car accident.

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The new film is pretty clearly intended for young children and their families. For example, one of the Israelites, tired of trudging through the desert, actually moans, "Are we there yet?" as though he were a child buckled into the back seat of a station wagon. Joshua, meanwhile, is little more than a kid in his early teens, itching for a chance to go up Mount Sinai. And as the Hebrews march down the dry path that crosses the Red Sea, a child sticks his head through the wall of water to get a good look at the dolphins, fish, and sea turtles swimming by. I don't recall seeing that happen in a Moses movie before, but it's precisely the sort of thing my friends and I used to have fun imagining when we discussed this story in Sunday school.

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On the face of it, you might think Elizabeth: The Golden Age would not have to deal with the same problems that plague other sequels. While the creators of fictitious franchises have to walk a fine line between recycling their earlier movies and offering something new, the Elizabeth movies are supposed to be based on history, and you might think that each film, by focusing on a different part of the reign of the original Queen Elizabeth, would be somewhat unique. But alas, that is not how it turns out. Yes, The Golden Age has a sea battle and one or two other new bits, thanks to its presumably bigger budget. But for the most part, it plays like a pale retread of the film that earned Cate Blanchett her first Oscar nomination nine years ago.

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I had a friend whose grandparents were in a seniors Sunday school class entitled "Finishing Well." I thought this was a rather condescending (or at least, pessimistic) name for a class of elderly people—especially when I heard that the teacher of the class was a vigorous young forty-year-old! But the whole "finishing well" concept is ubiquitous in Christian teaching, and for good reason. 2 Timothy 4:7 ("I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race") is probably the most oft-quoted passage for encouraging Christians to persevere in the face of ending or change. It's also an inspirational topic for cinematic storytelling, and The Final Season is a perfect example.

Based on a true story and directed by David Mickey Evans (The Sandlot), Season tells the remarkable tale of the Norway (Iowa) High School baseball team. Even though the school contained a mere 100 students, it managed to win 19 state championships in baseball in a 22-year span. But in 1991, the state government announced that Norway was one of several tiny rural schools that would be closed and merged with nearby larger schools—a change that would abruptly end the dynasty forever.

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The best thing that can be said for The Game Plan is that it shows what a good sport Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is. It has always been a tad difficult to take the former pro wrestler seriously, even when he isn't trying to be all that funny; I can recall how the audience tittered when the ancient warrior he played in The Mummy Returns looked back and scowled after a military defeat. But to his credit, Johnson is well in touch with his humorous side, and so, after playing a minor comic role or two (remember the gay bodyguard who wanted to be a singer in Be Cool?), he has now taken the lead role in an out-and-out comedy—and a children's comedy, at that.

He hasn't stretched his onscreen persona too much, though. In his last film, the real-life drama Gridiron Gang, he played a football coach with a message. This time, he plays a vain, selfish, celebrity football quarterback whose life undergoes some drastic changes when the daughter he never knew he had turns up on his doorstep—and this time, it's the film as a whole that relays the obvious messages.

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See if this sounds familiar: teenage boy in England is informed by wise British elders in robes that he is "special" and that he alone can stop the evil forces bent on conquering the world. Boy is reluctant hero, but ultimately accepts the challenge: balancing world-saving with girl problems and other teenage concerns. Harry Potter? No, a lesser-known literary antecedent: The Dark Is Rising. Unfortunately, the movie version is post-Potter, which is a bad place to be if you're a sub-par, adolescent boy-wonder fantasy film.

The film is based on (or "inspired by," as some diehards no doubt prefer) the 1974 Newberry award-winning book by Susan Cooper—part two of a five-book series of novels for children, originally published in the 60s and 70s. Following in the footsteps of Lewis or Tolkien-esque fantasy, the books feature youths on whimsical adventures, thrust into epic battles between good and evil, with colorful characters and creatures on both sides of the struggle...READ MORE

In the Valley of Elah
Review by Peter T. Chattaway | posted 09/21/07

Say what you like about Paul Haggis's merits as a writer or director, but he sure does know how to bring together an impressive cast and, in some cases, how to elicit some of their finest work. In the Valley of Elah has generated a lot of buzz for Tommy Lee Jones, who plays the father of an American soldier who goes missing, and then turns up dead, after a tour of duty in Iraq. But while Jones clearly earns all his accolades, you cannot help but notice all the other actors who turn up for small-ish parts here and there: Susan Sarandon as Jones's wife, Josh Brolin as a sleazy police chief, even James Franco in a couple scenes as an army sergeant who answers the phones. (Did he have other scenes that ended up on the cutting-room floor?)

So, credit where credit is due. As Hank and Joan Deerfield, Jones and Sarandon do a masterful job of conveying the grief of two parents who have lost their child and don't know why he died. Actually, it's worse than that: we find out fairly early on that they have lost two children, because they had another son who died in an accident on an army base some years before. And beneath the grief, there is resentment, as Joan accuses her husband, a Vietnam vet, of inspiring her children to join the military and thereby put themselves in harm's way. But the bitter, ironic truth is that, while both of their sons died on Uncle Sam's payroll, neither of them was killed on the battlefield. They died when they should have been safe.  READ MORE

The Brave One
Review by Steven D. Greydanus | posted 09/14/07

Neil Jordan's The Brave One is one of those movies that comes along occasionally from some interesting filmmaker, like Cronenberg's A History of Violence or the Polishes' The Astronaut Farmer, that leaves one squinting at something that appears so straightforward, you wonder whether the makers are entirely serious. It's a bit like a Calvin & Hobbes strip from 15 years ago, in which Calvin followed up a grotesque, avant-garde snow sculpture ridiculing bourgeois tastes with a very traditional smiling snowman representing, Calvin said, "popular nostalgia for the simple values of rural America 50 years ago." Even so, he claimed his traditional snowman was "very avant-garde." How's that? Hobbes wondered. Confided Calvin: "It's secretly ironic."

What The Brave One shares with the other films mentioned above is a rigid adherence to convention more conventional than all but the most mechanical instances of its genre. The violence in Jordan's film, like the violence (and sex) in Cronenberg's, may shock or startle, but the plot seems rigorously calculated never to surprise. It almost leads you to expect a twist, and then the twist is that there is no twist. It does exactly what such movies do, and then it does it some more, and then it stops. Is it an exemplar of the genre, or a self-conscious deconstruction? It all depends on whether the snowman is smiling because he's smiling, or because he knows snowmen are supposed to smile. ..READ MORE

Shoot 'Em Up
Review by Brandon Fibbs | posted 09/07/07

Say what you will about Shoot 'Em Up, you have to give the madcap actioner points for truth in advertising. With a title like that, you don't exactly expect an intricate plot or lavish character development. And it's a good thing too. Shoot 'Em Up couldn't care less about such finer points. It's one preposterous action sequence after another; a film in which the escalation of violence is inversely proportional to its plummeting taste.

While minding his own business on a bench one evening, the generically named Mr. Smith (Clive Owen) witnesses a terrified pregnant woman stagger past him and into a dilapidated building with gun-wielding thugs hot on her heels. Mr. Smith reaches into his trench coat, pulls out a large carrot from which he takes a hefty bite, and proceeds to use it to kill or maim the small army. Unfortunately the pregnant woman is killed in the ensuing hail of gunfire, but not before the handy-to-have-around Mr. Smith delivers her baby and safely flees the scene.  READ MORE...

3:10 to Yuma
Review by Brett McCracken | posted 09/07/07

3:10 to Yuma is a very modern western, but it's also a throwback to the '50s classics of the genre's heyday. It's a remake of the 1957 film of the same name, and is exactly what a remake should be: not merely updated, but better. This is a film that revels in all the most entertaining conventions of its genre, but also strives for—and achieves—a deeper inquiry into moral psychology. On one level it's about gunfights, spurs, and saloon showdowns, but on another it's a film about the fuzzy lines between right, wrong, and the law in an altogether lawless frontier land.

With 3:10 to Yuma, director James Mangold follows his Oscar-nominated Walk the Line with another film that deals with western Americana and the personal quest for honor and redemption. The story setup is pretty simple: An Arizona rancher (and wounded Civil War vet) named Dan Evans (the remarkable Christian Bale) is down on his luck, about to lose his ranch to the Southern Pacific suits who are bringing the railroad to the tiny town of Bisbee. Seeking to redeem himself financially and in the eyes of his adolescent son Will (Logan Lerman)—who wishes his dad were more like the legendary heroes of his Old West dime novels—Evans stumbles upon a major chance to prove himself.   READ MORE NOW!

In all fairness, you need to know that Will Ferrell could probably make me laugh just by reciting the alphabet. I've found his film career somewhat disappointing, but his work on Saturday Night Live still makes my sides ache. I can't tell you how many times I've been in a church service, dutifully focused on God, only to be beset by an almost uncontrollable urge to giggle when the worship pastor started playing the keyboards and talking over the music in a manner quite like Ferrell's portrayal of middle school music teacher Marty Culp. (Me choking back laughter is not necessarily a pretty scene.)  READ MORE

Review by Camerin Courtney

Annie Braddock (Scarlett Johansson) has a lot going for her. She's a brand-new college grad with a degree in business and anthropology. Though her dad is absent, her mom (Donna Murphy) is a nurse with huge dreams for the daughter who's getting the opportunities she never had. And Annie's got an interview with one of the top business firms in New York City.

But all it takes is one question on said interview to bring to a screeching halt the promising path of this New Jersey girl: Who is Annie Braddock? Sitting there in a high-powered office in a stiff, new business suit, Annie realizes she has no idea...CLICK HERE TO READ MORE!

Review by Peter T. Chattaway

Looking for something different in this summer of second sequels? How about a third remake? The Invasion is the fourth adaptation of Jack Finney's novel The Body Snatchers to come out since 1956, and while it strives to be the most topical and "relevant" version to date, it is also the least engaging—and, one, suspects, the least enduring. Watching and reading about the film, one also gets a strong sense of déjà vu, and not simply because this movie is the latest in a series of remakes.  READ MORE CLICK HERE!

Review by Steven D. Greydanus

Rush Hour 3 is a half-hour of brilliance, preceded by an hour of dreck.

That's a roughly comparable dreck-to-brilliance ratio to the first two Rush Hour movies, I guess, and par for the course for Jackie Chan's Hollywood films (and a fair number of his Asian ones). It's just that the earlier Rush Hour movies are hit-and-miss throughout, whereas Rush Hour 3 is basically non-stop missing for an hour, saving all its hits for the end.  CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THIS REVIEW!

 Review by Peter T. Chattaway

In this high-tech digital age, the makers of high-profile action movies sometimes like to brag about how they used real cars and real stunts—even when some of the defining images in their films couldn't possibly exist without pixels on a screen. (Yes, Live Free or Die Hard, I'm pointing at you and that spinning airborne car that just happens to miss our hero by a hair.) But every now and then, along comes a film that really seems to have happened in front of the cameras—and The Bourne Ultimatum is just such a film.  READ THE REST OF THE REVIEW!

The Simpsons have been on TV for eighteen years—the second-longest running primetime program behind 60 Minutes. So unless you've been in the Peace Corps for a good chunk of that time or simply don't watch any television, you probably already have an opinion about America's favorite animated family.  READ MORE CLICK HERE!

Review by Peter T. Chattaway