Movie Reviews

After a couple of less-than-stellar romantic comedies (namely Rumor Has It and Alex and Emma) and the oh-so-schmaltzy The Bucket List back in 2007, director Rob Reiner is wisely returning to his more youthful roots with Flipped.

Like 1986's Stand By Me, which is still regarded as one of Reiner's best films, Flipped is another coming-of-age tale that explores the ups and downs of being a gawky adolescent. However, this time around, the story takes place in the pre-Beatles era, which lends a sweet, decidedly old-fashioned feel to the proceedings. Read More.

There are certain films that just make you feel good. Such a film is Nanny McPhee Returns (screenplay by Emma Thompson). The movie is a pure delight from beginning to end. It's packed with uplifting wit, nice plot twists, and a thought-provoking storyline that's bound to bring out the best in both adults and kids. It wouldn't be an overstatement to say it borders on inspiring. As one youngster said as he was leaving the theater, "That made my day."

The movie, set in WWII England, offers a stellar cast that includes: Maggie Gyllenhaal (Secretary, Crazy Heart) as a harried mother of three rambunctious children; Maggie Smith (The Missionary, Gosford Park) as an elderly and slightly kooky shop owner; Rhys Ifans (Notting Hill, The Shipping News) as a lovable and comical villain; and Emma Thompson (Howard's End, The Remains of the Day, Sense & Sensibility) as Nanny McPhee. Adding even more clout to this cast is Ralph Fiennes (Schindler's List, The English Patient), who is arguably one of Hollywood's finest actors. It's an A-List cast—and it shows. Each actor contributes to make the fantasy of it all very believable. Read More.

Felix Bush (Robert Duvall) has a nagging desire to clear the air about his own reputation. The hermit, who has stayed largely out of sight for several decades, wants to stage a funeral—his own—at which all the townspeople will share stories about Felix.

That's the premise of Get Low, an uplifting story of guilt, repentance and reconciliation that stands head and shoulders above most 2010 films. It's a low-key work that is profound in its simplicity—an oasis amid the meaningless fare that always dominates the choices at the multiplex, but never more so than during the summer months.

Felix emerges from isolation early in Get Low, but it takes most of the film's 103 minutes for him to emerge from the emotional cocoon he's built around himself. Tired of the ominous looks and threatening gestures made toward him whenever he heads into town, Felix visits Rev. Horton (Gerald McRaney) to inquire about a funeral service—his own. Legends about the long-bearded man have grown up around him during the years he's stayed mostly hidden from the public, and he's tired of enduring suspicious looks and derisive comments from the locals. By throwing a funeral for himself, he'll be able to hear the stories about himself and finally get a picture of why people fear him. Presumably, he'll be able to clear the air, although he never directly states that as a goal. Read More.

Letters to God is the latest film made by Christians and aimed directly at the evangelical audience. It's a competent, old-fashioned production that puts Jesus Christ front and center, and one in which every needy character embraces faith as an answer to their problems. While not demanding a big-screen viewing experience, the film goes down easy, with respectable performances and craftsmanship to help it along.

How is the film old-fashioned? It starts with a sequence in which a postal carrier (Christopher Schmidt) delivers mail to a group of residents who wait patiently for his visit. Everyone in the neighborhood seems to be doing nothing but waiting for the mail. One man carps about the letter carrier's delivery time, but the letter carrier smiles and carries on with his route. That route includes the Doherty home, where the man picks up letters addressed to God. They're sent from 8-year-old Tyler (Tanner Macguire), who's fighting cancer. He puts his prayers into letter form, seals them in a stamped envelope, and addresses the correspondence to the Almighty. Read More.

If forced to sum up Charlie St. Cloud in one pithy line, I'd say it's a Lifetime made-for-TV movie with way better cinematography. And I guess the fact that it doesn't star Tori Spelling or Jo from The Facts of Life and doesn't feature some skeevy guy cheating on his wife (who she'll naturally have to murder later) probably helps the cause a little, too.

But beyond that, if you don't believe that Zac Efron is the dreamiest guy on the planet, well, there's not much to love about this standard-issue shlock-fest that makes anything Nicholas Sparks has served up recently look downright Oscar-worthy in comparison. Read More.

Aside from Toy Story 3 and Despicable Me, kids (and their parents) have really gotten the short end of the cinematic stick this summer. And sadly, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore doesn't exactly up the ante. In fact, this sequel to 2001's Cats & Dogs (that I'm pretty sure nobody asked for, natch) is so bad that it should've gone straight to video.

Unlike the aforementioned Toy Story series, I'm pretty sure the original audience for Cats & Dogs has already moved on to bigger and brighter movie horizons. So naturally, that begs the question: Why in the world did Hollywood movie execs greenlight this dreadful mess and drag truly funny people like Neil Patrick Harris, Sean Hayes and Bette Midler along for the ride? Read More.

Don't be fooled by people who tell you that if you're not gung-ho about Inception, you simply couldn't understand it. The new film from director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Memento, The Prestige) is complex, and its story about exploiting the dreams of others has rewards for those who can follow its story across multiple levels. But ultimately, the story doesn't quite coalesce. However, if the plot of Inception isn't quite up to the film's fascinating premise, it deserves credit for creating memorable dreamscapes and for its coherent depiction of action across several physical and temporal planes.

Leonardo DiCaprio is Dom Cobb, an expert in extraction, the art of stealing information from people while they dream. He's a tortured soul whose marriage to Mal (Marion Cotillard) went awry and whose professional and personal lives have crumbled. When a businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) challenges Cobb to enter the dream world of a rival and implant, rather than extract, an idea, Cobb grabs the chance to redeem himself with one final job. Joining him are Inception team members Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Eames (Tom Hardy), Yusuf (Dileep Rao) and Ariadne (Ellen Page), an "architect" who builds dream worlds. Read More.

Ramona and Beezus, the latest adaptation from Walden Media of a beloved series of children's books, is unobjectionable G-rated family entertainment. It's not very cinematic, nor is it memorably performed by its lead actresses, but a charming performance by John Corbett as the girls' father helps the film immensely.

Nine-year-old Ramona Quimby (Joey King) lives in the shadow of big sister Beatrice, aka Beezus (Selena Gomez). At school, Ramona's playground antics and argumentative nature test the patience of her teacher (Sandra Oh). At home, her parents (John Corbett and Bridget Moynahan) bear with Ramona's childish disobedience, as when she hides her report card in the freezer and squeezes an entire tube of toothpaste into the sink. When upset, Ramona threatens to use a bad word, yet the worst she can come up with is "guts." Read More.

Has Pixar ruined the animated film? Of course not—it's simply raised the bar for all other contenders in the world of animation, and that's a good thing.

Dreamworks has seen success with its Shrek series, but many other studios have failed to get a foothold in the world of animation. That hasn't stopped them from trying, however, because they know that no audience segment is more grateful for good entertainment, and more willing to support it through repeated viewings, than the family audience. When a good animated film finds that audience, the profits can be massive during both the film's theatrical run and in its afterlife on home video. Read More.

Director M. Night Shyamalan could use a hit, but his latest film, The Last Airbender, based on a Nickelodeon cartoon, is likely to cement his reputation as a filmmaker who peaked early and then crashed and burned. To sit through The Last Airbender is to wonder how someone who seemed so talented a few short years ago could completely unravel.

After the little seen Wide Awake, Shyamalan hit pay dirt with The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs, all mysterious, moody films anchored by a sense of mounting suspense and, sometimes, depictions of faith. Read More.

Once upon a time, Tom Cruise was just like his big-screen alter ego Jerry Maguire: king of the house calls, master of the living room.

In short, everybody loved him, whether he was the cocky pilot in Top Gun, the noble military lawyer who wanted the truth but apparently couldn't handle it in A Few Good Men or spy extraordinaire Ethan Hunt in the successful Mission Impossible franchise. Truth be told, aside from winning the coveted Oscar, Cruise could pretty much do it all while flashing that trademark, toothy smile.

But as any actor worth his/her salt knows, Hollywood is a fickle place, and audiences often bore easily. And around the time Cruise began dating Dawson's Creek alum Katie Holmes and did the whole couch jumping heard ‘round the world on Oprah in 2005, his leading man likeability was seriously called into question. Further revelations about his outspoken commitment to Scientology, not to mention that controversial interview when he called The Today Show host Matt Lauer "glib," certainly didn't help his cause.  Read More.

Aside from The Lord of the Rings, of course, there are few recent film trilogies that have truly dazzled from beginning to end.

But now, with the release of Toy Story 3 almost 11 years after its predecessor (!!!), the franchise continues to soar to infinity and beyond, thanks to heartfelt storytelling, great celebrity vocal talent and imaginative action sequences featuring Woody, Buzz and the rest of everyone's favorite toys.

Frankly, it's amazing just how much someone can actually care about what's essentially copious amounts of plastic—the true mark of exceptional character development on the part of Pixar, which has really become the gold standard in that department. Building upon the theme of abandonment that was developed in Toy Story 2, the latest installment begins with the realization that Andy (voiced by John Morris) has, for better or worse, outgrown his toys. Read More.

The A-Team is back: Hannibal (the leader); Face (the hunk); Murdock (the kook); and Baracus (the muscle). And I'm glad to see them again. Sitting in the theater for this film was more like a reunion with old friends than anything else. Although the movie failed to perfectly emulate the old TV series (1983-1987), it came close enough to the show's characterizations, feel, and plot to be enjoyable.

We meet the new A-Team as they join forces south-of-the-border to thwart a crooked Mexican general who has captured Face (Bradley Cooper, The Hangover). It's up to Col. John "Hannibal" Smith (Liam Neeson, Taken, Schindler's List) to save his pal with the help of Baracus, the character made famous by Mr. T. (now played surprisingly well by former UFC Light-Heavyweight champ, Quinton Jackson). They escape, but only after tracking down Murdock (portrayed hysterically by actor, director, producer, Sharlto Copley) in a psychiatric ward—a certified nut-case, but also one of the best pilots anywhere. Read More.

If you were alive and out of diapers in North America in 1984, you probably remember Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita in The Karate Kid. If, like me, you were a teen back then, Mr. Miyaga's eccentric karate instruction methods ("wax on, wax off") have likely become a part of your pop culture psyche. The Karate Kid's enduring legacy makes the current remake seem inevitable. The question, of course, is whether the long shadow cast by the original makes the copy inevitably disappointing. Read More.

Aside from the easy scatological laughs, however, there are a couple of predictable but still family-friendly storylines running throughout. Ultimately comparing the hierarchy of the canine kingdom to the stereotypical high school cliques, Marmaduke (yes, that Marmaduke from the Sunday comics, now voiced by Wilson) doesn't really feel like he fits in anywhere. Coincidentally, that's a sentiment a few members of his human family feel as well as they're making a big move from Kansas to the O.C. Read More.

Summer is the season of popcorn movies—films that entertain on a large scale but offer no lasting message or takeaway value. They're fun, plain and simple, and they give audiences exactly the mindless entertainment they're looking for on a hot day.

But it's useful to remember that some popcorn is stale, popped somewhere else and trucked in, then warmed up and layered with too much artificial topping.

That defines Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. It has the elements of a successful formula film, but it sells short its best assets in exchange for tedious special effects designed to please those who enjoyed the video game on which the film is based. Prince of Persia spends too much effort recreating a gaming experience rather than developing an affecting story. Read More.

Shrek Forever After is being billed with the alternate title Shrek: The Final Chapter—a spur to get Shrek fans to line up one more time for a story that, purportedly, is the last in the wildly successful series of animated films about a loveable ogre.

Anyone who believes that this Shrek will be the final chapter must have been asleep for the last 30 years, as Hollywood studios have tried to pump life into one sorry film series after another, then, when the box-office tallies dried up, put the films out to pasture for just a few years before reviving them once again (Freddy vs. Jason, anyone?). This Shrek needs only clear a couple hundred million dollars—chump change for this series—to have its studio suddenly rethinking its "final chapter" strategy. Read More.

First, the good news: Unlike the last rom-com Gary Winick directed, the criminally annoying Bride Wars with Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway, Letters to Juliet is infinitely more enjoyable.

However, the bad news is that even with a breathtaking Italian backdrop, a nod to literature's favorite star-crossed lovers (Romeo and Juliet) and not one, but two, potential happy-ever-afters packed into an hour and a half, Letters to Juliet is still only a notch above mediocre.

In terms of perfectly frothy, purely escapist entertainment, Letters to Juliet had possibility in spades. It's the faulty execution, not to mention the clichéd storytelling, that didn't work out so well. Let's just say it could've used a little more Shakespeare and a little less cheese. Read More.

While it won't set the world afire, the new telling of Robin Hood—actually more of a "pre-story" of the events leading up to Robin embracing his "hood" identity—has some life in it. The movie's not particularly unique or special—it feels interchangeable with the likes of Gladiator, the previous collaboration between star Russell Crowe and director Ridley Scott, and other big action spectacles. But it's hard to look away from the well-composed images of the film, and from the compelling actors trying to make something interesting of characters that should have been better fleshed out.

It's endurable despite its length, but the ending title card, "And so the legend begins," comes across as a little irritating. If the legend didn't start 2 hours and 20 minutes earlier, what did we just watch? Read More.

Iron Man 2 suffers from a typical problem with sequels. It has a little too much of everything—too many characters, too many subplots and a running time that's too long. But it's not half bad.

Sure, it could have done a better job of fleshing out the character of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) or his friend Lt. Col James "Rhodey" Rhoades (Don Cheadle), and it might have given either of its villains, Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) and Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), more than one dimension. But what else should we expect from a movie series based on comic book characters? It all goes down rather easily, and if it doesn't rise to the level of better summer blockbusters, it at least holds its own against the original, wildly successful Iron Man. If you liked that first film, you'll likely enjoy this sequel. If you didn't, don't come to the sequel expecting any improvements. Read More.

Consider yourself warned: Furry Vengeance is truly the worst movie I've screened this year, and trust me, I've already reviewed some doozies (Tooth Fairy, Cop Out and The Bounty Hunter, for starters).

Not only did the filmmakers shamelessly pilfer the idea, not to mention the majority of the plot points, from a far, far better kids' flick, 2006's Over the Hedge, but they substituted gaudy animatronic woodland creatures in place of the cute animated ones.

Considering how the animals are supposedly the movie's big draw in the first place, that's already a mistake of cataclysmic proportions. And then if that lack of foresight wasn't already embarrassing enough for everyone involved, the screenwriters also manage to extract every precious ounce of humor from the storyline. Read More.

A Shine of Rainbows is a small Candadian/Irish production with its heart in the right place, intertwining beautiful cinematography and emotional performances with a warm and poignant tale about finding (and embracing) familial love and acceptance. Now if only the movie had that certain little something to make it as special as it might have been.

Eight-year-old Tomás (newcomer John Bell, who looks like the Irish version of a young Macaulay Culkin) is a sweet-mannered but shy and lonely orphan in Ireland, picked on by the bullies at the orphanage. His life quickly changes for the better with the arrival of Maire (Connie Nielsen of Gladiator ), a kind woman dressed in radiant yellow that brightens the dull grey of his existence. Unable to have children of her own with husband Alec (Aidan Quinn of Legends of the Fall ), she adopts Tomás without even meeting him (and for that matter, without Alec's specific approval). Read More.

In the 1989 sports fantasy Field of Dreams, baseball was merely a vehicle for a father and a son to reconcile and finally play catch.

Four years later in The Sandlot, lacing up their cleats and hitting a few balls was merely a reminder that a group of neighborhood pals were more than a team, but the best buddies in the whole world.

And now with the release of The Perfect Game, America's pastime is simply the gateway to a heartwarming, beat-the-odds story of a bunch of underdogs triumphing over adversity at home—and in public. Basically, the game itself is certainly a character of sorts, but not exactly the driving force behind the inspiration. Read More.

As those who regularly watch The Office and 30 Rock already know, Steve Carell and Tina Fey are two very funny actors.

Ultimately, it's a testament to their respective comedic talents that Date Night, their first big-screen pairing, isn't a total bust. Somehow in the midst of bad writing (trust me, the movie's best lines are probably improvised) and a hackneyed case of missing identity that grows increasingly sillier as the minutes tick by, Carell and Fey still shine as two New Jersey suburbanites trying to keep their marital spark alive with a little night-on-the-town spontaneity.

Like many modern couples trying to raise kids while working full-time, too, Phil (Carell) and Claire (Fey) don't have a lot of extra time to devote to their relationship, save for the weekly date night they're often too tired to really enjoy. But sleepy or not, they always make time for the requisite salmon and potato skins dinner at the local steakhouse, the sort of routine outing that Claire's friend Haley (Kristen Wiig) says inevitably caused the demise of her marriage to Brad (Mark Ruffalo). Read More.

Letters to God is the latest film made by Christians and aimed directly at the evangelical audience. It's a competent, old-fashioned production that puts Jesus Christ front and center, and one in which every needy character embraces faith as an answer to their problems. While not demanding a big-screen viewing experience, the film goes down easy, with respectable performances and craftsmanship to help it along.

How is the film old-fashioned? It starts with a sequence in which a postal carrier (Christopher Schmidt) delivers mail to a group of residents who wait patiently for his visit. Everyone in the neighborhood seems to be doing nothing but waiting for the mail. One man carps about the letter carrier's delivery time, but the letter carrier smiles and carries on with his route. That route includes the Doherty home, where the man picks up letters addressed to God. They're sent from 8-year-old Tyler (Tanner Macguire), who's fighting cancer. He puts his prayers into letter form, seals them in a stamped envelope, and addresses the correspondence to the Almighty. Read More.

The Last Song, written for the screen by novelist Nicholas Sparks, is treacly, preposterous and full of clichés. It's also moving and, for the most part, family-friendly, focusing on themes of human failure and forgiveness. Sparks' story has to bend over backward to get to the message at the heart of The Last Song. He puts his characters through out-of-nowhere plot machinations and sometimes draws hokey, symbolic story parallels. But if you can stomach the moments that stretch believability, the payoff has its rewards.

Sound like a paradox? It is, although not a deeply thoughtful one. The Last Song is a film that begs to be dismissed, but which offers just enough to earn a recommendation. The more movies one has seen, and the more life one has lived, the less tolerant one might be of the forced elements in The Last Song. However, the film's target audience—pre-teen and teenage fans of pop-music star Miley Cyrus—will be less demanding and more open to the central romance in the story, while adults will connect with the compassion shown by Ronnie's parents. Read More.

The ads for Clash of the Titans suggest epic entertainment, superb special effects and the catch phrase of the year so far—"Release the Kraken!"—but there's nothing epic about Titans other than the sense of disappointment it leaves in viewers.

The film is lacking in nearly every area—story, performances and perhaps most disappointingly, special effects. Shot in 2D but then rushed into 3D after production had been completed, the conversion delivers very little. The film is so plodding and dull that viewers have plenty of time to wonder just why, exactly, they've been asked to wear dark glasses to so little effect.

The 2D-to-3D switch is driven by fantasies of box-office lucre—the filmmakers hopped onto the 3D bandwagon after seeing the way 3D ticket prices inflated box-office receipts. But the move creates a whiff of desperation. Could it be that the people behind the film realized they had a dud on their hands and then looked to 3D as a gimmick to mask the film's inability to hold viewers' attention across its nearly two-hour running time? Read More.

Considering the film's fluid, intricately crafted animation and the heartwarming quality of the story, you'd almost think that How to Train Your Dragon was Pixar's latest flick.

But it is, indeed, a DreamWorks project, and it's refreshing to see an engaging story that doesn't rely on a slew of pop culture references, childish shenanigans and lowbrow humor to entertain the kiddies (and their parents). Instead, the filmmakers wisely invested their time in creating arresting visuals (yes, even better in 3-D) and a familiar but relevant story that's updated in a fresh way (with dragons, of course).

Set on the mythical island of Berk, which is also known as "the meridian of misery," How to Train Your Dragon is a fast-paced fantasy in a world where Vikings have always been at war with their neighboring dragons. In case you didn't know exactly how dangerous dragons are, there are plenty of scenes that inevitably settle the score. When the menacing fire-breathers aren't swooping down on Berk's precious livestock, they're busy setting the residents' huts on fire.  Read More.

Once upon a time, the leading men in romantic comedies made grand, sweeping gestures to eventually win over their women … and they weren't wearing ugly flannel shirts a la Gerard Butler while doing so.

Back when dial-up was the Internet connection of choice in You've Got Mail, Joe Fox wooed Kathleen Kelly by e-mail with promises of bouquets of freshly sharpened pencils.

In Love Actually, an adorable fourth grader (with his dad's blessing) dodged airport security and risked getting arrested so he could tell the prettiest girl in school that he loved her before she flew from London to New York.

Lastly, who can forget in Say Anything when John Cusack's much-beloved Lloyd Dobler held up that clunky boom-box in a park (yeah, we're not talking a lightweight iPod here) so his sweetie could hear their song, Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes," from her bedroom window?

These days, however, getting the girl looks a little different with Butler on the scene. Officially kicking Mr. Sensitive to the curb, his character's idea of a fun night involves throwing his ex in the trunk and carting her off to jail for a cool 20k in The Bounty Hunter. Read More.

Raise your hand if you were a wimpy kid.

I was, and although a little time at the gym in recent years hasn't changed much, I feel a lot better about my wimpiness after a good workout.

Diary of Wimpy Kid, based on the books by Jeff Kinney and directed by Thor Freudenthal (Hotel for Dogs), brought back memories of the most awkward time in my life, and in any man's life: The beginning of middle school. The longtime friends you've established over the years start to grow up, look different and gravitate to new social circles. You either do the same—or get left behind. Read More.

Kristen Stewart is everywhere these days. The star has earned as many detractors as fans by playing Bella in the Twilight films—a franchise that stokes passions among its ardent followers. That high-profile role aside, Stewart has quietly been making a strong impression as an actress in lesser-seen films like Sean Penn's powerful Into the Wild and Greg Mattola's coming-of-age tale Adventureland.

If Stewart is an up-and-coming actress, William Hurt might be considered past his prime. The actor, who won a Best Actor Oscar for his role in Kiss of the Spider Woman back in 1985, followed that performance with two more Oscar-nominated roles—in Children of a Lesser God and Broadcast News—in the two subsequent years. His hot streak cooled with The Doctor in 1991—his last big starring role—but he continued to work quietly throughout the 1990s, giving mostly supporting performances. A few years ago, when it seemed the actor's best work was behind him, Hurt gave a crazed, acclaimed performance as a gangster in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, earning him another Oscar nomination.

That "comeback" role was no fluke, as proven by The Yellow Handkerchief, a small but potent story of human failing and the power of forgiveness. Although Stewart and her young male co-star Eddie Redmayne do fine with their roles in The Yellow Handkerchief, it's Hurt who walks away with the film. Read More.

The 1980s Rambo franchise brought Sylvester Stallone more fame for his portrayal of a Vietnam vet who fights mistreatment at home and rescues POWs in Asia. Film critics criticized the movies, particularly Rambo: First Blood Part II, suggesting that the films represented a fantasy in which America had a chance to refight—and this time, win—the Vietnam War.

Much of the audience who showed up en masse to see the Rambo movies were too young to remember the truth about America's involvement in Vietnam. Critics feared that core group may have been susceptible to the alternate history presented by Stallone's movies. One main criticism was that the films were too war-happy, too conservative in their vision.

Green Zone, an Iraq War drama that reteams director Paul Greengrass with star Matt Damon, falls into the same trap as Rambo did, but this time from the political left. In the film, a U.S. Army officer tasked with uncovering weapons of mass destruction in Iraq learns that his efforts will never bear fruit because of shady dealings by U.S. officials who falsified intelligence. Angry at this betrayal, he confronts his adversary, rats out the official to a journalist who discovers she's been spun by the same official, and exposes the government's actions before the war escalates. Read More.

In the first few minutes of Alice in Wonderland we learn the best people in the world are apparently "bonkers," perhaps, a fitting nod to the man behind the lens himself, Tim Burton.

Given that Burton has been the guy responsible for everything from the bizarrely lovable Edward Scissorhands to the truly demented update of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (remember Johnny Depp's blindingly white buck teeth and anything but kid-friendly demeanor?) to the grisliest of all Broadway musicals, Sweeney Todd, where men are offed during their regular haircuts and promptly used as filling for London's famed meat pies, it's not surprising that Lewis Carroll's Alice, no matter how many times it's already been adapted, would be a perfect vehicle for Burton's unconventional filmmaking.

And trust me, a little oddity in the right hands can be a good, good thing on the big screen—especially in 3D. But we'll get back to those eye-popping visuals in a moment… Read More.

One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted –
One need not be a House –
The Brain has Corridors—surpassing
Material Place –

Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting
External Ghost
Than its interior Confronting –
That Cooler Host –

Emily Dickinson's words in this poem offer severe insights into the psychological torments within the human mind—"Ourself behind Ourself." It's a theme that has been paramount in literature and art ever since: the depths, mysteries, and hidden horrors not of some external phantom, but of our internal self. Read More.

Appropriately enough, watching Valentine's Day immediately brought those ubiquitous heart-shaped boxes of chocolates to mind—you know the ones where you're never quite sure what's inside until you take a bite.

In any given box there's probably only two or three really good pieces of candy, (unless we're talking Godiva, of course) but to get there, you've got to chew your way through coconut, that mysterious, raspberry-ish substance and plenty of nuts and nougat for that delicious chocolate payoff. And so goes the story of Valentine's Day, a star-studded rom-com with a couple of decent scenes surrounded by the cinematic equivalent of marshmallow cream.  Read More.

At first blush, it's probably tempting to simply dismiss Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief as a poor man's Harry Potter. 

After all, the three protagonists are a destined-for-greatness guy, a whip-smart, know-it-all girl and a goofy, loyal sidekick just like Harry, Hermione and of course, Ron Weasley. But aside from the obvious (like director Chris Columbus' involvement, the man behind the lens of the first two Harry Potter films and Home Alone), the story, which is based on the first of author Rick Riordan's best-selling books for kids, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, definitely has its own action-adventure thing going on.  Read More.

If you've read any of Nicholas Sparks' tear-jerking novels or watched the equally swoony, big-screen renditions of The Notebook, Nights in Rodanthe or Message in a Bottle, you've already got a pretty good idea of what to expect with Dear John.

Yes, once again, boy meets girl on the Carolina coastline (this time, it's South Carolina rather than North Carolina, so I guess that's a slight change from the norm), and before anyone gets too comfortable, there's a slew of handicaps and hardships blocking the couple's road to lifelong happiness. Read More.

In Extraordinary Measures, a medical drama about a race to develop a life-saving drug, Dr. Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford) conducts lab research while blasting Classic Rock. It's Led Zeppelin and The Band, turned up to top volume—music that's several decades old but still projects energy. A crabby perfectionist, Stonehill doesn't care that the blaring music upsets his fellow doctors. It's what keeps him moving toward his professional goals.

By the end of the film, the Classic Rock has been replaced by Eric Clapton's "Change the World," one of the artist's big Adult Contemporary hits of the 1990s that helped redefine the guitar king as an Adult Contemporary soft-rocker. Read More.

If When in Rome was the proverbial cream of the romantic comedy crop, Kristen Bell's character Beth would've likely been played by Reese Witherspoon, Sandra Bullock or Anne Hathaway (if they wanted someone a bit younger). And standing in for the eventual love of her life, Nick, instead of Josh Duhamel? Well, Hugh Grant, Matthew McConaughey or Bradley Cooper, of course.

But since all of the aforementioned have paid their rom-com dues lately (or will in the forthcoming Valentine's Day, which stars about, oh, half of Hollywood), we've got two stars best known for their television work on the now-defunct series Veronica Mars and Las Vegas, instead. Read More.

If you think the sight of a beefy bruiser like The Rock (a.k.a. Dwayne Johnson) in a pink tutu and oversized sparkly wings is funny, well, The Tooth Fairy is definitely the movie for you. After all, the screenwriters get a lot of mileage out of seeing the former wrestler play a has-been hockey star forced to reveal his softer, fairy side.

Nicknamed "the tooth fairy" because of how hard he hits his opponents, (yeah, as you probably guessed, plenty of them lose their precious chompers in the process), Derek Thompson (Johnson) is a former NHL star who's been relegated to the minor leagues because of a bum shoulder and actually hasn't scored a goal in years. Read More.

If you're a serious evangelical filmmaker, there's one response to your work you absolutely do not want to hear: For a Christian movie, that was pretty good. Yet when it comes to the more impressive motion pictures produced by churches and ministries, this backhanded compliment remains the most ubiquitous—and often, the most deserved. Thankfully, To Save a Life merits big picture comparisons.

Limited financial resources aside, the biggest hurdle for talented directors is making a faith-fueled film that's believable. Even if you manage to obtain a truly gifted cast and crew and have a great screenplay in hand, how do you create an utterly convincing portrayal of our fallen world without offending evangelical sensitivities?  (To dismiss this concern undermines funding from Christian investors and threatens your core audience.) More than thirty years after groundbreaking films such as The Hiding Place (portraying the Nazi persecution of Jews), The Cross and the Switchblade (gang activity and profanity) and Born Again (salty-tongued Christians and prison life), and twenty years after Billy Graham's Caught landed its PG-13 rating for explicit drug use, legalism and fear continue to handicap Christian market films. Read More.

The Lovely Bones left me torn. On the one hand, it was an astonishingly creative and beautiful film, filled with the sort of deeply imaginative imagery that makes you want to leap from your seat in applause. But on the other, the film suffers from a conspicuous case of style over substance. While it is a message film—and a good one at that—the message is not prominent, and the conclusion needlessly timid. But it is something the film has no control over that impairs it the most—a philosophical aversion to bend to the rapacious human appetite for vengeance.

The main character, 14-year-old Susie Salmon (a terrific Saoirse Ronan), is murdered only minutes into the film. The setting is 1973 in the Philadelphia suburb of Norristown, where Susie is a typical teenager, especially her feelings for a schoolboy with whom she plans on sharing her first kiss. But it is a kiss she is never to have in life. Taking a shortcut through a cornfield after school one day, she encounters her neighbor, George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), who convinces Susie to enter an underground den that he says he's built for the local kids. But once inside, Harvey he rapes her, cuts her throat, and dismembers her body. (Thankfully, this horrific event occurs offscreen.) Read More.

Ever seen Kindergarten Cop? How about The Pacifier, Daddy Day Care or Are We There Yet?

Basically, if you answer yes to any of these, well, then you can safely skip The Spy Next Door—or at least wait for the DVD—because it's essentially the same pseudo family-friendly movie, only far, far less entertaining.

And truth be told, that's really saying something considering the aforementioned comedies starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, Vin Diesel, Eddie Murphy and Ice Cube—actors who haven't exactly shined the brightest when playing the put-upon caretakers to cute and cuddly kids.

However, since Jackie Chan isn't nearly as spry as he once was (give him a break, he is inching toward 56), he's probably looking to diversify his acting resumé. But with a script seriously devoid of laughs and a been-there-seen-that sensibility to boot, The Spy Next Door isn't exactly a step in the right direction. In fact, it's the second-rate fluff that's usually pushed straight to DVD, hence the January release date (the month in the movie biz typically reserved for all the post-Christmas stinkers). Read More.

The Book of Eli continues Hollywood's obsession with post-apocalyptic tales, and in many ways feels like it belongs in the same world as The Road with its ash-laden wastelands and crazed cannibals roaming about. But the comparisons end there. Where The Road is a thoughtful art film based on a Pulitzer prize-winning novel, Eli is more of a popcorn action flick influenced by the visual style of graphic novels, although it's more thought-provoking and less of an adrenaline rush than the Mad Max movies. Read More.

Ever since Alvin and his brothers debuted in 1958, movie, TV, and music producers have been able to count on the money-making combination of precocious animated rodents, kid-friendly plot lines and, most importantly, chart-topping pop music delivered in those trademark chipmunk vocals. The latest installment in the adventure is Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, the follow-up to 2007's hugely successful live-action/animation offering. To parents, the film is likely to feel like an innocuous but somewhat lazy cash grab, but kids (especially younger ones) will laugh and thrill on cue to the munks' latest exploits.

This story begins where the previous film ends; Alvin, Theodore, and Simon are world-touring mega-pop stars in the tender but exasperated care of their adoptive father Dave (Jason Lee). When Alvin's on-stage shenanigans land Dave in a Paris hospital, Dave decides his young charges need some regular life to combat their growing rock star egos. He sends them home for a dose of normalcy, complete with enrollment at the local high school. Of course, three tiny woodland creatures attempting to study, socialize, play dodge ball, and negotiate hallways with hundreds of full-sized (and heavy-footed) teenagers is anything but "normal." But this film, like the last one, wrings a lot of humor and charm from the idea that these three talented chipmunks are both an extraordinary novelty and also, psychologically, a lot like you and me (or our misbehaving children). Read More.

In what's basically a remake of Frank Capra's It Happened One Night set in the always-photogenic Irish countryside, Amy Adams (Julie & Julia, Enchanted) and Matthew Goode (Watchmen, Match Point) do manage some winsome chemistry a la Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in Leap Year.

Truth be told, there is something refreshingly old-fashioned about the movie, right down to the lack of the usual profanity and lowbrow sexual innuendos that litter so many of today's rom-coms. Instead, the screenwriters Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont (Made of Honor, Surviving Christmas) wisely focus on the witty verbal sparring between two people who can barely tolerate each other, but you know will end up falling in love by the time the credits roll. Read More.

There's only one thing you can be sure of after leaving The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and it's this: Tom Waits makes an excellent devil.

The wild, wooly, fanciful tale takes place somewhere between the glorious imagination of Doctor Parnassus—which can be strangely manipulated by the entrant's own imagination—and the dingy, crass modern London underbelly. Perhaps most notable as Heath Ledger's final film (he died in New York in January 2008 following the first round of shooting), Imaginarium manages, impressively, to seamlessly blend Ledger's performance with the three actors who stepped in to finish the role: Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell. If Ledger's ghost didn't hang so heavily over the film, you probably would never know that Gilliam didn't plan it that way, which may simply be a testament to his frenzied imagination. Read More.

In a year of popular franchise extensions (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) and reboots (Star Trek), who would have thought that the most satisfying entertainment of the lot would be a reinvention of Sherlock Holmes?

Popularized on film decades ago by Basil Rathbone and brought briefly back to the screen in the mid-1980s courtesy of producer Steven Spielberg and director Barry Levinson (The Young Sherlock Holmes), the cerebral detective wouldn't seem to have much of a niche to carve out among today's spectacle-driven audience, dominated by teens who have, at best, read one or two Holmes stories as part of their English classes. Read More.

If you haven't heard anything about Avatar, you soon will. The epic sci-fi blockbuster-to-be from writer-director James Cameron arrives after years of development—Cameron conceived the story in the early 1990s—hundreds of millions of dollars spent, and great anticipation from Cameron's fans, as well as from the movie industry itself.

Although movie theaters are seeing an uptick in box-office receipts during another year of a recessionary economy in North America, they also are facing new technologies and delivery mechanisms that potentially threaten their business. The advance of motion-capture and 3D technologies has given a recent lift to the industry, but those technologies have continued to bump up against certain limits in telling absorbing stories on the big screen. A palpable fear is that younger generations will turn to video games and other sources of entertainment that delivery sensory experiences that moviegoing can't match? Read More.

There's nothing like the holidays to remind everyone about what's really important in life. But sometimes the delivery of what's ultimately a valuable message about the importance of family simply gets lost in translation, which is exactly what happens in the ho-hum dramedy Everybody's Fine. 

Better suited for a Hallmark Channel holiday TV special than the big screen, despite an engaging, nuanced performance from Robert De Niro as Frank Goode, the dad who's trying to make amends for his previous absence in his kids' lives, Everybody's Fine inevitably suffers from a lack of real emotional gravitas. Read More.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

This is the final stanza of "Invictus," written by Victorian poet William Ernest Henley after having his tubercular foot amputated. The word invictus is Latin for "unconquered," and in this poem Henley defies the difficult circumstances of his life to conquer him.

A century later, inside a South African prison, Nelson Mandela would take consolation from this poem. And so, from director Clint Eastwood, we get the film Invictus, which tells the story of how Mandela (Morgan Freeman) used the 1995 Rugby World Cup to unite and inspire a post-apartheid South Africa. Mandela was coming off 27 years of imprisonment for his activism against apartheid, having been released in 1990 and then, in 1994, through South Africa's first-ever multi-racial democratic elections, elected as president. It was the end, at last, of apartheid. Read More.

When a movie isn't screened for critics, it's often a sure sign that it stinks—but there are occasional exceptions. Case in point: Armored. There's no good reason why this little action drama should've been kept from critics. It's certainly nothing to rush out and see in the theaters, but it's at least worth a rental or televised viewing.

Like 1992's Trespass took inspiration from 1948's The Treasure of Sierra Madre, this movie similarly plays like a modern, urbanized western. Imagine a gang of bandits planning to steal from the stagecoach they're sworn to protect. But when it's time for the big heist, one of them decides he's into more than he bargained for. When he tries to do the right thing, the others turn against him. But with Armored, we're talking about security guards and armored trucks rather than cowboys and stagecoaches. Read More.

In what's not exactly a ringing endorsement for a tasteful family comedy, the movie trailer for Old Dogs boasts that it's brought to you by the director of Wild Hogs.

While it's safe to say that Walt Becker doesn't dig quite so deep in the slop bucket for his low-brow giggles, (it is rated PG, after all) Old Dogs could've used a few new tricks, namely a stronger, less-schmaltzy script, a more convincing friendship between our protagonists played by John Travolta and Robin Williams respectively, and well, a few more laughs that don't involve bodily functions. Or a perpetually cross-eyed character who constantly runs into things and inevitably frightens small children (even more shocking is that it's Rita Wilson who signed on for that unfortunate cameo). Read More.

This adaptation of a Michael Lewis book (The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game) tells the true story Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), a gentle hulk of a boy who, through some string-pulling by concerned relatives, gains admission to the same Christian school the Tuohy children attend in Memphis. His IQ of 80 and grade point average of 0.6 present obvious challenges for his teachers and his unwillingness to do any homework is jeopardizing his future at the school. Read More.

With a strikingly different tone than its swoony, spooky counterpart Twilight, New Moon actually answers the age-old question that most romantic comedy scripts never have the opportunity to:  What happens after the girl actually lands the man—or in this case, vampire—of her dreams?

Turns out, for Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), it's not exactly the happily-ever-after ending that she was probably hoping for. On the eve of turning 18, she's smack dab in the middle of a quarter-life crisis that's unfortunately arrived seven years too early. See, this is the first time she's going to be older than her forever young beau, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). And considering how sparkly and beautiful he is in the sunlight, not to mention easy on the eyes when it's dark, she isn't sure he's still going to love her when she's old and wrinkly. Read More.

Adapted from Jodi Picoult's 2004 novel, My Sister's Keeper is the story of the Fitzpatricks, a family defined and consumed by the leukemia that has plagued teenager Kate since the age of two. Sara, Kate's mom, has devoted her life to saving her child, giving up her career as a lawyer early on in the process.  Brian, Kate's firefighter dad, is a strong and loving presence, despite the fact that he is often rendered speechless by his own emotion and the force of his wife's fierce determination. Evan, Kate's older brother, is lost and aimless, often overlooked in the ongoing crisis management that demands his family's focus. And Anna, Kate's younger sister, is an 11-year-old kid resigned to needles and operations and the knowledge that she was deliberately engineered to be an ideal donor match for her sick sibling. Read More.

A favorite sci-fi franchise is reborn with Star Trek, director J.J. Abrams' take on the early days of James T. Kirk, Spock and the other well-known crew members aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise. The film's fresh approach to the well-worn franchise takes viewers back to the origins of the crew's beloved characters. By starting the franchise again, Abrams has brought a freshness to Trek and has launched a memorable young cast into a series that may come to define their careers the way that the same roles defined the careers of predecessors William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. Read More.

Roland Emmerich or Michael Bay: Who is Hollywood's true reigning King of Schlock?

In the mid-1990s, Emmerich threw down the gauntlet with the planetary disaster–action spectacle Independence Day, in its day a ranking contender for most the staggeringly overproduced B-movie to date. Two years later, Bay arguably upped the ante with the similarly overproduced planetary disaster–action spectacle Armageddon.

Emmerich's next film was the Civil War cartoon The Patriot, followed a year later by Bay's WWII cartoon Pearl Harbor. After that, both Emmerich and Bay took stabs at dystopian near futures with The Day After Tomorrow and The Island, respectively. Read More.

While I'm a big fan of movie trailers that manage to save a few of the really good scenes for the actual movie, I couldn't help but feel a bit hoodwinked when watching the first 15 minutes of Up.

Much like the trailer for Marley & Me, which was all golden retriever cuteness sprinkled in with doggie hijinks without any indication of the sadness waiting in the wings, (guess I should've read the book first, after all), there's so much more to Up than the brightly colored balloons and sassy barbs traded between an over-eager boy scout and a really grumpy old man.

In fact, I dare you not to shed a tear (or many, in my case) as the highlights and sorrows of Carl Fredricksen's (a superb Edward Asner) life play out in the film's first few minutes. Like they did so marvelously in last year's Wall·E, the Pixar folks certainly know how to evoke emotion without using any words at all. And through this thoughtful montage, the audience gets a very telling glimpse of how Carl became the crusty curmudgeon he is today. Read More.

No doubt about it, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is a timeless story with plenty of relevance, particularly in light of our nation's still-fragile economic situation where many people have been forced to reevaluate what's really important in life. 

And for those who haven't had to give that reality much thought, well, a plea for soul-searching and generosity always gets a better response at Christmas, right? Hence the power of the story of Scrooge and his eventual transformation from miserly curmudgeon to a caring member of the community…

But considering that the familiar tale has even made its way into a Matthew McConaughey rom-com this year, namely Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, there needed to be something, anything that made A Christmas Carol worth revisiting yet again—classic or not—because it's really all been done before. Read More.

Just in case you've ever wondered what it's like to watch someone else play videogames for two and a half hours, sitting through Transformers:  Revenge of the Fallen will definitely satiate your curiosity. And yes, it's just as boring and uninspiring as you probably imagined.

Proving yet again that less is definitely more, especially when it comes to seemingly endless sequences of CGI stunts, Revenge of the Fallen is everything most ill-conceived sequels are:  bigger, considerably longer and much, much louder than its predecessor. Coincidentally, that's a pretty convenient starting point for tackling the flick's myriad of weaknesses. Read More.

Since I became an uncle, I've come to regard the makers of Thomas and Friends and Cars as business geniuses. They know a captive market when they see one. I've seen firsthand the very powerful draw that trains, cars, and trucks have on little boys. It's absolutely amazing.

But trains and trucks weren't my thing as a kid. I was drawn to something else entirely: Dinosaurs. So, when Ice Age came out, I thought the franchise kind of shot itself in the foot by starting out with the extinction of these big draws—despite the fun it had with saber-toothed tigers and wooly mammoths. Read More.

Considering Michael Jackson's unexpected death was only two weeks before his big comeback tour was slated to premiere at London's O2 Arena on July 8, I'm sure that plenty of This Is It ticket-buyers will automatically assume the roles of amateur psychologists and detectives, you know, basically looking for any clues to what may have caused his untimely demise. Read More.

As versed as I am in cartoons, comics, and superhero lore, the character of Astro Boy has managed to fly under my radar all these years. I'm not alone: despite becoming a hot commodity in Japan and the rest of the world, Astro Boy never gained much of a following in America—and after watching some of the lame old episodes from the '60s and '80s, I can see why. (The original cartoon pioneered kitschy Japanese anime, but it's all still substandard and juvenile, whether we're talking the '60s, '80s, or '90s.) Read More.

Clocking in at a mere 339 words, Maurice Sendak's beloved children's book Where the Wild Things Are easily proves the "less is more" adage that a truly powerful story can be told without going on and on and on.

When that aforementioned book, classic or not, is optioned for big-screen treatment, well, it's going to take a substantial effort, namely a smart screenplay, to make a truly memorable transition.

I'm guessing this is something that director Spike Jonze (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) anticipated, too, so with Sendak's blessing, Jonze eventually recruited acclaimed novelist Dave Eggers, who co-wrote Away We Go, another sparse indie pic that also frequently favored style over story development. Read More.

It's a sign of the times that the May-December relationship at the center of An Education is unique. Why unique? Because May is the woman and December is the man. How romantically retro and almost refreshing in this age of cougarism. Of course, we have to flash back to 1961 in a London suburb to find this bit of rom-dram history. But it's a mostly delightful walk down memory lane. Read More.

I know, I know, it's tempting to simply dismiss Drew Barrymore's directorial debut as Juno on roller skates. After all, Whip It does feature Ellen Page as the slightly offbeat protagonist who doesn't exactly fit in her small hometown of Bodeen, Texas.

But unlike Page's turn as the pregnant teen with a whip-smart quip for, well, everything in Juno, her latest character, Bliss Cavendar, definitely has more in common with the girl next door—even if she does end up moonlighting as Babe Ruthless on the local roller derby circuit. Read More.

The new documentary More Than a Game is a cousin to Hoop Dreams. It tells the story of NBA superstar LeBron James's high school basketball team in Akron, Ohio, and their quest to win a national championship. The film's six main characters are: LeBron; teammates Dru Joyce III, Sian Cotton, Willie McGee, and Romeo Travis; and their coach, Dru Joyce II. (Read our interview with Coach Joyce here.) Read More.

Every now and then, two or three movies will hit upon the same idea at the same time—and right now, the hot topic du jour seems to be remote-controlled bodies. A few weeks ago, we saw humans controlling fellow humans in Gamer, and a few months from now, we will see humans controlling extra-terrestrial hybrids in James Cameron's Avatar. But for now, we have Surrogates, a futuristic sci-fi flick in which something like a billion humans—including nearly all Americans—conduct their affairs through robot duplicates of themselves. Read More.

With the recent popularity of High School Musical and TV programs such as American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, and Glee, it comes as no surprise that Hollywood would attempt to revitalize Fame. The 1980 original is an Oscar-winning classic that birthed a franchise: a popular TV show, hit singles, albums, a tour, a musical, and other forms of merchandising. Unfortunately, the film itself has aged poorly over the last three decades. Read More.

On a boat to Italy, where he would soon die at the young age of 25, English poet John Keats inscribed a sonnet in his traveling companion's copy of Shakespeare's Poems. It was a poem about love he had left behind in England. The sonnet's first line, "Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art," refers to Keats' beloved Fanny Brawne, and it's also the inspiration for a stunning new film about their star-crossed romance. Read More.

What's the last family film you can think of that name-checked Nikola Tesla and Alexander Graham Bell? When in movie history has the girl ever revealed her true self and become more attractive to the hero by putting on spectacles and pulling back her hair? Read More.

Say you're a hotshot investigative journalist, a rising star in a Shreveport, Louisiana television newsroom, but due to budgetary restraints you've been relegated to covering soft stories—dog obstacle course races and coffee taste tests. But you've been watching, and you have a hunch that the District Attorney, who is running for governor, is dirty. Something just doesn't check out about the guy. He's too smooth.  His history seems implausible. Every one of his cases seems to be won with DNA evidence. But you're dating one of his underlings. Read More.

I first saw Shane Acker's Oscar-nominated short film on which 9 is based at the Telluride Film Festival nearly five years ago. It was intriguing: dark yet captivating, dynamic yet baffling, oddly familiar yet undeniably surreal. The short always felt like part of a much larger whole, so it is no surprise that when visionary director Tim Burton ( Edward Scissorhands, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory) saw the film, he, together with Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted, Nightwatch), encouraged Acker to develop it into a feature-length film. Read More.

A couple years ago when the presidential race was heating up and immigration reform was again a hot-button issue, we heard many statistics, facts, and proposals about immigration in America. At the time I was volunteering with an English as a Second Language class for immigrants and refugees, so I had a heightened awareness of all these discussions. This wasn't just an issue for me, this was daily life for Jose and Fatima and Dula. I was frustrated that stories such as theirs—the real people and faces and realities of immigration—weren't also a part of our collective conversations. Read More.

The Cove is many things—a work of political activism, a piece of investigative journalism, even a sort of real-life espionage thriller—but at its heart, it is a story of one man's efforts to atone for his role in an enterprise that he has come to see as incredibly harmful, even abusive. That man is Ric O'Barry, who got his start as one of the dolphin trainers on the 1960s TV show Flipper and now campaigns to liberate dolphins from captivity all over the world. As O'Barry tells it, Flipper played a huge part in stimulating the domesticated dolphin industry—but it was his experience working up-close with the water-bound mammals that led him to believe it was wrong to turn such animals into slaves for our entertainment. Read More.

Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda started out making documentaries, then moved into narrative films, for which he has been highly praised. He commonly explores death, shame, and memory—themes that are embedded into the fabric of Japanese society—and though his early work is sometimes rendered stilted by its detached approach, he has lately warmed to his audiences, inviting them into his stories. Read More.

There are, in general, two kinds of Robert Rodriguez films. First there are the rather pulpy and sometimes nihilistic films for grown-ups, full of R-rated sex and violence: films like From Dusk Till Dawn, Sin City and Planet Terror. And then there are the kids' movies, full of imagination and bizarre plot twists that feel like the sort of thing a child might have made up if he or she were improvising a story for their friends: films like Spy Kids and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lava Girl. Read More.

Ryden Malby seems like every employer's dream candidate: pretty, funny, driven, smart, and down-to-earth—an obsessive lover of books but also personable and willing to work. Her whole life, she's studied and worked hard toward college graduation and a job at the most prestigious publishing house in Los Angeles, but things aren't working out the way she expected. She moves home to keep job-hunting, but between her eccentric family and a dismal series of interviews, her only lifeline to sanity is her best friend Adam. That is, until she meets the sexy Brazilian infomercial director living across the street. Read More.

It Might Get Loud is a documentary about a musical instrument: the electric guitar. It's a film about how electric guitars are made, how they are used to make sound, and how their users interpret them philosophically. But really it's a film about electric guitarists—those artists who paint jagged, reverb-laden sonic landscapes with their 6-string brushes, pedals and amps. It's a film about how we use tools like guitars to make beautiful and unexpected things like music, and how sometimes that music brings us together as a culture and launches us in the direction of the transcendent. Read More.

In the films of Hayao Miyazaki, children often see things that the adults around them miss completely. It's not that Miyazaki's grown-ups have impaired vision, and it's certainly not that they're dim. It's just that they can sometimes be so caught up in the hustle and bustle of busy, everyday life that they forget how to really look. Read More.

Though G.I. Joe started out as a Ken-sized action doll in the '60s and '70s—"with kung fu grip!"—the name became increasingly and enduringly popular in the '80s after its reinvention through toys, comics, and cartoons. Since then, millions of boys (self included) spent their childhood geeking out over the super-team of military specialists and their extensive array of space-age hardware devoted to fight against the world terrorist organization known as Cobra. Read More.

Two women. Fifty-three years in time and an ocean apart. Both recently relocated for their husband's jobs. Both looking for their own role in this new location. Both feeling rather lost. Read More.

Aliens in the Attic is one of those titles that pretty much sums up the entire movie. It's not some sort of pun or metaphor or literary allusion. This is a film about aliens that invade an attic of a house and wage war (in a not-so-scary way) against the family residing below. It's a straightforward film geared toward third-graders, a movie with nothing on its mind but some good old-fashioned "let's shoot paintballs at the bad guys!" kid power.  There's nothing in here for adults to enjoy, but plenty of hijinks and hilarity for anyone born in the 21st century. Read More.

This has been a surprising summer for a number of reasons, one of which is how dreadfully dull most of the big popcorn films have been. Read More.

Summer Finn, a narrator tells us, is an average woman in many ways—like height and weight, though slightly above average shoe size. Yet something about her arrests men's attention. She gets an average of 18.4 double takes per day. This is, we are told, "the Summer Effect." Read More.

If my friends and family are any indication—and the legions of Hogwarts fans online tell me that they are—the latest Harry Potter movie is being greeted with a great amount of anticipation. My sister-in-law planned to dress up as an Inferius and drive three hours to join friends at a midnight opening. And at least two other groups of friends have been holding ad hoc Harry Potter movie festivals over the last couple of weeks, watching the first five movies in the series in preparation for the sixth—Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Read More...

There's nothing wrong with G-Force that John Lasseter couldn't fix.

For that matter, the Pixar honcho, now head of Walt Disney Animation Studios, has already done this story right: It was called Bolt, and it was the first theatrical release from Disney Animation under Lasseter's watch (he also produced). If you missed Bolt in theaters last fall, it's well worth catching on DVD—particularly as a counterpoint to G-Force, which is pretty much the film that Bolt could have been if it were Disney as usual … which, thanks at least in part to Lasseter's absence, it wasn't.  CLICK FOR MORE INFO.

Ever since Francis Ford Coppola abdicated the rights in 1974 after The Godfather II, no one has mastered the crime epic better than Michael Mann. Mann's Heat (1995) is, in my opinion, flawless. It's inevitable that his latest film, Public Enemies, will be compared to that masterpiece and it is not an unfair comparison. Indeed, Mann seems to invite the association, making it impossible to ignore. Public Enemies is Heat with fedoras, a gangster epic that is easily the best and most rewarding thing the director has done in more than a decade, an intensely visceral tour-de-force. In a summer season tailor made for teenagers, Mann has come out with something perfect for adults. Read more.

Since I became an uncle, I've come to regard the makers of Thomas and Friends and Cars as business geniuses. They know a captive market when they see one. I've seen firsthand the very powerful draw that trains, cars, and trucks have on little boys. It's absolutely amazing. Read more.

Adapted from Jodi Picoult's 2004 novel, My Sister's Keeper is the story of the Fitzpatricks, a family defined and consumed by the leukemia that has plagued teenager Kate since the age of two. Sara, Kate's mom, has devoted her life to saving her child, giving up her career as a lawyer early on in the process.  Brian, Kate's firefighter dad, is a strong and loving presence, despite the fact that he is often rendered speechless by his own emotion and the force of his wife's fierce determination. Evan, Kate's older brother, is lost and aimless, often overlooked in the ongoing crisis management that demands his family's focus. And Anna, Kate's younger sister, is an 11-year-old kid resigned to needles and operations and the knowledge that she was deliberately engineered to be an ideal donor match for her sick sibling. Read more.

What do you do in the face of injustice toward another? Do you immediately look away, not wanting to see or hear because it's too uncomfortable? Do you observe the injustice, silently thank God it's not impacting you, then proceed as usual? Do you speak out against the wrongdoing? Do you fight the injustice lawfully? Unlawfully? Read more.

"All men are strange," breathes Léa de Lonval, the famed courtesan played by Michelle Pfeiffer in Chéri, the latest film by director Stephen Frears (The Queen, Dangerous Liaisons). She would know, because courtesan is just a fancy word for prostitute. Read more.

Whether you think it's a good thing or not, know this: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a faithful extension and escalation of director Michael Bay's first film in the franchise. In fact, it's practically the same movie—but supersized. Everything is turned up to eleven—the good and the bad. Read more.

It had to happen eventually. It has been five years since The Passion of the Christ brought the Bible epic back to the big screen, and nearly four since Judd Apatow began producing and directing a string of raunchy comedies—a few of which, such as the musical pseudo-biopic Walk Hard, have dabbled explicitly in genre parody. It was only a matter of time before Apatow or someone like him turned their attention to the religious epic, and the result is Year One, a buddy comedy that takes a relentlessly lowbrow look at the Book of Genesis. Read more.

Contrived is almost too soft a word for the premise of The Proposal, Sandra Bullock's latest romantic comedy offering, yet the fresh dialogue, gorgeous scenery, and ultimately winsome love story make this one of the most appealing romances to come down the pike in recent years. Bullock plays Margaret Tate, a hard-as-nails book editor in the vein of Meryl Streep's iconic Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada. She's so loathed and feared that her employees send out frantic instant messages warning of her impending arrival in the office. "The witch is on her broom." But unlike Anne Hathaway's bumbling, lost Andie from Prada, Margaret's assistant is skillful, competent, ambitious Andrew Paxton. As played by Ryan Reynolds, Drew has confidence to spare and has managed to stay a step ahead of Margaret's wrath for three years.

Read more.

There's an ambitious modesty to Duncan Jones's debut film Moon, a smart, existential science-fiction drama with one onscreen actor that runs 97 minutes and goes nowhere more exotic than our planet's natural satellite. The setting itself recalls the era of the Apollo project, that remarkable period during which, over a three-year span of time between 1969 and 1972, a dozen Americans walked on the moon. Not coincidentally, at least as regards Moon's milieu, it's also the era of philosophically serious science-fiction films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running and Solaris, the influence of which is consciously at work in Moon. There is also a connection to Blade Runner (though not in terms of mood, structure or look). Read more.

A movie is like a parade: before you see the fullness of the procession's pomp and circumstance, you see forerunners—standard bearers—that serve as heralds and hint at what is to come. And before you see a movie, you see and hear things that frame your expectations, so you'll know what about the movie is of primary importance, and why someone should want to see it. The advance banner may well be the plot, but it could also be the cast, especially if the actors have had recent personal troubles. It might be the famous director, or the scale of its special effects. Read more.

Every day, the New York City subways carry over 4.3 million people around town. It's a more or less efficient system, depending on time of day, the weather, the state of the tracks and the train, and whether the passengers comply with the rules. Trains are delayed for logistical reasons, signal malfunctions, investigations in stations, and various other reasons. I ride the subway nearly every day, and have for the last four years. Read more.

Sometimes when I'm at a movie screening, I feel like a spy. This is especially true when I'm screening a children's movie, trying to hide behind my bucket of popcorn and hoping no one notices that a) I'm not eight years old and b) I'm scribbling notes. Of course I'm supposed to be there. The movie's publicist has even saved a seat for me. But at kids' movies, by the first time the five-year-old behind me squeals with delight at a gag that barely registered on my laugh-o-meter, I've figured out that I'm clearly not the target audience—and I start paying attention not just to the screen, but also to my fellow critics. And don't let those cherubic faces fool you. Elementary schoolers are a tough crowd. Read more.

My Life in Ruins comes billed as "from the star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding," but it could just as truthfully be billed as "from the director of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days." Both are romantic comedies from about six years ago, and if Greek Wedding put Nia Vardalos on the map with the same basic schtick she reprises in My Life in Ruins, the new film's randy humor is closer in spirit to director Donald Petrie's How to Lose a Guy than to the tame PG Greek Wedding. Read more.

It's not as if the public was clamoring for a remake of Land of the Lost. Young and old generally remain ignorant of the short-lived Saturday morning television program from the mid-'70s with campy dialogue and Z-grade special effects. As for the forty-somethings that actually remember it from their childhood, they typically regard it with nostalgia or embarrassment (if not both). I caught a few episodes during a recent TV marathon—to call Land of the Lost cheesy is an insult to cheese. Read more.

The Terminator movies—especially the first two—have stood out in the action genre for their ability to engineer compelling human drama into the captivating action. I'll admit it: I still tear up at the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day when Arnold gives a scorched thumbs-up sign to his friend John Connor as he sacrifices himself for humanity. Read more.

The best set piece in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian is probably Larry Daley's wild flight through the National Air and Space Museum riding the original Wright Flyer with an animated waxwork Amelia Earhart.

At least, it's the one time in the film—in either film, really—that I felt a connection to Larry. If I ever met him now, I would say, "Dude. Speaking of crazy goings-on in the Air and Space Museum, let me tell you about the time my wife and kids and I climbed out of their elevator escape hatch and up the shaft after being trapped between floors for two-thirds of an hour. Me with a baby on my back, too." We would totally bond. Read More.

It may have been boring and heretical, but the film version of The Da Vinci Code was also one of the biggest international hits of all time when it came out three years ago—bigger than The Passion of The Christ, bigger than the Narnia movies, bigger even than at least one of the Star Wars movies. So it was pretty much inevitable that Tom Hanks and director Ron Howard would reunite for an adaptation of the other Dan Brown novel that features Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon. (A third novel is now due to come out later this year.) Read more.

The Brothers Bloom is a joyful little movie that glories in the art of storytelling. It's a film that makes very clear that it is a fiction—a spectacularly embellished, bedazzled fiction with little recourse to reality but a huge debt to other stories, other movies, and other myths. Like his first feature, Brick, writer/director Rian Johnson's sophomore effort is a highly stylized, heady film that is deeply influenced by cinematic history and genre storytelling. But whereas Brick was a fast-talking film noir drama set in a contemporary suburban Los Angeles high school, The Brothers Bloom is a lavish caper film that mixes conventions of everything from James Bond to Ocean's 11, all with a stylistic flair and quirky optimism that evokes Wes Anderson. Appropriate given its self-reflexive palette, the film's thematic center is the idea that life and narrative are one and the same—that we are all living out our own stories. We are spinning our own narratives. "There's no such thing as an unwritten life," says one character. "Only a badly written one." Read more.

Steve Zahn has played a panoply of doofus-y sidekicks in his career. He has a knack for it. And despite the fact that he's playing a romantic lead opposite Jennifer Aniston his latest flick, his character, Mike, appears to be pro forma Zahn character at first blush. But don't be deceived. Remember Rescue Dawn. By the end of Management, Mike has evolved from a man-child to a man capable of taking care of a child. And Zahn has shown the range and nuance that might just make him one of the most talented actors working in film today. Dude. Read more.

How odd is Odd? When we meet Odd Horten, he is driving the Oslo-Bergen express train through a blue-white snowy landscape. (This opening-credits sequence is gorgeous: each dive into a tunnel, each returning plunge through a circle of searing white, is a cinematic marvel.) But a young railroad employee catching a ride up front with Odd finds that it's very hard to draw him into conversation. Questions and comments get monosyllabic replies, if any. Why is that? Read more.

The trailers say this isn't your father's Star Trek, but they could just as easily have said this isn't your grandfather's Star Trek. The series really is that old: it has been 45 years since Gene Roddenberry produced the first of two pilot episodes for the original TV show, and as James Bond could tell you, that's a long time to let a franchise run without taking things back to square one and giving yourself a fresh start. So now, here comes the reboot: directed by J.J. Abrams (producer of Lost and Cloverfield) from a script by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (the Transformers movies), the new Star Trek is a hotter, sexier, flashier, more youth-oriented version of the sci-fi series than we have ever seen before. But it doesn't completely sever its ties with the original series—indeed, it puts those ties front-and-center—and the result is a movie that may leave Trek fans feeling deeply ambivalent. Read More.

As the finale of a trilogy, X-Men: The Last Stand was disappointing. It concluded by removing the natural superpowers of two key characters, killing off two other beloved heroes, and apparently killing, then inexplicably resurrecting, another central character—an odd ending considering all of them survive in the comics with powers intact. Read More.

Watching Battle for Terra, the latest computer-animated 3D offering, is little like stepping into a breathtaking cathedral in a strange city and finding a church play going on in the middle of it. The drama may be competently done, but it's the least interesting thing in the room. You keep looking past the action, stealing glances to one side or the other, absorbed in the splendor of the setting. Earnest as the players are, the moralizing story draws you in only fitfully, and most of the time you'd rather steal away and just wander aimlessly from one corner to another, taking it all in. Read More.

When we first meet Kate (Kelly Macdonald), she is nursing a lavender shiner. It doesn't take us long to figure out that her abusive husband (Bobby Cannavale) is responsible, a cop sworn to serve and protect but who instead takes out his frustrations on his wife's face. Kate flees home and heads to Chicago to start a new life. While leaving work one night, she happens to glance up at the falling snow and catches sight of a man standing on the ledge of a building across the street, poised to jump. Luckily, Kate's scream scares him off the roof, an act her co-worker deems nothing less than a "Christmas miracle." Read More.

The Limits of Control is a film about subjective meaning. Its title comes from a William S. Burroughs essay ("The Limits of Control") about how language is used as a control mechanism. "No control machine so far devised can operate without words," writes Burroughs, "and any control machine which attempts to do so relying entirely on external force or entirely on physical control of the mind will soon encounter the limits of control." It's not entirely clear exactly how this idea fits into writer/director Jim Jarmusch's film. There are a number of ways you could look at it. And for better or maybe worse, that is exactly the point. Read More.

What happens when you try to make a creepy stalker film, but the stalker just isn't very … well, creepy? That's the trouble with Obsessed, long-time television director Steve Shill's feature film debut. Derek Charles (Idris Elba, who starred in The Wire and more recently had a brief stint on The Office as Michael Scott's cold-hearted replacement) is an up-and-coming executive for a financial firm. He's just gotten a promotion, and he and his beautiful wife Sharon (Beyoncé Knowles) are the proud new owners of a sprawling home. They're also madly in love, as we watch them in the opening scene flit from room to room enjoying some playful alone time before the movers arrive. Oh, and they've got a super-cute baby sound asleep downstairs. Life is good. Read More.

I'll be honest: I had concerns. I signed up to review Joe Wright's third film, The Soloist, last summer. Then the film's late-fall, Oscar-buzz release slot was bumped up into the fallow month of April to allow the studio to focus its award campaigning on other (better?) movies; in the movie biz, we call that a Bad Omen. And then came the trailer, itself loaded with so much sugary sweetness and saccharine sentimentality, the prospect of sitting through the full two-hour movie began to seem nauseating. Read More.

Is Anybody There? is one of those unlikely friendship movies. It might even be described as a February-December romance—without the romance. Unapologetically heartfelt and sentimental, the character-driven study uses the relationship between two people—one of them nearing the end of his life and the other just beginning it—to ask some of life's most probing questions, namely what happens to us after we die. But don't go to the movie looking for answers. Perhaps the filmmakers understand that such conclusions are better reached in houses of worship or in individuals' own hearts. Instead, Is Anybody There? has the sentience to know that it is but a small, unassuming comedy and adjusts its stature accordingly. Read More.

Earth, the first release from Disneynature films, is 85 minutes of jaw-droppingly beautiful clouds, waterfalls, icebergs, and savannahs; of graceful animals, scary animals, funny animals, and excruciatingly cute baby animals. James Earl Jones delivers a narration that is mild and accessible to children. (A typical line: after a shot of a penguin sliding on his belly, Jones says, "You might not know this, but penguins are one of the few creatures born with a built-in toboggan.") It reopens the tradition of Disney nature documentaries, as in the "True Life Adventures" films of 1948-1960, and a better family-friendly nature film can't be found. Read More.

A homeless man is shot to death in a dark Georgetown alley. Miles away, a beautiful young congressional staffer dies beneath the screeching wheels of a speeding subway train. Are they isolated, unrelated tragedies, or just two slivers of a massive conspiracy involving the highest echelons of government? Read More.

Zac Efron is the next Brad Pitt. That's the thought that bolted through my brain about twenty minutes into 17 Again. And trust me, I was just as surprised as you are. But there he was, up there on the big screen, swaggering across a high school campus in a white T-shirt and skinny jeans with all the devil-may-care cool of a clean cut Tyler Durden. Read More.

American Violet was made by documentary filmmakers and it is based on true stories, but it's not a documentary. Still, the reality of the tale is chilling—the war on drugs has gone awry and targeted some of society's most vulnerable people, people like Dee Roberts. Read More.

You've probably heard of Hannah Montana—and if you have a child under the age of 14, you may even have heard a bit too much. The smash Disney channel sitcom stars Miley Cyrus as Miley Stewart, a fun-loving American teen whose secret alter ego, Hannah Montana, just happens to be a global pop star. With the series in its third wildly successful season, Disney decided it was time to take Miley/Hannah to the big screen in a full-length feature. Hannah Montana The Movie is the tween-pleasing result. Read More.

Though Fast & Furious is the fourth installment in the franchise, it's really the first true sequel to 2001's The Fast and the Furious since it reunites the principal cast members. 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) was little more than the next car-centric case for hotshot cop Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker), while The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) offered nothing in common with its predecessors beyond fast cars and a cameo in the final scene by racer/thief Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel). But then F&F begins with a heist involving a principal character from Tokyo Drift who died in that film, making this either a prequel to the third movie or else a sequel that begins with a flashback. Read More.

This year's Super Bowl broadcast featured one highly touted, heavily technical special effect—and I'm not talking about Bruce Springsteen's slide into the camera. TV spots leading up to the big game urged viewers to stop by their local grocery store and pick up a special pair of 3-D glasses, in order to view what was said to be the world's first 3-D television commercial, to be played some time during the game. It was a curious mix of the hi-tech and the lo-fi; as far as 3-D imaging has apparently come, you still need to obtain a pair of cheap, flimsy glasses in order for it to work at all. Read More.

I have to wonder whether it really benefits a horror movie to claim that it's based on a true story. Yes, some viewers are drawn to the "credibility" of the events out of curiosity. Others—including Christians—are turned off by the prospect of facing supernatural evil which they already understand to be real under the guise of "entertainment." Read More.

The numbers are staggering. 315 nations visited. 38,000 miles walked. 76 million steps putting over 16 billion pounds of weight on the feet of one Arthur Blessitt, the man who carried a cross 1.5 times around the world. "This wood," he says, caressing a pitted, dented, darkened beam, "is my friend." Read More.

Film critics often use the word "fun" when referring to a movie that isn't going to turn many heads and may not be all that worthy of significant attention, yet still retains some semblance of quantitative entertainment value. Critically acclaimed films don't often involve fun—moving, sophisticated and elegant, yes, but rarely fun. So when a film appears that is whiplash smart and breathlessly entertaining, you want—to paraphrase the great Walt Whitman—to shout your review over the rooftops of the world. Read More.

If you've seen any of the trailers, then you'll probably have a good idea what to expect from the first hour or so of Knowing, the latest mind-bending bit of speculative fiction from Alex Proyas (Dark City, I Robot). But even that first hour has its surprises, and after that, the film veers in directions that go far beyond anything you might have expected—directions that will be all the more awe-inspiring the less you know going into the theater. Read More.

Two years ago, Justin Shubow wrote a fascinating and insightful article for National Review on the emerging trend of "bromantic" comedies, i.e., male buddy movies that follow the narrative template of a romantic comedy, even to the point of including scenes in which the two men declare their platonic love for one another, perhaps by saying something like "I love you, man." Looking at Wedding Crashers, Superbad and other films in this mini-genre, Shubow said the one thing they all lacked was the "meet cute," the scene in which the two buddies meet for the very first time. But now, at last, we have a film that follows the template from start to finish—and it is called, fittingly, I Love You, Man. Read More.

A dozen years ago, Tom Hanks's production company, Playtone Records, released a film called That Thing You Do. It was quirky, witty, and a lot of fun—light, refreshing cinema with a good message about priorities and loyalty. Read More.

Have you ever strolled into a modern art exhibit and found yourself standing in front of some paint splattered canvas, muttering under your breath, "Heck, I could do that!" You may have the same reaction to Disney's shameless resurrection of their time-honored (though hardly sacred) Witch Mountain franchise, a film so incompetently directed and poorly written that it insults kids' intelligence, not to mention the adults who brought them. Read More.

The characters at the center of Sunshine Cleaning are like the crime scenes they're paid to clean up: messy, broken, and mired by tragedies of the past. Years after the death of his wife, Joe Lorkowski and his two daughters are still tremendously wounded. Sure, these wounds have somewhat scabbed over, but they haven't disappeared. Joe, Rose, and Norah are left with emotional limps that hinder their progress and growth. They're each, in some way, stuck. Read More.

Aside from the comic shorts at the beginning of Pixar films, most people rarely see short films. Movies under a half hour or so are often used by directors as calling cards, or by film students as practice runs. Major feature films have grown from ideas explored in shorts. But as an art form, the short is generally treated as the quail's egg of the film world: diminutive, often delicious, and rarely experienced except by connoisseurs. Read More.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you CAN make words mean so many different things."
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Humpty Dumpty–esque word users can be seen (and heard) everywhere. After all, the English language is often bent, twisted, and manipulated to serve the users' purposes. We see this in our use of labels: When someone doesn't fit into cultural standards (boys who are effeminate, children who act out), he or she often gets slapped with easy—but not always accurate—labels. Read More.

I can't remember how old I was when I first read The Velveteen Rabbit. I was young enough to not quite understand what Scarlet Fever meant or why all the possessions of the child at the center of the story, including his beloved stuffed rabbit, had to be burned. The story didn't seem dark per se, but it did seem dangerous and mysterious. And even at that young age, I sensed the stuffed rabbit's quest to be real as serious and important. The story felt grown-up in that way that is irresistible to children. I was hooked. Read more.

Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) is in over his head—quite literally, in the opening scene of Two Lovers. He's jumped into the murky waters off Brighton Beach, in Brooklyn, New York, and is rescued by a passing stranger. He offers his rescuer a half-hearted "thank you" before casually sauntering home. And when his worried mom (Isabella Rossellini) sees that he's dripping wet, Leonard assures her "I won't do it again." It seems he's not so much a man who wants to die as one who's lost and directionless. More adrift than drowning. Read More.

Gleefully eviscerating Sophie Kinsella's bestselling novel of the same name, Confessions of a Shopaholic gamely declares itself recession-proof, wrapping done-to-death chick flick clichés in a morality tale that's blissfully amoral. Read More.

Move over, Darth Vader. Get out of the way, Hannibal Lecter. Step aside, Joker. There's a new villain in town: the evil bank. Timing is everything, and whether through luck or prescience, The International capitalizes on employing bad guys squarely in the crosshairs of American fury and bitterness. But this seemingly surefire recipe for box-office success is squandered on a thriller that, quite simply, forgets to be thrilling. Read More.

Coraline, a horror film made for children, has some pretty heady stuff for adults too. When the best-selling book debuted in 2002, The New York Times dubbed it "one of the most truly frightening books ever written."

Director Henry Selick, who also helmed The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach, wasn't afraid to transport the very things that made author Neil Gaiman's novella so intoxicatingly unique—a curious mix of dank morbidity and gossamer whimsy—into his big-screen adaptation via brilliant stop-motion 3-D animation. Read More.

There's something very satisfying—downright delightful, even—about seeing celebrated dramatic actors cutting up and engaging in sheer, just-for-the-heck-of-it silliness. Surely that's part of what makes the Ocean's franchise so appealing. The occasional Coen Brothers movie not withstanding, where else can mainstream movie audiences see the likes of George Clooney and Brad Pitt and Andy Garcia do something with no political undertones, no Oscar gold in sight—but something that's just good, silly fun? Read More.

In a time like ours, when every comic-book company in the world seems to have a movie deal, and everyone from Pixar to Will Smith has spoofed the superhero genre, there is something kind of refreshing about a film like Push. Yes, on the one hand, it is yet another superhero movie, coming to us at a time when there have arguably been far, far too many of these films as it is. But, on the other hand, it is not based on any existing franchises or characters, so the filmmakers have an opportunity to surprise us by creating a new story entirely from scratch—a new story that will not be hindered by any perceived need to cater to an existing fanbase. Read More.

We've all heard it, and some of us have said it: "I'm so glad I'm not out there anymore." It's the kind of statement that is made after observing the elaborately convoluted nature of the modern mating ritual. He's Just Not That Into You, a humorous and heartfelt take on the sometimes excruciating and frequently exhilarating nature of love, will evoke that sentiment in spades. Read More.

Long, long ago in a Hollywood far, far away, Fanboys began a slow, strange trip into theaters. This love letter to Star Wars fandom was written in 1998 by a diehard Star Wars devotee as he awaited the release of the most anticipated film in movie history, Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Several years passed before the script was picked up, shot, and set for release. But that was back in the summer of 2007—just the beginning of a behind-the-scenes saga that's now legendary among film geeks and Star Wars fans. Read More.

The billboard for New in Town has it all wrong. It features Renée Zellweger as Lucy Hill, perched on a designer suitcase, legs and arms crossed, coy smile on her lips. The people of a small Northern town (in which Lucy is new) fill the background like a parka-robed choir. Such an image might give you the impression that this is Zellweger's movie. It's not. Read More.

When 17-year-old Kim Mills asks her father for permission to spend three weeks in Paris with a girlfriend to visit museums, he's reluctant to consent. A retired CIA covert paramilitary operative, Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) sees the world as a dangerous place—too dangerous for a pair of 17-year-olds more or less on their own in a city like Paris. Read More.

American remakes of Japanese thrillers have become so commonplace that they're essentially a subgenre unto themselves. Films like The Ring and The Grudge—perhaps the highest profile movies in this subset—inspired a whole slew of imitators, not all of which are actually based on Japanese source material, but, interestingly enough, that doesn't really matter. So numerous are these movies, and, frankly, so similar are they to one another, that comparing the remakes to the originals isn't nearly as helpful as comparing the remakes to other remakes, and to similar American imitations and knock-offs. Though the trend may have its roots in Japanese suspense, it's basically an American phenomenon at this point. Read More.

One of the longstanding complaints that people have made about the movies and other visual media is that they steal the imaginations of children who would be better off reading books. So it's kind of ironic, even amusing, when a film like Inkheart comes along and celebrates the power of literature, of sitting down and turning page after page. And while this particular film is, itself, based on a book (in this case, a best-selling German children's novel by Cornelia Funke), the story is perfectly suited to the cinematic medium, because it is all about fictitious characters who come to life, springing off the page and finding themselves living and moving in our own world. Read More.

Hotel for Dogs offers just the sort of kibble that makes the children in my family sit up and beg to go to the movies: A lovable assortment of pooches get into various kinds of doggy trouble, only to ultimately be saved by an equally lovable collection of up-and-coming teenage actors. What's not to love? Read More.

Che Guevera has always been more of an ideal than an actual person. He's been the romanticized poster boy for many a wannabe revolutionary, and his face on T-shirts has become the universal symbol for proletarian, raging-against-the-machine rebellion. His mythos is way larger and more important than his biography, because his biography—as hammered home in Steven Soderbergh's two-part, four-plus-hour film—is disappointingly mundane. If Soderbergh's goal in making this movie was to demystify Che Guevera and de-romanticize "revolution," he's succeeded winningly. But unfortunately the result is a film that is just not very compelling. Read More.

Anne Hathaway loves weddings. Well, one might surmise as much from her recent trio of rsvps—Rachel Getting Married, Bride Wars, and the forthcoming The Fiancé. I don't know what the last movie will bring to the mix, but the first two are almost opposite from one another. Whereas Rachel featured three-dimensional characters and lively, buzzing tension, Bride Wars offers characterizations in place of characters and a resolution that comes wrapped with a big bow on top and a gift receipt tucked inside. Read More.

Be warned: Waltz With Bashir is not the kind of cartoon you see for entertainment. It's heavy and difficult. It lays out the tragedy and horror of war through the lens of one man's confused experiences. The feature-length animated documentary lives somewhere on the border between dream, reality, and a yellow-hued nightmare, and while it explores the horrors of war, it plunges deeper to feel out the damaged human psyche. Read More.

It is fashionable these days to look back upon the '50s and '60s as a time when there was cool fashion and a lot of smoking and martini drinking, covering up for deeply unsettled, Stepford Wives-esque lives of quiet desperation. The AMC show Mad Men revels in this milieu, sometimes to an excessive extent. Were people really this suppressed, oppressed, and unhappy in their cookie-cutter suburban lives? Did Manhattan businessmen really have "swell" afternoon romps with secretaries while their wives baked cakes with the children at home? It's all very convenient and elegant to portray the postwar American ideal as an ill-founded, flashy farce covering up for the ugly truths of life, and it's made Mad Men a pop culture hit. But it's a little too convenient, too expected. And although it has many virtues, Revolutionary Road ultimately comes across as a little bit too cynical for its own good. Read More.

From The Diary of Anne Frank and Sophie's Choice to Schindler's List and The Pianist, there have literally been hundreds of films depicting the Jewish Holocaust. Most depict the Jews as helpless victims, unable to defend themselves from horrifying adversity and oppression. But sometimes they fought back. Read More.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is an epic, not of scale, but of time. It is the story of an infant born suffering the infirmities of old age who lives his life in reverse, growing younger with each passing year until he dies in infancy. The film is a charmed, enchanted fable steeped in melancholy and wistful serenity. And it is an artistic and narrative triumph, which, while colder and more emotionally remote than necessary, embodies one of the most beautiful love stories set to screen in a very long time. Benjamin Button is not the finest film of the year, but it gets awfully close. Read More.

Many young couples do it: Get a dog to give their parenting skills a test drive. John (Owen Wilson) and Jenny (Jennifer Aniston) Grogan, a 20something newlywed pair of newspaper reporters, get their Labrador retriever mainly because John's not quite ready to become a dad. So he surprises Jenny with a puppy for her birthday one year, hoping it will buy him some time. And the adventure begins. Read More.

Here are five words you probably never thought you'd hear in the same breath: "An Adam Sandler Disney movie." At first, it may seem counter-intuitive that a comedian as juvenile and, occasionally, crude as Sandler would be working in Uncle Walt's name. It may seem even stranger when you notice that his best friend is played by Russell Brand, who recently played an oversexed rock'n'roll star in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and has since caused a controversy or two, by mocking the Jonas Brothers for their virginity at the MTV Music Video awards and by making lewd phone calls while hosting a British radio show. But on a certain level, the pairing of Sandler and Disney makes sense: if Sandler is just an overgrown kid, then a movie made for kids, about bedtime stories that come true, should be right up his alley, provided of course that he can keep things clean. And surprise, he does, more or less. Read More.

These days, it is impossible to watch a Tom Cruise movie without thinking of what it might mean to the movie star himself. Two years ago, his Mission: Impossible character got married, around the time Cruise himself got hitched to Katie Holmes. Then, after his antics on Oprah's show and elsewhere got him in trouble with the media and with the powers that be at Paramount, forcing him to look for work elsewhere, he played a hotshot politician who criticizes a reporter to her face in Lions for Lambs and a foul-mouthed studio mogul who has zero sympathy for the people that work for him in Tropic Thunder. Now comes Valkyrie, the second film to be made by United Artists since Cruise took the reins at that struggling studio, and over the past year, thanks to constantly shifting release dates and rumors of reshoots, the film has acquired the reputation of a "troubled" production. It is tempting, then, to read an element of autobiography into the film, as Cruise plays a wounded German officer who is already unpopular with the Nazi high command when he joins in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler—a plot that we know is doomed to fail. Read More.

Will Eisner and Frank Miller: two great tastes that taste awful together?

A couple of decades ago, maybe. In the late 1980s, when comic-book giant Miller's groundbreaking graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns was rocking the world of comic book fandom, I had the privilege as a cartooning student of studying under the legendary Eisner, creator of the seminal The Spirit series. In those days, there were no greater luminaries in my pantheon of cartooning heroes—The Spirit was Citizen Kane, The Dark Knight Returns was The Godfather—even though Eisner didn't share the Miller love, and could be merciless to a cartooning student who submitted pages displaying a Miller influence (as I learned the hard way). Read More.

If you've ever felt alone in a crowd or kind of passed over by life, you'll find a kinship with Harvey Shine (Dustin Hoffman) and Kate Walker (Emma Thompson). It's these feelings that give them a tentative kinship with each other when they first connect in an airport bar halfway through the film. It's not the typical meet-cute of a rom-com; it's more of a "meet-snarky." But before they meet, life has to kick them around a bit first … Read More.

Kate DiCamillo's book The Tale of Despereaux is an enchanting story about a mouse with the heart of a hero. Already considered a classic, this Newberry Award winner is a favorite of families and children's librarians everywhere. And now The Tale of Despereaux—or something resembling it—is a movie. Director Sam Fell is no stranger to rodents; he directed Dreamworks' Flushed Away. But where Flushed was a cartoon caper, Despereaux is a poetic work of children's literature that deserves a place alongside such classics as Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh stories, White's Charlotte's Web, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Fell and his co-director Rob Stevenhagen respect their source enough to illustrate it with lush and extravagant animation. Newcomers accustomed to frantic, frivolous, disposable family fare are likely to be surprised and enthralled. Read More.

Jim Carrey has been taking it slow lately. In the last five years, the funny man has made only a half dozen films, several of which he spent trying his dramatic wings and another hidden behind animation. It was probably a good thing. If you're anything like me, you can only handle Carrey in small doses. Yes Man is a pleasant, albeit minor, surprise that actually harkens back to Carrey's glory days with a solid, satisfying comedy that aims to please and mostly hits its mark. Read More.

Movies often go into production years before they hit the theaters. So it's unlikely that when the makers of Seven Pounds could have predicted the economic crisis that would be facing the moviegoing public when they released their film. If they had, they might have thought twice about sending their bleak tale of remorse and death out into the world at this moment. A little Hollywood-style escapism seems in order, no? Read More.

The Wrestler is not really a sports movie, despite the pummel-heavy wrestling matches. It's not really a romance, though there's a kind of love story. It's not a tale of redemption or glorious comeback, though the main character finishes in his own kind of victorious way. It is, however, a very real movie about failure, fear, and confronting the reality of your future. Read More.

Another month, another movie about a female protagonist who loses her dog. But unlike Bolt and Beverly Hills Chihuahua, this month's model is about as far removed from a kid-oriented comedy as you can get. Directed by Kelly Reichardt, whose previous film Old Joy earned raves for its depiction of two male friends who have stayed in touch long after they began to grow apart, Wendy and Lucy is a gritty, slow-paced look at those who live on the margins of society, made all the more believable by Reichardt's lo-fi aesthetic. Shot in the trainyards and empty parking lots of Portland, Oregon with a cast of mostly unknown actors, the film has a close-to-the-ground documentary feel that draws us into the economic hardships of its main characters far better than a typical low-budget studio movie would do. Read More.

Kate Winslet has played any number of feisty, intelligent women over the years. Even when she plays a bored suburban housewife, in films like Little Children and Revolutionary Road, her characters tend to believe that they are somehow better and smarter than their neighbors—and on some level, they often are. So it comes as a bit of a shock to see Winslet in a role where her character doesn't seem to be all that bright, really, and where her character ultimately wants to be regarded as anything but exceptional. But that describes Hanna Schmitz, the role Winslet plays in The Reader, a film that is partly about a woman who lives in post-war Germany, and whose past involvement in Nazi atrocities eventually catches up with her. Read More.

By now, you know the routine: Every time a major movie studio announces that it is going to remake one of its classics, fans all over the world slap their foreheads and wonder why anyone would want to mess with perfection. But some movies are more adaptable than others, in theory at least, and The Day the Earth Stood Still is just such a film. Produced in 1951, as the Cold War was just getting started, the original film depicted an alien who comes to Earth and warns us that our militaristic ways could lead to the destruction of the entire planet—if not at our own hands, then at the hands of interstellar robots who have been programmed to prevent any planet from posing a threat to other planets. The political landscape has changed in many ways since then, and the world has moved on to other dangers, but that, in its own way, creates a whole new set of storytelling opportunities; there is no reason an alien couldn't pay us another visit and give us a whole new set of warnings. Read More.

Chicago is a city of neighborhoods and proud ethnic enclaves, none more proud than the Puerto Rican community of Humboldt Park. A tall iron Puerto Rican flag straddles Division Avenue just west of Western Avenue, ushering motorists down the main drag through the neighborhood and leaving no doubt about the heritage of the local residents. If there was any doubt, show up on Puerto Rican National Day, when the area's streets are transformed into a kind of merry-go-round by flag-festooned cars touring the neighborhood and blaring their horns. I used the live in the middle of it all, three blocks from the flag. Read More.

Doubt is a bundle of questions, chiseled to a point and encased in the trappings of a Catholic church era now nearly forgotten. It boasts one of the finest leading casts this year—seventeen Oscar nominations between them—and some heavy, yet relevant source material. Based on the Pulitzer-prize winning play, this Doubt was re-written for the screen and directed by its playwright, John Patrick Shanley. Read More.

A major metaphor in Frost/Nixon, the fairly straightforward retelling of the 1977 television interviews between David Frost and ex-president Richard Nixon, is the sport of boxing. No punches are thrown. The sport isn't really discussed. But under the glare of the TV cameras, these two men are not merely asking and answering questions, they are juking and jabbing. They evade. They attack. They manipulate. They break from their duel to retreat to their corners for analysis and the clearing of sweat from their handlers. Strategy and mental games are everything for this champion and his challenger. Read More.

The first time I saw the trailer for this film in a theater, the audience laughed. It portrayed a senile, furrow-browed Clint Eastwood brandishing a gun and barking at Asian people to "get off my lawn." Was this Dirty Harry: The Retirement Years? Thankfully, no. As it turns out, Gran Torino is surprisingly earnest—a film that is funny and angry and sad for all the right reasons, and remarkably well timed. As 2008 comes to close—and with it many things—Gran Torino captures the zeitgeist as eloquently as anything possibly could. Read More.

Adam Stein (Jeff Goldblum) was a well-loved circus-style entertainer before he was hauled off to a Nazi concentration camp, along with his beloved wife and daughters. There, he encounters a Nazi commandant (Willem Dafoe) who remembers him from his act years ago and takes him into his home—not as a friend, but as his "dog," an entertaining, subservient companion who goes around on all fours, barks, and eats raw meat with the other (actual) dog. Read More.

In our age of sophistication and snark, earnestness is a character trait that provokes laughter more than anything else—think of Kenneth in 30 Rock or Ned Flanders from The Simpsons. Local Color is a welcome exception, centering itself around John, an idealistic young artist who yearns to understand beauty and truth, and a charismatic, confident performance by Trevor Morgan makes this quest vital, not hokey. Read More.

Early in Baz Luhrmann's Australia, one of the main characters says of his country: "this land has a strange power." And indeed, if one surveys the landscape of films about Australia, many of them (The Last Wave, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Proposition) seem to express this sentiment: Australia is a nation of strange, captivating, haunting power. In his epic film about his native country, Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!) affirms and exaggerates this Australian mythos, to spectacular effect. Indeed, his impressively rendered film has a "strange power" of its own. Read More.

Silly and frivolous though it may be, Four Christmases is nevertheless a movie that speaks loudly about the time and place in which it was created. Intentional or not—and, with a movie this unabashedly and straightforwardly fun, it's probably not—it's a film that bears witness to the crisis facing the very institution of family, a movie that surveys a culture in which disunity is becoming more commonplace than familial bonds, in which shallow attraction and infidelity are more popular than real love or commitment. It's not a great work of art—not even close—and it's not a pointed piece of social commentary, but it's a telling and revealing movie just the same. Read More.

The filmmakers behind Milk couldn't have asked for better timing for their release. A tightly composed tale of Harvey Milk's contribution to the gay movement (he was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the U.S.), Milk portrays the early and explosive days of grassroots activism for homosexual rights on the streets of San Francisco. Thirty years later, the movement is taking to the streets again in California, protesting the recently passed Proposition 8, which amends the state Constitution to restrict the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman. Read More.

Because of immense buzz for this first film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series of novels, some have compared this tween and teen phenom to Harry Potter. Like the last two Potter movies, this vampire romance film made Fandango.com's top ten list of all-time advance ticket sales—thanks to a rabid fan base whose hearts were set on swoon ever since they first saw images of the vampire and werewolf dreamboats they've fallen for in the books. Read More.

It has been nearly three years since Disney and Pixar settled their differences, leading one company to buy the other. But while Disney technically owns the Pixar label now, the minds that created Pixar in the first place have been calling the shots at Disney Animation ever since the merger—and the first significant result of their efforts is Bolt, a cartoon that could perhaps be best described as "Pixar Lite." Read More.

The 2006 smash hit Casino Royale was James Bond's Batman Begins, a darkly masterful, psychologically layered origin story that threw to the winds the tongue-in-cheek camp stylings of earlier franchise installments and completely rethought its iconic but flawed hero and his world from the ground up, taking seriously the rough edges that had previously been papered over with a wink. Read More.

Good luck pinning Danny Boyle down. The director of such wildly divergent films as Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Millions and Sunshine chews through genres the way some actors chew through scenery. Yet in each, Boyle leaves his utterly distinctive signature. It is a hybridization containing equal measures darkness and light. His fables often depict relentless despair that gives way to something beautiful and transcendent just when the viewer cannot take a moment's more gloom. No matter how wretched Boyle's situations, hope is, at all times, just a frame away. Read More.

Opinions will vary on whether Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa is a better or worse film than its predecessor, or for that matter roughly the same, but about one thing there can be no doubt: The series' sense of geography has improved, however slightly. The first film imagined that a bunch of animals from New York City's Central Park Zoo were put on a boat for Africa, and then the boat was commandeered by penguins heading for the Antarctic, and then the former Zoo-mates, trapped inside some crates, fell overboard and drifted—not to the Atlantic coast of Africa, which presumably would have been fairly close, but to the island of Madagascar, way on the other side of that continent. The second film, thankfully, imagines a much simpler journey. This time, the penguins have found an abandoned plane and "fixed" it for a flight back to New York City. The flight, naturally, takes them over Africa—and when they run out of fuel, they crash-land on the continent below. Read More.

Thomas Kinkade has become a very rich man selling his paintings, many of them to Christians. But many believers also dismiss the work of the "Painter of Light" as commercial kitsch, and anything but real art. So when I was assigned Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage, a straight-to-DVD film releasing today, some of my friends and co-workers reacted as if I was reviewing the bottom of the film barrel. Read More.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is one of those good, but not great, movies that you wish you liked more than you actually do. It tackles a deadly serious subject—the Holocaust, and the moral complicity of those who made it happen—from a relatively fresh angle, and it is made with a certain degree of skill. At times, it is even quite powerful. And yet there is something about it that doesn't quite work. Read More.

Director Robby Henson has scored the Christian thriller hat trick: he's now adapted three supernatural suspense novels in just three years. He started with The Visitation by Frank Peretti and then turned to Ted Dekker's Thr3e. And so, it makes sense that his third would be House, a tag-team work by Peretti and Dekker. Read More.

In January 2006, a friend suggested my kids might like High School Musical, a made-for-TV Disney movie about a group of squeaky-clean teenagers who break out of their school's cliques by taking part in a drama production. I was skeptical; at ages 8 and 5, my son and daughter were on the young end of the film's demographic, and the whole premise seemed underwhelming. But one Friday night our family found ourselves without plans and it just so happened that HSM was being re-aired. It came, we saw, it conquered … and now our extensive collection of DVDs, T-shirts, posters, soundtracks, and chapter books evidences our children's deep and abiding affection for the HSM Franchise. Read More.

Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) is a single mother—competent, responsible, and devoted to her nine-year-old son Walter—who works as a switchboard supervisor in Los Angeles. She returns home from a weekend shift in early 1928 to discover that Walter has vanished. A nationwide search is launched, but to no avail, until a child claiming to be Walter Collins surfaces in Illinois six months later. He is returned to Christine, who immediately recognizes that the boy is not her son. Broken-hearted, confused, and manipulated by a shifty police force unwilling to recognize its mistake in front of the press, she allows herself to be persuaded to take the boy home on a "trial basis."

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Happiness is an elusive quality in a Mike Leigh film. Sometimes, in his films, you will meet characters who try to cheer other people up, but there is usually a darker side to their perkiness. The photographer who tries to get people to smile in Secrets and Lies is stressed out by conflicts within his family; the woman who provides illegal abortions in Vera Drake naively tells her clients they will all be "right as rain" after she has left, and is caught off-guard when one of them almost dies thanks to her efforts; and when Gilbert & Sullivan premiere their latest musical comedy in Topsy-Turvy, a depressed Gilbert responds to the applause by privately grumbling to his neglected wife, "There's something inherently disappointing about success." Read More.

Pride and Glory has had a rocky road getting to the screen. Set to begin production in early 2002, the film was abandoned after the 9/11 attacks on New York City, when it was deemed that people wanted to celebrate the heroics of the city's police force, rather than tarnish their reputation with a tale of corruption and scandal. Once it was finally made, Pride and Glory spent the better part of two years sitting on the shelf, ping-ponging between release dates. Now that it's finally seeing the light of day, is Pride and Glory worth the wait? Yes, but barely. Read More.

Synecdoche, New York is comically difficult to summarize (and pronounce), but here goes: Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who may or may not be a hypochondriac, is a small-time theater director lives in Schenectady, New York (a small, slowly dying city near my hometown, three hours north of New York City) with his wife, Adele (Catherine Keener), who has attained some fame as a painter of tiny canvases. Cotard directs at a local theater, where he and the receptionist, Hazel (Samantha Morton), flirt on smoking breaks. In the midst of rehearsals for Death of a Salesman, Cotard's body starts acting up on him. Strange afflictions plague him, but soldiering on toward his artistic vision, he produces the play, which everyone loves but Adele. Read More.

There is something deeply, damagingly conventional about Passengers, an obvious fact before the opening credits are even finished. But once this is recognized, there is no reason Passengers cannot be enjoyed in the same way that an episode of ABC's Lost might be. That is, as a small but entertaining exercise in twisty sci-fi indulgence. Read More.

Five minutes into The Secret Life of Bees, we learn Lily Owens's (Dakota Fanning) life-altering secret: When she was just four years old, she accidentally shot and killed her mother. Lily's mom had left her and her dad, T. Ray (Paul Bettany), months earlier and had returned, according to him, simply to retrieve her belongings. Not, he stresses to now 14-year-old Lily, to retrieve her. Read More.

Though director Oliver Stone is no stranger to presidential biopics (JFK, Nixon), W. is his first film to tackle the subject of a sitting U.S. president, a fact that has drawn the ire of more than one critic. Isn't history written best with some distance and perspective? Bush is one of the most controversial presidents ever, after all, so couldn't Stone have waited a few years to give him a proper cinematic treatment (as he did with World Trade Center)? Read More.

There's a revealing tale about old Hollywood that sounds apocryphal, but it's true: Billy Wilder had just screened his noir classic Sunset Boulevard—in typical cynical Wilder style, a thinly-veiled expose of the seedy side of the movie business—for industry executives. Though some recognized it for the classic it was destined to become, MGM co-founder Louis B. Mayer collared Wilder on his way out and railed at him in front of the crowd, declaring, "You have disgraced the industry that made and fed you. You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood." Read More.

As a video game, Max Payne was fairly groundbreaking for its time, offering a cool, but gritty crime noir about a New York City cop driven to the edge by the murder of his family. It played like a graphic novel heavily influenced by action movie clichés, particularly John Woo films and The Matrix with its nifty ability to slow down time, leaping with guns blazing while dodging the enemy's bullets. Yet as stylish and fun as the storytelling and game-play were, with a tongue-in-cheek name like Max Payne, the game was clearly an homage to action classics rather than a serious story.  Read More.

Billy Graham has appeared in many movies over the years, most of them produced by World Wide Pictures, the movie studio that he founded through his evangelistic ministry in the 1950s. But apart from a handful of parodies, no actor has ever played him before, and certainly no film has tried to show what kind of person he was prior to becoming the internationally recognized preacher that he is today. So there was lots of fertile ground for Billy: The Early Years, the first major Graham biopic, to explore. Too bad, then, that the film does such a poor job of bringing his story to life. Read More.

City of Ember begins with the end of the world.

Knowing that an unrevealed cataclysmic event (war? disease? environmental crisis?) will soon eliminate human life, a group of scientists create an underground city called Ember where civilization will go on. It's basically a giant fallout shelter shaped into a city—complete with brownstones, brick streets, and a city-square fountain—spread out under an impressive web of light bulbs and wires. Read More.

Sir Ridley Scott is not only one of the world's most popular filmmakers—he's also a visionary. Best known for directing Alien and Blade Runner, two of the most influential sci-fi films ever made, he also delivered such classics as Thelma and Louise, Black Hawk Down, and Gladiator. Sumptuous cinematography and strong performances distinguish his grand epics about power, corruption, and conscience. Read More.

The Express is a rare inspirational sports film that remembers who sports are supposed to inspire: other people.

While in many ways the story follows familiar genre conventions, The Express isn't just about individual achievement, following your dreams, or coming together as a team. It isn't even just about facing social pressure and overcoming racist opposition, like many earlier racially aware sports films (Remember the Titans, Glory Road, Pride, etc.)—though race does play a major role in the film. Read More.

One of the running gags in An American Carol, a political satire produced in part by right-leaning Hollywood movie stars—and yes, such people do exist—is that a fat, boorish, left-wing filmmaker has won an Oscar for his documentaries but really, really wants to direct a feature film, with a budget and a screenplay and some actors and so on. Whenever Michael Malone (Kevin Farley) tells someone that he once won an Oscar, the other person inevitably replies, "For a documentary," and we can tell, from Malone's facial expression, that he, too, believes deep down that the trophy on his mantle doesn't really give him all that many bragging rights. Read More.

Let's face it: most documentaries these days don't bother to document anything in an objective, journalistic sense. We can thank Michael Moore for re-conceiving the documentary film as something akin to a sensationalistic, cinematic op-ed piece. If you have something you hate, or something you want to humiliate in as public a way as possible, make a documentary! And this is precisely what Bill Maher does in his new anti-religion film, Religulous. Read More.

Ay, Chihuahua! Beverly Hills Chihuahua is better than its premise and trailer might lead you to believe. But not by much.

The film opens in, where else, Beverly Hills—a world of perfectly manicured lawns and people, of glittering couture and gleaming cars, of plastic credit cards and even more plastic bodies. It's also the place where people spend more on their dogs' wardrobes, clothing and jewelry than the entire gross national product of Morocco. Read More.

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It doesn't take a Flash of Genius to figure out that this movie about an engineer was the product of some highly intelligent design; everything about it feels calibrated to perfection, and its quality of craftsmanship is difficult to deny. It's a movie that comes decked out with all the features necessary to win over its audience. It's a tale of a lowly David taking on corporate Goliath, a portrait of a marriage on the rocks, and a tit-for-tat courtroom drama. It's got a tortured genius whose brain power is challenged only by his inner madness, and it's got his loving, long-suffering wife who sees in him what others may miss. It's a 1960s period piece, it's based on a true story, and hey, it's even got mental illness. Awards, please! Read More.

In Blindness, the bleak new film from acclaimed director Fernando Meirelles (City of Men, The Constant Gardener), a major city is struck with an epidemic of "The White Sickness," a highly contagious disease that causes sudden loss of vision. Health officials react swiftly; within hours, hazmat-suited military personnel are quarantining infected individuals in a dilapidated sanitarium. Read More.

Some of the best movies involve tenuous family situations at weddings and other celebratory events: Think of The Godfather, this year's forthcoming Unconte de Noel (A Christmas Tale), or if you're into dysfunction, Margot at the Wedding. There is something about mutually shared histories, families brought together under one roof, and a little bit of wine to really bring out the best and the worst in people—and to provoke the stories that make for interesting cinema. Rachel Getting Married is one of the more joyful additions to this canon, and one that deeply resonates in the soul. Read More.

Two years ago, there was a big controversy when Facing the Giants, an ultra-low-budget movie produced by a church in the Bible Belt, was rated PG, allegedly for its spiritual content. Pundits and politicians railed against the MPAA and its ratings board for its perceived bias against religious themes, and moviegoers rallied to the film's defense at the box office, making it one of the most successful Christian movies of all time. But as the debate over the movie's rating subsided, another controversy emerged. Some Christians praised the film for its positive, family-friendly values, while others condemned it as bad art, a bad story badly told that would only encourage the worst artistic instincts of the evangelicals who saw it. Read More.

The first thing you need to know about Eagle Eye—the new techno-paranoid thriller starring Shia LaBeouf and directed by D.J. Caruso, who previously collaborated on last year's teenaged Rear Window wanna-be Disturbia—is that it is absolutely, completely preposterous. LaBeouf plays a young man named Jerry Shaw, whose life is hijacked one day when items show up at his apartment that make him seem like a terrorist, and he begins receiving mysterious phone calls from a woman whose directions for escaping the cops are perfectly timed to coincide with out-of-control cranes and moving trains. Even when Jerry loses his cell phone, the woman is able to reach him on another phone that happens to belong to a complete stranger. Read More.

Adrienne Willis (Diane Lane) is frazzled. Her cheating husband, Jack (Christopher Meloni), has left. Her angsty teenage daughter, Amanda (Mae Whitman), wishes she could. And now her soon-to-be ex wants a second chance to save their marriage. With this proposition on the table and the kids vacationing with Jack for the weekend, Adrienne heads to North Carolina's Outer Banks to look after her friend's inn—grateful for the chance to retreat and reconsider. Read More.

TK (Michael Peña) loves to work a crowd. As Teddy Roosevelt's son famously said of his father, he wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. Actually, TK just wants to tell you about his remarkable experiences as the bride and the corpse, in his easygoing, no-really, I'm-not-BS'ing-you style. He's just holding forth on the extreme gratitude with which his girlfriend responds to his almost mystical knowledge of how to touch a woman, and is verging into the subject of multiple women, when the roadside IED hits. Read More.

Spike Lee's attempt at a sweeping war epic, Miracle at St. Anna, opens with an aging World War II vet watching the D-Day classic The Longest Day starring John Wayne. As the movie shows white face after white face, the African-American man grimaces and says, "We fought for this country, too." Read More.

Some of my favorite experiences at the movies have come as a result of stumbling across something wholly unexpected. Movies that catch us by surprise often crystallize into some of our most cherished cinematic experiences. We usually know, more or less, if the movie we're about to see will delight or disappoint. Usually it's just a matter of discovering the degree. But with the new fantasy comedy Ghost Town, the word I keep hearing on everyone's lips, critics and moviegoers alike, is "surprise." And indeed it is the best possible kind of surprise—a film at once hilarious and heartfelt. Read More.

Like it often seems in monster movies, the land of Malaria only has two real professions: mad scientist or lowly lab assistant. Obviously, one career is far more revered. In fact, in this land of evil laboratories, all mad geniuses' helpers are called by the same name: Igor. Read More.

Lakeview Terrace is like Crash in a cul-de-sac. It's a film about race; it's set in L.A.; it features a corrupt LAPD cop. Ultimately, it doesn't take itself quite as seriously as Crash does, however, and instead of using car crashes as a metaphor it uses another Southern California staple: out-of-control wildfires. Though sometimes a bit heavy-handed (how can a film about race not be?), and frequently over-acted (in the case of one Samuel L. Jackson), Terrace is, in the end, a solid bit of entertaining melodrama with some vaguely astute observations about life and racism. Read More.

The resurgence of the cinematic western genre may have hit its peak last year (3:10 to Yuma, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood), but it is clearly not gone yet, as evidenced by Appaloosa, a western in every sense of the word. Read More.

Georgiana Spencer, the Duchess of Devonshire (Keira Knightly), was the original people's princess. Like her direct descendent, Princess Diana of Wales, Georgiana was a woman of ravishing beauty, glamorous style, burnished intellect, and populist mystique. A political mover and shaker, Georgiana used her popularity with the masses to draw attention to the great social causes of her day, and proved that she was more than a match for the aristocratic, male-centric world into which she was born. And yet, for all of her success and popularity, the one man who seemed beyond her seductive charms was the one man she yearned for the most—her husband, the Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes).

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Hounddog is a tragedy of a film, and not in the sense that it strives to be. It's a tragedy, on one level, because it is quite simply an artistic disaster. But mostly it is a tragedy because of the way it uses and abuses its starring actress—the then 12-year-old Dakota Fanning.

It is not surprising that Hounddog, which caused, Read More.

In a sense, The Women is the ultimate chick flick—men are discussed, chewed out, lauded, and lambasted, but the only one who makes an appearance is a tiny newborn boy. No other male actors appear onscreen at any time, not even as extras. And that's what constitutes this film's biggest departure from standard chick-flick fare; no charming male leads are around to romance the audience, and there's little of the fairy tale to be found. Each of the women lives in the strange-but-true world of uppercrust New York society—one where a session at Saks Fifth Avenue with Madonna's manicurist is simply something to do while waiting for your hair appointment—but like "real" people, they have strengths, failures, children, messes, and job problems, and only their friends to help sort it all out. Read More.

"So what did we learn?" "Well I dunno!"

That exchange occurs in the final few seconds of the Coen Brothers' latest adventure, Burn After Reading, and though it makes perfect sense in the context of the story, it's hard not to think that it's also a commentary on the Coens themselves, and the unusual predicament in which they've found themselves. Read More.

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino—both originally from New York City, both about the same age, both made their film debut around the same time, and both considered legends among American actors. Yet it's taken them this long in their 40-year careers to finally star in a film together. Read More.

Very few people saw Empire of the Sun when it came out 21 years ago, and possibly even fewer people remember it. But the effects of that World War II film—one of Steven Spielberg's most underrated efforts—live with us still. It introduced the world to a 13-year-old kid from Wales named Christian Bale, who has since conquered the box office as The Dark Knight. It also featured a young man named Ben Stiller, in one of his very first roles, as a prisoner of war named Dainty. And it was while working on that film that Stiller first got the idea for Tropic Thunder.

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One debate among film critics is whether it's necessary to know the original version to appreciate an adaptation or remake. Aside from those deeply immersed in Asian action cinema, most average filmgoers won't care if the new Bangkok Dangerous is true to the 1999 original from Thailand of the same name. They just want to know if it's an exciting Nicolas Cage action flick. Read More.

Never mind the fact that it's been universally panned. Here's how bad Babylon A.D. really is: In the days leading up to its release, the film's director, French auteur Mathieu Kassovitz, publicly denounced his own movie, citing disagreements with the studio and a troubled production and summing up the film as "a bad episode of 24." But he wasn't the only one upset about the movie; the film's star, Vin Disel, also made public declarations about the project's awfulness, but, very much to his credit, he did so not with a spirit of bitterness or frustration, but in a cheerfully joking, self-deprecating sort of way. Read More.

Traitor shows flashes of being something greater than just an average spy thriller, but doesn't quite get there. Co-stars Guy Pearce and Don Cheadle bring dynamic and believable conviction to this chase film's cat and mouse. The film attempts—and mostly succeeds—to discuss big topics about faith, war and worldview. And the filmmakers' bold decision to center a movie on a devout black Muslim creates one of modern Hollywood's most serious, nuanced, and refreshing portrayals of committed, daily faith.  Read More.

Earlier this summer, we were all treated to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a cinematic event many of us were deeply excited about, only to be greatly disappointed; the film was a pale, ridiculous ghost of its former self, more hokey parody than joyous reunion. After 15 years, it would have been better if we'd simply left Indy riding off into that glorious sunset. And so I'm forced to ask: Why, when that film was such a colossal disappointment, would I ever want to watch your third-rate, wannabe, copycat rip-off!? Mr. Cohen, I'll say this for The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor—it makes Indy's latest adventure look like a masterpiece by comparison.  Read More.

Review by Todd Hertz 

At the same time, The Dark Knight isn't a summer popcorn blockbuster. At least not entirely. Yes, it's loud, explosive, exciting, and fun. And yes, it possesses the kind of action set pieces that cause us to exclaim with that half-exhale, half-laugh that marks shock and awe. Under all that, though, lives an unnerving, serious, and ambitious crime drama about three good men with the courage to stand against evil—and how evil responds.  Read more.

Is the human race worth saving?

That's the unanswered question looming in the background of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Guillermo del Toro's sprawling, take-no-prisoners follow-up to his comparatively timid first stab at Mike Mignola's unconventional comic book superhero four years ago. Read More.

Review by Brett McCracken

In the pantheon of Fourth of July Will Smith blockbusters, Hancock, directed by Peter Berg, will rank significantly higher than Men in Black 2 but far lower than the granddaddy of them all, Independence Day. In other words: It isn't horrible, but it's far from classic. Actually, it does pretty much everything it should do for what it is: explosions, romance, laughs, heroes, villains, and gobs of patriotism. Read More.

Review by Todd Hertz 

Get Smart seemingly does several things right in remaking the quirky spy parody created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. First, it involves Brooks and Henry in some capacity as consultants. Second, it features near-perfect casting with Steve Carell as CONTROL agent Maxwell Smart, Anne Hathaway as Agent 99, and Alan Arkin as their Chief. And thirdly, it largely captures the spirit of the original while paying homage.  Read more.

Review by Russ Breimeier

So, what do we call this new Hulk movie? It's not a true sequel to Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk, since none of the actors or filmmakers return for this version. Nor is it a remake, since this film doesn't retell the same origin story—in fact, The Incredible Hulk sort of picks up where Hulk left off.  Read More.

Review by Carolyn Arends

Po is a Chinese noodle shop worker whose consuming passion is kung fu. There are only a few obstacles standing in the way of his dream of becoming a martial arts master. 1) His father expects him to take over the family restaurant. 2) He doesn't actually know kung fu. And 3) He's a panda. And a portly, sluggish, uncoordinated one at that.  Read more.

Review by Peter T. Chattaway

For all their talk of staying true to the spirit of C. S. Lewis's novels, the makers of the Narnia films have frequently deviated from the books in ways both big and small, and the liberties they take with Prince Caspian—which echo but go far, far beyond the liberties they took with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—both help the film and hurt it. They help because you can sense that co-writer and director Andrew Adamson is finally making the big epic fantasy battle movie that he really wanted to make the first time around, and his devotion to that vision holds Prince Caspian together and makes it a more consistent, and consistently entertaining, sort of film than Wardrobe was. But in steering the film closer to his own vision, Adamson steers it away from Lewis's, and so it loses some of the book's core spiritual themes.  Read More.

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