Under normal circumstances, adolescence is a difficult field to navigate, but for an undersized, child-like boy with dysfunctional parents, it can be a minefield of isolation. Based on the novel, “The Book of Intimate Grammar” by David Grossman, Israeli director Nir Bergman’s powerful film Intimate Grammar is the heartbreaking story of a boy stuck in [...]

Hunter S. Thompson was an acclaimed author and journalist, though as memorable as his literature is, he also has a legacy for his lifelong love of alcohol, mescaline, LSD, and cocaine. And on February 20, 2005, when the drugs stopped supplying happiness, he shot himself to death. The suicide note read: “No More Games. No [...]

Ding! Ding! Ding! It’s time for a brief lesson on the Bard of Avon — William Shakespeare. Born to a working-class family in early 1560s, and, with a sixth-grade formal education, he began as a successful actor in London. Later, ‘Peare branched out to writing plays, specifically comedies and tragedies. His more famous works, considered [...]

Late last night Magnet Releasing (Magnolia Pictures) put out the trailer for their haunted hotel flick, The Innkeepers. It takes place in The Yankee Pedlar Hotel and poking its other-wordly inhabitants are two employees charged with boxing everything up and closing its doors forever. I’m not the biggest fan of Sara Paxton but the two [...]

It’s the good, the bad, and the catty in Chris Miller’s Puss in Boots, the first action-packed spinoff of the Shrek series, and to the surprise of many, it not only provides viewers a much needed history lesson by explaining how everyone’s favorite swashbuckling orange tabby came to be the legend he is today, but [...]

The second trailer for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol arrived yesterday and I must say I’m now pumped to see the movie. After his covert team is disavowed by the government for an attack on the Kremlin, Ethan Hunt and his team — Benji Dunn, Jane Carter and Brandt — must work blind to clear [...]

4.3.2.1.. The title of this multi-threaded thriller gives the impression that a timer is counting down the seconds — maybe it is bomb methodically ticking down to Armageddon, maybe it is a rocket set to take flight to the moon. Or maybe, as in this case, it spells out the specifics of the film. There [...]

From Universal Studios and Illumination Entertainment (Hop, Despicable Me) and the flighty imagination of Dr. Seuss comes the timely tale of The Lorax. Timely in such that it is about the loss of environment at the hands of corporate greed. In it a boy, Ted, seeks out the wispy and colorful Truffula Tree to win [...]

The second theatrical trailer for the supernatural induced Armageddon film 11-11-11 is now online. In it, an American widower begins to unveil clues to a coming invasion of demons to our Earthly realm. Finding himself alone and in a foreign land, he works feverishly to get believed and put together a plan to stop the [...]

You will enjoy particular films even more if you do not know very much beforehand; think The Sixth Sense or The Crying Game. Previews of movies nowadays give away everything including the set up, the conflict, the climax, and sometimes even the ending all before you go and see it. The preview for The Skin [...]

Every year or so a claymation project gets greenlit, to, I suppose, offset the plethora of computer animated features clogging cineplexs nowadays. The feature for 2012 is The Pirates! Band of Misfits, a Sony Pictures Animation and Aardman production that borrows a story from Gideon Defoe’s The Pirates! book series. In this adventure, Pirate Captain [...]

Set in a fictional brokerage firm in 2008 just before the housing bust, Margin Call appears to be very loosely based on Lehman Brothers (hence the boldly printed words “Inspired by a True Story” on its poster). Opening strongly, Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) is ushered into a conference room to meet with people he has [...]

During my younger years, my mother would always tell me outlandish stories. Most of these tales involved animals spontaneously springing to life and adapting anthropomorphic qualities and inspired an overactive imagination, but one fable in particular would always scare me witless. As a superstitious woman, she’d look at me — her words marinated in conviction [...]

Admittedly, I haven’t the slightest idea of what it means to be a woman (especially in these oh-so-confusing times). But, with the media on blast about weight loss products and plastic surgery, and super models — all rail-thin and covered in makeup — constantly being shoved in our faces, I assume that it’s difficult for [...]

Kaboom is a celluloid pastry, an instrument of candor, a bundle of youthful fun that inspires even the more soporific among us (I’m looking at you, elderly couple next to me who came to the wrong film and gladly stayed through to the end). In strongly repudiating all the noise over how The Social Network [...]

When legendary frontman Jim Morrison joined The 27 Club in 1971, it is widely believed that he did so while reading one of the earliest unofficial scripts for what would become Platoon, sent to him by director Oliver Stone. Whether or not Jim would have been given the film’s lead role is uncertain. Regardless, Stone [...]

Um . . . hmm . . . wow. I’m stupefied at what a colossal mess The Three Musketeers has been made into. Three of the more prominent heroes in history have been watered down to pathetic caricatures and, in their own movie, given a back seat to a nausea inducing 3D experience and to [...]

Everyone has their own, personal reason for choosing to walk the 500 mile Camino de Santiago. This is a trail which begins in France, winds its way through the French Pyrenees, across northern Spain’s Basque region, and ends in Galicia at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Legend says St. James is buried here. Every [...]

Out of fucking control is how I would describe the latest red-band trailer for A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas. There is not a single thing politically correct about it. From a baby getting high and snorting coke, to NPH calling Jesus a cockblocker, to a hot chick instructing Harold to “fuck a baby [...]

Butch Cassidy didn’t die! Both he and the Sundance Kid somehow made it out alive at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and escaped certain death at the hands of the Bolivian Army. Flash forward 20 years and Butch, now known as James Blackthorn (Sam Shepard), is still in Bolivia and living [...]

A second trailer for Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows has been made available for viewing by Warner Bros. Pictures. This trailer markets more of the action — the train sequence is highlighted more as is the artillery shelling woods scene in which bullet time trickery is used with gusto. It’s also got [...]

The Mill and the Cross is a movie inside of a painting, specifically a 1564 painting titled “The Way to Calvary” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Pieter Bruegel (Rutger Hauer) is the main character in the film which takes turns following him as he decides how his painting will take shape and who will be [...]

Based on the nonfiction book “To Kill the Irishman: The War That Crippled the Mafia” by Rick Porrello, Kill the Irishman is a compelling walk through Cleveland’s criminal underbelly during the 1970s and an informative look at a man who brought down the hammer on the mafia’s golden age. To seasoned consumers of gangster movies, [...]

Curtis (Michael Shannon) is having bad dreams. Bad dreams are a bit low key to accurately describe what he dreams at night; absolute night terrors works better. He dreams his faithful dog suddenly attacks him and takes a chunk out of his arm and later he dreams his best buddy stabs him with a pickax. [...]

Who, in their right mind, would have thought a film about the enthusiasm for the frankly boring occupation of birdwatching would make for such a fun experience? Apparently 20th Century Fox did, as their newest release, The Big Year, while not drop dead hilarious, is nonetheless a very decent time at the cinemaplex. Evidently, for [...]

A shapeshifting creature from outer space. Interesting (and a bit campy) the first time it was introduced to movie going audiences in 1951’s The Thing from Another World (which was adapted from the short story “Who Goes There?”). Downright fucked up scary in 1982, when John Carpenter updated the scenario and released The Thing. Clunky [...]

The high-pitched singing sensations Alvin and the Chipmunks, and The Chipettes are back to fill our ears with squeaky versions of today’s popular songs in Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked (I’m not sure that is such a good thing, but nonetheless it’s going to happen). This time, after Alvin screws around on a well-needed vacation [...]

Rare for a mysterious thriller set in the high stakes business realm, Love Crime is dominated by women with the men relegated to paltry supporting roles. Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas) is on the fast track to the elite tier of her international business firm as chief of their Paris office. She is confident, sexy, knows [...]

Milk it for all it’s worth. And let’s be realistic, some of the actors in American Reunion, the fourth in the American Pie series (unless you’re counting the four straight to DVD titles) don’t have much going for them and probably jumped at the chance to reprise their roles. This time around, the crew reconvene [...]

Hold onto your gonads — the trailer for the most anticipated film in history, The Avengers, is here. Because there are battles that conventional human beings can’t fight, SHIELD director Nick Fury sets to build a team of super protectors that can. Enter: Thor, Black Widow, Captain America, Iron Man and Hawkeye (and perhaps Hulk?). [...]

Being the responsible parents that they are, when their boys get into a scrap in the schoolyard, the Cowan’s and Longstreet’s meet up to discuss the events. As the day progresses, however, it’s these “upstanding” parents that act more outrageous and childlike. Based off of the play “God of Carnage,” Carnage, directed by Roman Polanski, [...]

Ah, the bungled bank robbery movie. A movie that could have done with a cameo appearance from Eileen Brennan, Flypaper at least adds a slight kink in its comedy presentation, which results in it being slightly fresher than it perhaps could have been. A bank is being robbed, the heist goes wrong, and the perpetrators [...]

Germain (Gerard Depardieu) is not illiterate. He knows how to read and write, but he really prefers not to. For one, he is not very good at reading — he goes slowly and he uses his finger to follow the lines across the page. However, his comprehension is pretty good, especially when someone reads aloud [...]

Compare experienced political operatives with their interns and you’ll see more than wrinkled faces and less hair up top separates them. The interns still have fresh ideals and expectations of the candidates they choose to support; the experienced staffers know better. There was a point on a campaign in their past where their own ideals [...]

Creepy describes the situation Edgar Allan Poe finds himself in. In the dark thriller The Raven, it seems a serial killer has taken to Poe’s writing and is using it as a template to spectacularly kill people (think “The Pit and the Pendulum”). Poe, enlisted by Baltimore detectives, puts his macabre mind to work to [...]

Let’s face it, no one is exactly young in Paramount Pictures’ Young Adult — one of them just acts like a snobby prom queen. That one in particular is Mavis Gary, a woman who returns to her small hometown (where she isn’t exactly remembered fondly) to reclaim her high school sweetheart. He, unfortunately, is married [...]

Real Steel, directed by Shawn Levy, is about an estranged father and son who learn to bond with each other through the medium of boxing robots. It’s the year 2020 and robots have replaced humans as the gladiators in the boxing ring. Former boxer Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) is unsuccessfully trying to make ends meet [...]

The second, and last, theatrical trailer for DreamWorks Animation’s Puss in Boots has made its way to the web. In this origin story, the swashbuckling Puss in Boots goes on a quest for the Goose that lays the Golden Egg with new characters Humpty Dumpty and Kitty Softpaws. Along the way, expect many kid and [...]

Man will bet on anything. You’ve got your traditional betting that’s done at casinos like poker and blackjack and others done with a local bookie on football and boxing. Some folks even like to bet on back alley dog fights. But if 13, Géla Babluani’s remake of his own film 13 Tzameti, is to be [...]

The title of Lars von Trier’s latest film refers to a rogue planet, significantly dwarfing our Earth and heading for it on an inevitable collision course. von Trier sets the countdown to extinction among a wealthy family holed up in a storybook castle, inhabited largely by two sisters, one a force of depressive nature and [...]

The Emperor is dead and next in line to replace him is a woman. Never in the history of China has there been an Empress. As her coronation draws closer, loyalties are tested, schemes are rumored, and when people start to literally burst into flames, the stakes can be no higher for all involved. This [...]

I Melt with You. Sounds like some sort of romantic drama in which two people fall madly in love, doesn’t it? Not so in Magnolia Pictures upcoming feature — it follows a yearly weekend reunion of four life-long friends. And based on the trailer, these guys know how to get down, dirty and blow off [...]