3/6/07:  "What makes a director great?  We can SEE the work of actors, cinematographers, costume designers, set decorators and special effects technicians.  We can hear the words the screenwriter wrote and watch the mechanics of their plot in motion.  We can listen to the composer's music and feel it improving or detracting what what we see onscreen.  But what of the director?  How can we really know when the most elusively Godlike of movie craftsmen is doing their job?  I suspect that at the end of the day, it's when he or she ensures that everyone else has done theirs to the best of their ability, resulting in the best possible movie.  David Fincher has directed six feature films:  Alien 3, Se7en, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room, and now the historical serial killer thriller Zodiac.  I have loved each and every one.  And that is why I think Fincher is the best director working today.

On July 4, 1969, a young couple sitting in a parked car are approached by a man who opens fire on them, killing one and badly wounding the other.  About a month later, three California newspapers receive letters taking credit for this murder and two others the previous December.  Each letter contains one-third of a cryptogram which promises to identify the killer." MORE

9/26/09:  "As I've said more than once here, our favorite genres become like close friends.  We're always happy to see them, never tire of hearing them tell the same stories again and again and feel comfortable teasing them about things we'd never think were funny about a stranger.  How else to explain a movie like Zombieland, which thinks the devolution of the human race into flesh-hungry rabid maniacs is pretty damn hilarious, or, more importantly, the fact that it's right?  Knowing both the zombie and apocalypse genres well enough to rib the living daylights out of both, Ruben Fleisher's delightful action comedy collects a perfectly matched quartet of characters and asks them not only to survive in the face of planetary doom, but also to contemplate the purpose in their lives in a humanity-free vacuum.  As smart as it is gross (and believe me, it's plenty gross), Zombieland barely makes a single wrong step in a brilliantly audacious 90-minutes that might be the most optimistic, cheerful movie ever made about the end of the world.

A young man we know only as Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) narrates, and he's got some bad news:  just two weeks after a single tainted hamburger caused Man Cow Disease to become Mad Human Disease, the world is overrun with zombies." MORE

8/3/11:  "Adam Sandler’s got a nice little empire set up with his Happy Madison Productions, for which he produces all his starring vehicles, but also several other movie and TV titles a year for a posse of friends that includes Rob Schneider, David Spade and Nick Swardson.  The problem with this formula is that while those guys have varying degrees of usefulness as supporting players, none is a real Movie Star.  But the same can’t be said of the latest addition to the Happy Madison family, former TV comedian Kevin James, who co-starred with Sandler in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and then graduated to starring roles in the surprise hit Paul Blart Mall Cop.  What makes James unique in the Sandler crew is that, within the confines of a reliable formula, he’s genuinely charismatic and relatable.  And it doesn’t hurt that the Kevin James Formula is more built on lucid storytelling and less as a wall at which to throw everything the filmmakers can think of and see what sticks.  Zookeeper, his second go-round as a leading man, starts with a singularly unpromising conceit:  afraid to lose their beloved handler who feels like he needs a better job to win the girl of his dreams, the zoo’s animals break their Code of Silence to teach him how to romance her.  But a funny thing happened while five guys (including James) labored over this script:  Zookeeper works that unpromising concept for surprising insight into the way so many of our mating rituals are as simplistic and unfulfilling as a wolf marking his territory by peeing on a tree." MORE