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 this [...]

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, [...]

“These times come and go, and if you live long enough, you see ’em come again.” Though the character in Black Dynamite who makes this sage observation happens to be an aging pimp, trying to comfort his comrades while their industry is in a slump, it applies just as well to the cyclical nature of [...]

Bronson, the new biopic about Charlie Bronson, “Britain’s most famous prisoner,” begins, more or less, with its hero naked, filthy, snarling, and stuck in a cage. It ends — and I don’t think I’m giving much away here — with its hero naked, filthy, snarling, and stuck in an even smaller cage. This is not [...]

As a movie, Zombieland very much mirrors the behavior of zombies themselves — relentless, bloodthirsty, and dumb as a lobotomized eighth-grader. Eschewing any form of social commentary, Zombieland instead opts for a similar tone as that employed by Edgar Wright in his 2004 genre parody Shaun of the Dead by mining zombie killing for laughs [...]

Before the New York Anime Festival happened this year, I was supposed to play at a release party for Eureka 7: Good Night Sleep Tight Young Lovers the night before the convention. Due to scheduling conflicts this never actually happened, however I did get to see a pre-screening of the movie, which was pretty cool [...]

In the alternate universe imagined in Jonathan Mostow’s new film, Surrogates, Earth is altogether more pleasant. Ninety-eight percent of the world’s population, we are told, sits in bedrooms, clad in sweatpants, using mind control to guide fantastically lifelike robots through the daily chores of everyday life. It’s a sort of über-videogame on a global scale. [...]

I am a big fan of high flying martial arts action movies, and in my many assorted travels and adventures I managed to recently catch a local screening of The Restless, a recent import from South Korea about … aboooouuut … uh … wait a minute what was this movie about again? The movie was [...]

Paparazzi swarm the front of the stage, the cast lost in a Blitzkrieg of stabbing white flashes. Megan Fox tries out a variety of come-hither poses next to costar Amanda Seyfried, occasionally transferring her weight atop those skyscraper stilettos. She has been trained well. “This is a tribute to the Fierce Power of Estrogen,” declares [...]

A Russian plane crashes at the South Pole in 1957 after one of those classically idiotic gun fights in a plane that can only end badly for everyone involved. Do movie characters never watch movies? Fifty years later, U.S. marshal Carrie Stetko, played with a boring earnestness by Kate Beckinsale, is stationed at the Amundsen [...]

A Glourious Return to Form Although he bought the rights to Enzo G. Castellari’s 1978 Italian WWII “macaroni combat” Inglorious Bastards as his ostensible source material, Quentin Tarantino has created, once again, something defiantly sui generis, or as he puts it, “a spaghetti Western but with World War II iconography.” Structured in chapters, like his [...]

Young filmmakers take note — this is how you start a career in the industry. Having familiarized myself with the shorts and commercial work of District 9′s director Neill Blomkamp prior to taking my seat at the 12:01 a.m. screening (presented by Peter Jackson, no less) I had a certain level of expectation that this [...]

Every so often a movie comes along that makes you feel good inside. Sword of the Stranger is one of those movies, and this is odd because by the end, practically everyone is dead! (Ooops spoilers!) OK, now that we pissed off a good fifty percent of our audience let’s get serious for a moment. [...]