3/14/09:  "Remakes make all kinds of sense for studio suits.  They get to tell their shareholders that they're exploiting a corporate asset in their long-standing rights to the original, and to pump up sales for yet another “Super-Amazing Unlimited Ultimate Edition” DVD (complete with free movie ticket).  It's also easier to promote an existing property than a new story.  You may not see a single trailer, TV ad or poster for Race to Witch Mountain, but when you see the title in your local theater listings, odds are you'll think “Oh, there's a new Witch Mountain movie out.”  Which is not to say that there's anything inherently wrong with remakes, just that movies that begin life as a deal already have one strike against them.  And Race to Witch Mountain is very much “deal first, movie second”, pairing superpowered alien kids with an action hero protector for a movie that peppers relentless but defanged action sequences with bonding and a cute animal sidekick.  Director Andy Fickman and writers Matt Lopez and Mark Bomback are so busy with their checklist of Family Blockbuster Stuff that their movie is woefully short on plot and is amazingly dull for something with this much “action”.  Good thing an excellent cast is game:  perversely, the only time this Race gets interesting is when the characters stop running and actually talk." MORE

6/6/10:  "If adventure had a name, it would be Indiana Jones.  If adventure had a theme song, it would go like this: “Duh-duh-DUH-duh, Duh-duh-duh, Duh-duh-DUH-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh-duh”.  It's difficult, as we close in on the 30th anniversary of Raiders of the Lost Ark, to remember that the movies chugged along for a good 80 years WITHOUT Harrison Ford's iconic whip-toting archaeologist of action, because he's so utterly the embodiment of a certain kind of escapist adventure that it feels now like he invented it rather than the other way around.  Like George Lucas' other triumphant franchise, Raiders was conceived as an homage to the serialized B-movie entertainment that flourished in the 40's and early 50's.  The thing is, what Lucas lacked in originality, he more than made up for in execution, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, directed by his legendary pal Steven Spielberg, wasn't just the most expensive self-contained serial ever made, it's still the only one you really need.

In 1936, Fedora-clad adventurer “Indiana” Jones (Harrison Ford) treks through the South American jungle with an exploration party in search of a valuable statue.  Natives, turncoats and hidden traps pick them off one at a time until it's just Indy and Satipo (Alfred Molina)."  MORE

1/28/08:  "When they're flying high, actors can be disdainful of franchises:  who wants to play the same characters over and over when there are all kinds of new and exciting roles offering comparable paychecks?  But once those A-list roles dry up, they're always happy to have those iconic characters to fall back on, usually in inferior knockoffs produced to ever-diminishing returns.  Sylvester Stallone ran his iconic Rocky and Rambo franchises into the ground in the 80's, but the characters retained their grip on our consciousness:  one the eternal underdog, the other the ultimate symbol of America's military might.  With his movie career more or less in ruins, it was no surprise to see Stallone return to those characters.  But what has come as nothing less than a shock is that he has done so with energy, imagination and skill that rivals his finest work.  Rocky Balboa was a gloriously heroic and thoughtful period on the character that made Sly a star:  a worthy bookend to the Best Picture of 1976.  The Rambo franchise which began in 1982 with First Blood was never that kind of artistic enterprise, but it delivered its' share of high-octane entertainment to 80's kids like me.  Rambo, the unambitiously-titled 4th film adventure of the traumatized Vietnam vet, is an outstanding comeback vehicle, sticking to the formula but running it with a newfound skill and intensity. It's simple, really:  set up an unjust foreign power as bowling pins for our hero to knock over.  And blow up.  And disembowel.  And decapitate.  Let the fun begin!" MORE

4/2/11:  "As much as we all like to hate on studio executives for dumbing down and generally screwing up movies, the truth is that if we went to see more smart movies, we'd get more of them.  And when there's a genre or style that can be relied upon to make money no matter what, the money men mostly leave the creative types alone.  Case in point:  animated movies make money hand-over-fist pretty much regardless of their content, so you'll actually see things like Up and Fantastic Mr. Fox in the format that you'd never witness in live action.  Add to the list Gore Verbinski's Rango, the first feature animated by George Lucas' iconic special effects house Industrial Light & Magic.  On the surface, John Logan's screenplay (from a story he drempt up with Verbinski and James Ward Byrkit) is a simple genre exercise, a Western filled with animated animals instead of people.  But it's also so much more:  a resonant story about the friction between traditional ethics and the march of progress, the relationship between animals and the human world that surrounds them, and most surprisingly, an existentialist meditation on the role of archetypes in defining ourselves and our place in the world.  It takes a little while to get your bearings in a movie that deliberately declines to explain itself as it goes, but by the end, Rango is truly something to behold." MORE

6/30/07:  "I often sniff derisively at trailers when they use the phrase “From the studio that brought you...” suggesting that the genius of a film you love came not from the actors, writers, directors, cinematographers, composers, set designers and best boys who actually made it, but rather the suits who signed their checks.  But it's pretty much impossible to resist the carefully plotted hype campaign that has, from the moment I was first wowed by Toy Story over a decade ago, sought to present Disney subcontractors Pixar as an authorial, rather than corporate, entity.  And so it is that one has come to expect a higher level of skill and sophistication from animated films bearing that label than those of rival studios or even plain old Disney itself.  Alas, while Ratatouille comes to us from acclaimed writer-director Brad Bird, whose previous Pixar outing The Incredibles may be the best movie ever produced under their brand, and has a look that absolutely shines, it is a relentlessly average story with no memorable characters and precious few laughs.

Remy (voice of Patton Oswalt) isn't like other rats:  he doesn't want to simply gather and devour every piece of crap he can get his hands on." MORE

11/13/11:  "Something Hollywood isn’t always as are of as it should be:  in the deepest, darkest recesses of the ten-year-old mind that never quite leaves a guy no matter how old he gets, all those monsters, superheroes and robots kicking around are really only good for one thing:  to fight!  Oh, yeah, we might wanna be their friend, learn all about their many powers and backstories so we can amaze our friends with our knowledge, but all this is just preliminaries to the main event.  Robots, in particular, are made for fighting.  This much Shawn Levy’s new movie Real Steel understands to an uncommon degree.  Using just the barest dusting of Richard Matheson’s 1956 short story Steel (which was once more faithfully filmed as a Twilight Zone episode), the Night at the Museum director sets out to combine family drama, a can’t-miss underdog sports formula and the wonders of Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots into an entertainment machine for which I’d had very high hopes.  Alas, Real Steel isn’t really pitched at those with an inner ten-year-old, but rather at ten-year-olds themselves, and lacks much in the way of grit or real emotional heft.  But it does have two excellent adult stars in Hugh Jackman and Evangeline Lily, and it also has fighting robots to spare.  Given what it could have been, Real Steel is a fairly substantial disappointment, but if the concept intrigues you, there’s a lot of can’t miss stuff here that mostly doesn’t.  Just know what you’re getting yourself into." MORE

4/5/07:  "I have a weakness for Theological thrillers:  not because of any particular religious bent, but because it's interesting to watch characters forced to confront as real things they'd been certain existed (if at all) only on some metaphysical plane.  While The Reaping isn't as Scripture-focused as, say, the Left Behind series, it uses the ten plagues of the Old Testament as a hook for an intriguing game of “What do you believe?” and “How can you be sure?”  At heart, it's a Twist Movie, but the twist is awfully good and flows more organically from the subject matter than you'd expect, even moments before it's revealed.

A traumatic experience (believe me, it's pretty traumatic...) while serving as a Missionary has caused Katherine Winter (Hilary Swank) to turn away from God and toward science.  She now specializes in debunking “miracles” reported around the world with Perfectly Rational Explanations.  Her latest task comes to her from Doug (David Morrissey), a science teacher in the small town of Haven, Louisiana.  Following the death of a local boy, the river where his body was found has turned red.  Blood red.  While Katherine and her assistant Ben (Idris Elba) collect samples, frogs start falling from the sky.  Then come the flies, and the diseased livestock." MORE

11/17/10:  "Unless Benjamin Button is somewhere reading this, it's safe to say that none of us is getting any younger and most of us aren't terribly happy about it.  There are compensations for aging, of course; experience really is a skill all its own.  But from the moment you pass the quarter-century mark, an ever-increasing segment of the population is going to look down on you as “old” in one way or another, and that's why the notion of “The Old Guys” coming back to kick butt is one of Hollywood's most enduring fantasies.  For this task, Red assembles a first-rate team of actors whose ages range from “a little old” to “pretty old” and even finds a role for that spry 90-something Ernest Borgnine.  What these performers have in common is the presence necessary to convince us they could tear your heart out no matter how old they are, and the skill to build complete characters out of just a few key moments.  As such, Red, aided a skillfully composed script by Jon and Erich Hoeber and Robert Schwentke's light directorial touch, is a first-rate action flick that should delight even those too young to know who the heck that Borgnine dude is.

Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) is a former spy who's found absolutely nothing to occupy himself in retirement." MORE

6/2/08:  "It's fun every once in a while to see a director go somewhere genre-wise that you would never expect to find him.  Yes, David Mamet is the gold standard for macho posturing in modern screenwriting (the man wrote The Untouchables, for crying out loud!), but a man who's still thought of at least as much as a playwrite as a filmmaker has spent his career a world away from martial arts action movies.  Those two worlds collide in Redbelt, in which the sport of Mixed Martial Arts is more than just a backdrop for a Mametesque plot filled with con games and triple crosses.  The writer/director actually holds a purple belt in Jiu-Jitsu and has something to say about the conflict between martial arts intended for spiritual focus and self-defense and the sports empires that market them as a type of gladiatorial combat.  Redbelt's all over the map as it tries to do a little more than it's capable of in about a hundred minutes, but its' unconventional climax packs an wallop of manly sentiment.

Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a Jiu-Jitsu instructor whose storefront studio trains all kinds of people to use the art for self-defense.  One of his students, police officer Dylan Flynn (Randy Couture) is put in an awkward position when tightly wound attorney Laura Black (Emily Mortimer) comes in looking for directions and accidentally fires the gun she carries for protection at him." MORE

3/15/11:  "A funny thing happened while Thirteen director Catherine Hadwicke was collecting a quick paycheck to direct some movie about a teenage girl in love with a vampire:  catching a massive wave of literary popularity, Twilight became the highest grossing movie ever directed by a woman.  While it may open some doors to her, it also poses a problem:  to the extent that there was a Hardwicke Brand prior to its release, it certainly had nothing to do with tween-baiting blockbusters, and now, for better or worse, that's exactly what she's expected to stand for.  So, for her follow-up, we get Red Riding Hood, which attempts to deliver high concept fantasy monsters, mild thrils and teen romance while also sprinkling in some genuine quality in the form of big-ticket supporting actors and plot threads best described as a road show production of The Crucible.  However it was meant to work, what limps into theaters is a mess, at once high-minded allegory, basic cable monster movie and Harlequin romance, all wrapped in the trappings of a fairy tale that doesn't prove a particularly sturdy vehicle of any of the above.  Shorn to a hair under 100 minutes and pasted together with narration and dream sequences, Red Riding Hood has too much weird stuff going on to be dull.  But the longer it goes on, the more it becomes clear that this basket is seriously bereft of goodies." MORE

10/25/07:  "These are dangerous times:  opportunistic politicians use the Global threat of terrorism as an excuse to attack our basic human rights.  And opportunistic screenwriters use those attacks as an excuse to trot out tired melodramatic cliches in the name of proving that We're All Connected.  Last year's Foreign Press darling Babel is the most famous example of this Soap Opera of Connection genre, but it ultimately had little to say other than that people who speak in subtitles are worthy of the same respect as Really Big Stars like Brad Pitt.  Now, along comes the Babelesque Rendition, which has a ton to say about terrorism, the Middle East, and a US Government-sanctioned torture program called Extraordinary Rendition.  Alas, it says it so softly, so hopelessly reverent of its' own importance, that even the converted may grow bored during the sermon.

Several stories are told at once.  Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a low-ranking government official assigned to an unnamed Middle Eastern country when the car he's traveling in goes through a square targeted by a suicide bomber.  Douglas is OK, but his superior is killed and a battlefield promotion puts him in charge." MORE

3/4/07:  "If there's nothing else a movie studio loves, it's a concept with a pre-existing audience.  It's for that reason that multiplexes are forever jammed with sequels, adaptations of novels, remakes, and movies based on old TV shows, videogames and toys.  And, of course, what has more of a built-in audience than taking the cast of a current TV series and giving them their own movie?  This rarely works, but everybody wants to give it a shot, the less-seen the series, the better.  I have never seen Comedy Central's wacky police sitcom Reno 911, and aside from a funny trailer I had little reason to be optimistic about their big-screen adventure, Reno 911:  Miami.  But that's why they play 'em:  Miami is a genuinely hilarious comedy, the kind of fine cinematic effort I haven't seen since Steve Guttenberg left the Police Academy series.

The Reno, Nevada Sheriff's department is not exactly a crack law-enforcement unit.  In fact, they're so pitiful they can barely catch a chicken loose on the road.  But they do have their own ongoing documentary series (a camera follows all the film's events) and they're invited to the National Police Convention in Miami because, well, everyone's invited.  So they load up the entire force (leaving the city either unprotected or better-off, depending on your point of view) in a bus and head across-country." MORE

3/24/10:  "As longtime site readers know, I'm a sucker for hardcore, R-rated sci-fi action flicks with a themes steeped in social commentary.  I am, after all, the guy who put Gamer on his 10-best list and gave The Condemned four stars.  As such, you'd think I'd be the ideal audience for Miguel Sapochnik's Repo Men, centered around a future business that makes predatory loans to sell the sick artificial organs at sky-high prices... and then reclaims them with extreme prejudice when the customers can't make the payments.  Alas, Repo is a big ol' bundle of things that don't work, starting with the way that concept manages to be a little bit of everything without saying anything continuing with how not one of the movie's action sequences generates thrills and finished off by a great cast not one of whom gives a standout performance.  Well, the movie is truly finished off by the way it finishes, but we'll get to that after the appropriate spoiler barricade.  Suffice it to say, like the US health care system it almost kinda seeks to satirize, Repo Men could use a whole lot of reform.

It's The Future, and things are not going so well (although we mostly need off-screen newscasts and narrators to tell us so)." MORE

7/28/07:  "For 5 months in 1965, US Air Force pilot Dieter Dengler endured starvation and torture as a Laotian prisoner of war.  Then, for 23 days, he battled his way through the jungle, sharing a single sole of a shoe with a fellow escapee and eating things you do not want to think about eating to survive.  I can't imagine how he did it, but thanks to Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn, I can at least imagine what he endured.  It's one of the great immersive survival movies, and if it proves to be a little slow and to contain one really misguided performance, it also achieves a level of punishing realism one rarely experiences at the movies.

German immigrant Dengler (Christian Bale) grew up watching Allied bombers pummel is home and somehow ended up dreaming of joining them.  He got his wish as an Air Force pilot participating in the pre-Vietnam War bombing of Laos.  On his first mission, he's shot down and falls into enemy hands.  After much abuse, he's dragged to a makeshift prisoner of war camp with a few other inmates including Duane Martin (Steve Zahn) and Eugene DeBruin (Jeremy Davies).  To the man they are broken and fearful, but Dieter doesn't know the meaning of either word.  From the moment he arrives, he's plotting escape and slowly but surely wins everyone else over.  But a successful escape would only be the beginning." MORE

9/24/10:  "Few popular film franchises have divided their target audience more ferociously than the films based upon Capcom's Resident Evil video game franchise.  The movies clearly have their fans, as the franchise keeps chugging along, but hard-core gamers have made them and filmmaker Paul W.S. Anderson a favorite target of online abuse.  I've never played the games and only joined the franchise with the last installment, Resident Evil:  Extinction, so I approach Resident Evil:  Afterlife with less of an investment than most potential viewers.  While I enjoyed Extinction, Afterlife is a real step forward, almost entirely shrugging off the trappings of the Zombie Movie and embracing the eternal struggle between Milla Jovovich's Alice and The Umbrella Corporation, a deliriously outsized Evil Corporation that delights me to no end.  While Anderson's return to the director's chair (after just writing the last two installments) is short on sense, it's long on entertainment thanks to a wonderfully game cast buoyed by the addition of Prison Break star Wentworth Miller.  It's only fair to have a TV star onhand, because Resident Evil:  Afterlife plays very much like the 2-hour season finale of a show the rest of whose season I missed.  I didn't always know what was going on, but it was undeniably cool." MORE

9/27/07:  "First, a Lost-style flashback:  I couldn't tell you exactly how old I was, but sometime in the 70's, at a single-digit age, a since-defunct UHF station decided to mix up their Saturday Afternoon Creature Double Feature and add to the usual run of black-and-white 50's monster movies Bob Clark's Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things.  Watching this gruesome zombiethon at that age (with my parents, no less!) pretty much scarred me, if not for life, at least for a couple decades.  While I've developed a healthy appreciation of most kinds of R-rated horror as an adult, I've remained a tad wary of anything that rises from its' grave in large numbers to eat the flesh of the living.  So it is that I arrive late to the Resident Evil party.  I've never played any of the video games nor seen either previous chapter in the popular movie franchise based upon them.  But as Resident Evil:  Extinction arrived on the scene sporting a cool post-apocalyptic Las Vegas trailer, I figured, what the hell:  if things went too badly, I could always run screaming for the exits and give anyone who asked an assumed name.  I was rewarded with a movie light on the zombies and heavy on the Road Warrior, plus an outstanding Milla Jovovich as the hottest woman to ever slice off two heads in the same motion." MORE

9/1/07:  "Since being blown away by his little-seen debut feature Deterrence back in 1999, I've been fascinated by the career of film critic-turned-director Rod Lurie.  He's a real oddity in our pre-sold movie era:  a director interested primarily in stories about politics and ethics. While it's brought him his largest audience and greatest popular acclaim, his fixation on getting a woman into the White House got him mired in the preachy, wonkish narratives of The Contender and the TV series Commander in Chief.  But I loved his passionately felt 2001 prison thriller The Last Castle.  Alas, it flopped, and it's taken another six years for him to direct his fourth feature, the boxing-flavored newspaper drama Resurrecting the Champ.  Like his other films, it wears its' heart on its' sleeve.  Unlike them, its' lens pans down below the concerns of Presidents and Generals to tell a story about the day-to-day battles we fight between facing the truth and hiding behind lies.  It's a steady, deliberate film filled with good performances and it packs a surprising emotional punch.

Erik Kernan Jr. (Josh Hartnett) coasts on his name as the son of a famous sportscaster, writing mediocre articles for a Denver newspaper edited by the disapproving Metz (Alan Alda)." MORE

9/14/08:  "De Niro.  Pacino.  Brand names for fans of a certain kind of movie and a certain school of acting:  if you think the 70's were Hollywood's greatest decade, you no doubt get a little misty whenever you think of their single scene together in the popular (albeit overrated) 1995 police thriller Heat.  For whatever reason, that was the only time the two icons had shared on screen in their long, legendary careers, until now.  Righteous Kill is a nicely tricky, above-average police thriller on the page that is kicked up several notches by at long last putting the two Greatest Actors of their generation together for long stretches in roles perfectly tailored to their personas.  While I loved just watching them do what they do together, the movie itself kinda snuck up on me, but by the time it's done playing all of writer Russell Gewirtz's clever cards, this is a genuinely engrossing and morally complex thriller that's a worthy addition to both men's formidable resumes.

Two Internal Affairs officers (Sterling K. Brown & Alan Rosenberg) watch a videotape of a Police Detective everyone calls Turk (De Niro) confessing to a series of murders.  The tape continues to serve as narration as we flash back to “how it all began”.” MORE

8/6/11:  "Say what you will about some of their wilder excesses, but there’s never been a gutsier franchise than the one that began with 1968’s Planet of the Apes.  From the stunning reveal that the title planet was in fact Earth, complete with gloriously buried Statue of Liberty, through those underground mutants with their Holy Bomb, the wonderfully nuts sequel that destroys said planet at the hands of the original’s own dying star, time travel back to have the refugees of the planet of the apes become the creators of it, and an outrageous ape uprising, the first four POTA movies are nothing if not an exercise in taking risks and changing things up.  How tragic, then to see an Apes reboot done in 2001 that took virtually no risks (yeah, the Charlton Heston cameo was priceless, but even the kicky tag with Mark Wahlberg returning to Earth to find Aperaham Lincoln waiting in Washington DC felt more calculated than gutsy) and sought to use the Ape name for purely commercial purposes.  One of the top-grossing would-be franchise starters nobody ever gave a moment’s thought to sequeling, Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes took a decade to get washed out of our collective consciousness and now 20th Century Fox goes back to the well with Rise of the Planet of the Apes, an intriguing reimagining of the last good movie in the original Apes series (that’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes for those of you scoring at home).” MORE

2/14/10:  "If no one believed in demonic possession and/or exorcism, Hollywood would have had to invent them, because the whole spectacle just makes for great cinema.  But many people do believe in them, so most modern exorcism movies walk a deliberate line between exploitation and documentation. The Rite may be the closest thing we've ever had to an “exorcism drama”, tracking a young seminary student through a crisis of faith while studying under a veteran exorcist in Rome.  It's “suggested” by the book The Making of a Modern Exorcist by Matt Baglio, which documents a similar relationship between two men of whom these characters are fictionalized versions.  Of course, neither of them ever claims to have actually been possessed, with the other having to exorcise him, which is probably why the end credits of The Rite contain not one but two disclaimers letting us know that while all this is kinda sorta vaguely inspired by a suggestion of a true story, it's really all made up.  But that doesn't stop it from being an interesting little movie, with Anthony Hopkins in his cynical/sinister wheelhouse and a strong performance by Colin O'Donaghue as the student who needs to step up to the big leagues well before his time.  This IS a character study about people who travel in a horror movie world as opposed to an actual horror movie, and genre fans looking for more conventional thrills might find themselves quite bored by a film whose deliberate pace occasionally tested my interest..” MORE

5/15/10:  "I'd say I hope to never again read an interview where someone connected with a new Robin Hood movie utters some variation on “Our Robin's not some prissy in tights, he's a man's man!” but that would mean I'm gonna get hit by a bus within the next five years, so I'll grin and bear it.  In a business that always struggles to reconcile a need to cannibalize the properties of the past and a white-knuckle terror that those properties will be laughed out of town because of their datedness, no classic film has been more defamed by its remakers than The Adventures of Robin Hood.  That 1938 masterpiece is remembered, depending upon your disposition, either as one of the greatest of all American films, or for Errol Flynn's green tights.  Recent films about the noble bandit who robs from the rich and gives to the poor have tended to, well, suck, in part because of their hesitation to embrace a story that is, depending upon your disposition, either awesome or quaint.  Robin Hood goes one step farther and tosses out the entire story in favor of a medieval version of Lost's Sideways World:  characters have the same names and a few of the attributes we associate with the residents of Sherwood Forrest, but only in its closing moments does the film even begin to be about, you know, Robin Hood.  Some will call it an origin story:  I'll counter with “cynical slapping of a famous name on an unrelated story”." MORE

12/5/08:  "It's good to be cool, but not such an easy thing to achieve.  How often do we get 5 minutes into a movie and have to let out an internal sigh at the low energy level, the commitment to settling for killing time while stringing scenes together?  You can go too far the opposite way, of course, slamming away at the audience with camera tricks and self-consciousness until they put up a white flag and beg to be released back into the afternoon sun.  Somewhere in between lies Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla, which from its' opening shot is consistently snappy, light on its' feet and clever even though the mildly diverting plot never adds up to all that much.  I guess you'd say it's “pleasantly awesome”.

One Two (Gerard Butler) and Mumbles (Idris Elba) are London hoods (sadly, no one ever calls them “Villains”) who're looking to move up to nightclub owners.  No proper bank would lend them the money, of course, so they turn to Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson), the elder statesman of London Gangsters.  Lenny's got his fingers in pretty much everything, and that goes double for manipulating the zoning board, so out of simple spite he ensures that approval for their club is revoked after the money's been spent, putting the two men in a position where they NEED to pull off a job to pay him back." MORE

1/4/07:  "The Hero wins the big fight, gets The Girl, and the camera pulls back as we delight in the thought that they'll live Happily Ever After.  Oh, we may check back in on them once or twice in a few sequels, maybe The Girl will even be off-screen in a few of them, but we know everything will work out in the end.  Then, we never write, we never call, and The Hero does indeed live the hell out of the next few decades.  But surely there will come a time when the adventures are done, The Girl passes away, and he is left with nothing to do but to retell the tales of his victories again and again.  It is at this moment that Sylvester Stallone's extraordinary Rocky Balboa begins.

We all remember Rocky, the iconic rags-to-riches hero of the Oscar-winning 1976 classic and its' increasingly dismal sequels.  When we meet him again, he is in his late 50's, mourning the death of his beloved Adrian, struggling to retain some contact with his distant son (Heroes' Milo Ventimiglia), and probably wishing he had less with the increasingly bitter Paulie (Burt Young, as ever).  He tells those stories at his restaurant, Adrian's, and finds himself reaching out to Marie (Geraldine Hughes), a woman he once met as a child, and her son Steps (James Francis Kelly III) just looking for “a couple new friends”. MORE

11/14/08:  "“Loser.”  It is perhaps the most cutting and vicious insult known to man, bringing to mind an entire world full of people living up to their potential lined up, pointing and laughing at you.  Never mind that basically everyone fits someone's definition of the word:  we are all heavily invested, whether we want to admit it or not, in the notion that life is a game and the suspicion that we're losing.  Oh, sure, we could look at the glass as half-full and focus on the fact that each of us has found something in our lives that brings us joy, whether it meets with society's approval or not.  But that kind of sentiment just seems so... losery.  Hurray, then, to the minds (and they are many) behind the new comedy Role Models, a cheerfully vulgar, hilariously cynical tale that manges the near-impossible.  It makes being yourself, no matter how much of a loser you might seem to be, seem positively cool.

For Danny Donahue (Paul Rudd), life is a dead-end street.  Every one of life's little annoyances drives him crazier than the last, and the tenth anniversary of his job pitching “say no to drugs, say yes to Minotaur Energy Drink” to high schoolers fills him with despair for his unrealized potential.  His partner, the Minotaur mascot Wheeler (Seann William Scott) throws him a surprise party, but not even the presence of his girlfriend Beth (Elizabeth Banks) can brighten Danny's day." MORE

4/3/08:  "It's funny what an accent will do:  check your local theater listings and see where the British comedy Run Fatboy Run is playing.  Yeah, it's probably snuck into a multiplex or two, but if you've got a multi-screen art house in your area, I bet it's there.  And if your multiplex has an area set aside for “Select” films, It's probably it's one of them.  But it really does a disservice to this fun, rousing comedy to consider it an art flick because all but one of its' characters is English.  In fact, the feature directorial debut of Friends star David Schwimmer is pretty much the opposite of one:  it does a fine job of running a well-established underdog formula, offers very few surprises, and is pitched precisely at the ticket-buying Regular Joe.  Pity if they missed out on it because it comes labeled with that scary “A” word.

Five years ago, Dennis (Simon Pegg) made a bad decision.  A really, really, colossally awful decision to leave Love of His Life Libby (Thandie Newton) at the alter while she was carrying their child.  Everything he's done since has followed the course he charted that day and he's now got a crummy apartment, a crummy job, and he's not much of a father to Jake (Matthew Fenton), the one thing that keeps him connected to Libby." MORE

8/12/07:  "It's hard to remember after almost ten years, but when Rush Hour arrived in the fall of 1998, it was a breath of fresh air:  an old-school buddy cop comedy with a couple of exciting twists.  Neither role was played by a white actor, and the film provided the best ever showcases for motormouthed comedian Chris Tucker and the US film career of martial arts legend Jackie Chan.  And most exciting of all, it was really, really good.  Tucker and Chan's characters were as sympathetic and relatable as they were funny, and Jim Kouf and Ross LaManna's screenplay was above-average for a writing-challenged genre.  Three years later, director Brett Ratner reteamed with Tucker and Chan on Rush Hour 2, a film just as funny and action-packed, but also bloated and scattershot in that way that summer sequels tend to be.  It, however, looks like Lethal Weapon when compared with the hopelessly shoddy threequel the trio has delivered after a six-year hiatus.  Rush Hour 3 is virtually action-free, shot like a old episode of Mannix and dragged down by a Chris Tucker performance so out of character he'd might as well be wearing a T-Shirt that reads “Hi, I'm Chris Tucker and I used to play Detective James Carter”.  Yet Tucker and Chan still wield formidable chemistry and the movie works so hard to be fun that it's not nearly as awful as the sum of its' defective parts.” MORE