Director Martin Campbell is a bit of a hero to me. He’s the man responsible for successfully re-booting the James Bond franchise TWICE with Goldeneye (which was so awesome it also spawned one of my favorite videogames of all time) and Casino Royale which was so good I developed a bona-fide heterosexual man crush for [...]

“Brutal violence, strong sexual content and language throughout, and brief drug use,” warns the poster for Rick Jacobson’s Bitch Slap, right beneath the big R for its well deserved rating. If the movie title didn’t stop you, if that warning didn’t stop you, if you’re not offended by the winking exploitation of the female body, [...]

It doesn’t take long, in Guy Ritchie’s new Sherlock Holmes, to see that this is a different version of the master detective than we’re used to. Really just a couple of minutes, which is how long it takes Robert Downey Jr., as Holmes, to start throwing Matrix-style slow-motion punches in brutalizing a bad guy. His [...]

So I just got in from watching James Cameron’s much-hyped opus, Avatar, the science fiction tale of an alien planet and its people fighting the good fight against a horrible invading race of humans. I really enjoyed this movie, but not for any of the reasons I was supposed to. Cameron made a big deal [...]

Armored is a tough nut to crack. I went to see the movie because it promised awesome stunts, shootouts, explosions, and the grievous wounding of Milo “I Ruined Heroes” Ventimiglia. I was totally ready to either praise Armored from on high for its awesome stunt work and special effects, or totally blast it for being [...]

Recently an anime called Darker Than Black came to our American shores. It was about a world in which some sort of disaster caused strange distortions in space to open up in the world, and that in turn is making all sorts of crazy shit happen. The most notable instance of crazy shit is the [...]

Let’s get one thing straight. I had no idea there was an Afro Samurai sequel. None whatsoever. In fact the only reason I attended the special screening of Afro Samurai: Resurrection was because I was down at AUSA and I was so tired from dancing at the rave all night that I needed a place [...]

You don’t go into a movie entitled Ninja Assassin expecting subtlety and nuance — but if you’re expecting anything more than enthusiastic CGI decapitation and dismemberment from this Wachowski Brothers-produced actioner, then you will probably be disappointed.
What you do get is lots of gory action and lots of ninjas (more than 30 anyway), who [...]

Red Cliff marks the return of John Woo to American movie theaters after a hiatus of several years. Does anyone even remember the last Woo movie they went to see? At a cost of nearly $80 million, this epic film has all the classic Woo signatures (the doves, the slow motion shots, etc.) that his [...]

The Men Who Stare at Goats opens with a winking title card stating: “More of this is true than you would believe.” My belief is that more of what is true might have made this a better movie.
Based on the nonfiction (yes, nonfiction) book of the same name by British gonzo journalist Jon Ronson [...]

I’ve always been a big fan of G.I. Joe. I was a little disappointed when the big summer movie The Rise of Cobra never had a reference to the popular PSA spoofs, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. So now its fall and I’ve packed up my bathing suit, towel, and guns, and picked up the [...]

Bartender turned filmmaker Troy Duffy, the writer-director of 1999’s indie cult classic The Boondock Saints and the subject of the 2003 documentary Overnight (a cautionary tale of the arriviste’s subsequent burnout), returns to South Boston for Boondock’s long anticipated sequel. So has Duffy learned anything new in the ten-year interim?
On the evidence of [...]

The story goes that in early 2008, Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio was trying to decide whether it wanted to be involved with a microbudgeted supernatural thriller. Spielberg had taken a Paranormal Activity DVD to his Pacific Palisades estate, and not long after he watched it, the door to his empty bedroom inexplicably locked from the [...]

With Saw VI, the legacy of Jigsaw continues. You know, I went into this movie thinking that I was the wrong person to review Saw VI because I was not the biggest fan of horror movies and I had only a small interest in Saw ever since Saw III. But I came out of this [...]

It’s hard to write about The Ministers, the new movie from the New York-born director Franc Reyes, without giving away some plot twist or another. That would be a shame, because a few curveballs, late in the action, are what give it an unexpected, and welcome, intellectual weight. Characters and events, I will say cryptically, [...]