There are some good things to say about the newest film by director James McTeigue (“Ninja Assassin,” “V For Vendetta“), a combination of “Sleepy Hollow,” “Saw,” “Se7en” and the latter-day Sherlock Holmes films. First, it acquaints the uninitiated with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, one of America’s most creative and tortured writers (Poe, while [...]

There is but two guarantees in the movie business and both deal with Johnny Depp. One, he can always be counted on to play “interesting” characters. Two, he is attached to the hip of Tim Burton. Both of these certainties are in play in the Gothic-themed horror flick Dark Shadows. Based on a 1960′s cult [...]

Daniel Espinosa’s Safe House is a lesson in “Filmmaking with Parkinson’s.” The choppily edited actions sequences — onslaughts of bright colors and enough “shaky-camera” to make Jason Bourne nauseous — are hard to endure. Moreover, they’re built on clichés: Coincidental protests (allowing the protagonists some cover), accidental assassinations, and a handful of close calls. Because [...]

There are several factoids I learned after watching The Wicker Tree, the 39 years in the making sequel to cult favorite “The Wicker Man.” For one, nuclear power plants make all men who drink or bathe in its cooling source sterile (although on the flip side it also grants them the gift of being able [...]

Even though there are now two films in Guy Ritchie’s vision of the Sherlock Holmes universe (the first aptly titled Sherlock Holmes), I am still getting accustomed to the athletic, street fighting Holmes as opposed to the merely cerebral genius who used to chase suspects by horse and buggy rather than bash their brains out [...]

Let’s get this out of the way first: Black Death is by no means an enjoyable movie due to its bleak and unflinching depiction of the 14th Century. Be that as it may, it is a riveting, dramatic horror picture that’s as brilliant as it is challenging. Coming from director Christopher Smith (Severance, Triangle), Black [...]

A “found footage” mockumentary, Lake Mungo is not a typical horror movie in the vein of The Blair Witch Project or The Exorcist. Instead of a schlocky series of cheap scares, freshman writer-director Joel Anderson has crafted a low-key supernatural drama which examines the emotional repercussions of a family dealing with grief. With that said [...]

Daniel Cormack’s ten-minute short, Amelia and Michael, has little dialogue but draws us in with its compelling use of gestures, facial expressions, and subtle glances to establish an unsettling mood. Featuring outstanding performances from Natasha Powell and Anthony Head as an estranged couple named Amelia and Michael, the film is a compelling experience of two [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The only thing more cliché than a wholesome American family moving into a cheap mansion, only to realize that the awesome deal they scored was thanks to a supernatural presence or a dark secret, is a city slicking author, so anxious to leave the noisiness of the urban jungle to pen his book, that he [...]

The second trailer for Paranormal Activity 3 is here and perhaps I misspoke when I described the first trailer saying “. . . what made the series special had left already.” Maybe it has something to do with the connection to children, but the demon presented to us in this trailer is much more violent [...]

I did not enjoy Abduction, but not for the reasons you might suspect. While there are many to address, I want to assure you that none of my negative points will verbally lambast lead actor Taylor Lautner just because “he’s that guy from Twilight.” Nor will I make scalding references to his gratuitous lack of [...]

If you ask me, I think what made the first Paranormal Activity special has left already left the series. Paramount thinks otherwise as the first taste of Paranormal Activity 3 has come online. This time around, it focuses on the beginning — when Katie and Kristi first summoned the demon to this world to wreak [...]

There is a new threat for the infamous English detective Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. His name is Professor Moriarty. Holme’s intellectual equal, Moriarty has hatched a grand scheme with the sole purpose of shifting the balance of world power. Holmes, with a tag along fortune teller named Sim and his [...]

In a word: Intriguing. In a few more, Wasted On The Young is an ardent revenge film that shows substance and style in some areas, but appears to have bitten off more than it can chew in others. This little-known Australian film continues to follow the trend in the local film industry. That is, for [...]

Set in Lillian, Ohio, J.J. Abrams’ (Star Trek, Mission: Impossible III) latest, Super 8 chronicles Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), a young boy who struggles to connect with his depressed workaholic of a father, Jack (Kyle Chandler), the town’s Deputy Sherriff. He spends his time playing with monster makeup on the set of his friend, Charles’ [...]

An adaptation of Tiziano Sclavi’s Italian horror comic series and a spinoff of Michele Soavi’s horror-romance Cemetery Man, Kevin Munroe’s Dylan Dog: Dead of Night is no stranger to obscure source material. Bringing former Man of Steel, Brandon Routh, back into a leading role, the film (penned by Thomas Dean Donnelley and Joshua Oppenheimer), is [...]

Born as Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia to a middle-class family, philosopher and writer, Ayn Rand, would soon see her father, a successful pharmacist, lose his business following the Bolshevik Revolution. With her family punished for past successes, Rand moved to the United States, where she’d fall in love with capitalism and ultimately, [...]

The first three Scream films are pretty vital to the horror genre. The original movie shot this extra dose of adrenaline into slasher flicks, bringing a new found interest when most were beginning to think it was a tired genre. Truth be told, it probably is (most conceptions about the horror genre being terrible are [...]

Amidst the Arctic Circle’s barren snowcaps, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) hunts. With nothing more than a bow-and-arrow, she kills a deer, although to her disappointment, she missed her mark — the creature’s heart. She finishes the job with a pistol — a stare down with the animal’s bloodshot eyes revealing a sense of humanity and sympathy, [...]

In motion pictures, it’s a widespread belief that children are the embodiment of pure evil. Perhaps not all kids are the spawn of Satan, but horror filmmakers realize that evil disguised behind the eyes of a seemingly innocent child is an effective way of amplifying the scare factor. Into this genre now steps 2009′s Orphan. [...]

Much like Duncan Jones’ freshman endeavor, Moon, a film that was eclipsed (pun intended) at first, but which then skyrocketed to unprecedented levels of success during award season, Source Code is a cerebral thriller that takes an unorthodox approach to popcorn cinema. The similarities don’t end there, however; although both films were penned by different [...]

Anna (Christina Ricci) and Paul (Justin Long) have been together for quite some time and although Anna seems to be pulling away, Paul is still madly in love with her. When his job offers him a promotion that would require him to move, Paul intends to ask Anna to come with him and be his [...]

Just judging on the fact that the story has been interpreted to be an allegory for sexual awakening, Little Red Riding Hood was just asking to be dumbed down and reimaged into a romance for teeny-boppers. So eat your heart out kids, here’s Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood, a film that might have been decent [...]

Dr. Martin Harris (Liam Neeson) and his wife, Elizabeth (January Jones), are on a plane to Berlin, where he is to hold a presentation at a bio-technology summit funded by Prince Shada (Mido Hamada), a tree-hugging ruler that has attracted the interest of extremists in his country. Upon landing in a very snowy Germany, the [...]

It’s hard to believe that it’s been nine years since the release of Chris Columbus’ Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and it’s even harder to believe how much of a cultural phenomenon this big-screen adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s series of novels has become. In fact, Daniel Radcliffe, who has played Harry Potter over the [...]

If you think about it, the annual batch of torture porn (i.e., the Saw franchise) is the most harmless aspect of Halloween; I mean, there’s poisoned candy, pedophiles galore, and just general creepiness (and I don’t mean that in the jolly ol’ fun way, more like forty-year old fathers in bikinis weird — I’ve seen [...]

Christian Alvart’s Case 39 is basically what happens when you turn the Franklin D. Roosevelt quote, “. . . the only thing we have to fear is fear itself . . . ,” into a broader statement and use that to make a horror film. Furthermore, the film, penned by Ray Wright, who also wrote [...]

When the concept of being buried alive crashes its way into my thoughts like a semi truck, a shiver runs up and back down my spine. It immediately reminds of Jessica Lunsford, the poor nine-year old girl whose abuser handed her her stuffed dolphin, sealed her in multiple plastic bags and buried her alive. It [...]

If I had to choose three people that I’d hate to be stuck in an elevator with, they’d be O.J. Simpson, Phil Spector, and Justin Bieber. However, M. Night Shyamalan would be a close fourth. Coincidentally, Shyamalan translates the horror of spending countless hours in such an enclosed space with the aforementioned names in Devil, [...]

I don’t think I had ever been so excited to see a movie as I have been for Inception. For starters, it was directed by Christopher Nolan who has made three of the best movies I’ve ever seen: The Prestige, The Dark Knight and, my all time favorite, Memento. He is a master of his [...]

When the 2009 Academy Awards happened, there were a lot of shockers. Hurt Locker beating out Avatar, Precious winning best adapted screenplay over Up in the Air. But the biggest shocker for me was the fact that The White Ribbon didn’t win Best Foreign Language Film. I thought the movie was flawless — a masterpiece. [...]

Style over substance. That is the plaint of many a critic when they come across a film or book or any work of art they simply do not like, but which has undeniable merit, at least technically, if not in a few other measures, as well. But, the fact is that my opening words have [...]

The opening shot of a Boston ferry emerging from an impenetrable veil of fog as it makes it way toward a hostile, gothic-looking island proves to be an apt visual metaphor for what transpires in Shutter Island. From the moment the ferry appears and we hear the first strains of music, the audience is cued [...]

Pitch to Hollywood studio stooge: “You see, I’ve got this idea to do a film about a real life event, except the film will only feature about ten minutes of the real life event, as a sort of ‘in’ to get the suckers to come and drop ten bucks. Meanwhile, what we’ll do is make [...]

Via my forced high school readings of a novel or two and landing on a movie during a bored late night channel surf, I’m not surprised I remember very little of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation Sherlock Holmes. Literally, the only things that come to mind are: He was a condescending bastard who smoked a [...]

Credit, in some form, has to be given to Terry Gilliam for actually getting his much anticipated The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus completed. Anticipated, not necessarily because the world needed another Time Bandits or The Adventures of Baron Munchausen type movie but because Heath Ledger, the film’s lead died halfway through filming. I’m not sure [...]

Somebody up there likes me, and so I light a candle at the altar of the movie gods in thanks for delivering to this scare-starved horror buff a horror film worthy of the name. Written, produced, and directed by Oren Peli on a micro budget of $15,000, Paranormal Activity reinforces what The Blair Witch Project [...]

The already darkening skies encompassing the world of Harry Potter have darkened further in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth installment of the wildly popular movie franchise. Long gone is the baby-faced innocence our would-be wizards once had when they first entered Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. There is now deep-seeded resentment [...]

Jonathon Levine’s All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, starring Amber Heard (Alpha Dog, Pineapple Express) was released over a year ago in the UK, but horror fans in the U.S. are still waiting. So will it be worth the wait? Mandy Lane (Heard), is every teenage boy’s fantasy. She’s blonde, she’s beautiful, she’s innocent, and [...]

What do you get when you mix science fiction’s amazing anti-matter with the Catholic Church? No, it isn’t Scientology (although that is a good guess). You get Angels & Demons, the long awaited follow-up to The Da Vinci Code. This time around the pews, instead of hunting down Opus Dei and poking holes through the [...]

Mirroring Angelina Jolie’s harrowing performance in Changeling and raising similar moral questions as in the Oscar winning movie The Reader, Doubt is another emotional adaptation (this from the play of the same name by John Patrick Shanley), which strikes at the insecurities of humanity and challenges the notion of how far one can and should [...]

Remember when Steve Martin was a comic genius? No? Me either, although technically I still categorize him as one. His last major foray onto the big screen was The Pink Panther in 2006 (last year’s cameo in Baby Mama doesn’t count) and before that it was in the ever forgettable Cheaper by the Dozen 2. [...]

It may not be such a rarity these days for a premise with a central character to make its way to a sequel or even a trilogy. Something has to be said when a film franchise gets into the higher number of installments — a pentalogy is certainly worth some praise. That, however, is all [...]

The prospect of suddenly going blind is enough to fill most people with dread. And going blind is exactly what happens to the people of an unnamed city, perhaps even the entire world, in Blindness, the new film by Fernando Meirelles based on Jose Saramago’s excellent novel of the same name. Blindness is a powerful [...]

Yes, we know Big Brother is watching us. He’s been watching us for a very long, long time — the digital age and relentless media exposure just makes it that much more in your face. And just like when the internet was the new great unknown, Hollywood tried to capitalize on the horrors of it [...]

It’s not everyday that two of the more respected and admired actors in Hollywood share equal billing in a film. To be honest, I can’t even recall the last time it occurred. So when I caught wind that Robert De Niro and Al Pacino were starring together in the new crime thriller Righteous Kill, I [...]

Ten years since their first big screen foray (The X Files) and six since they went off the television airwaves, Scully and Mulder return to the silver screen in The X-Files: I Want to Believe. I’m not entirely sure what enticed the studio to come up with this so late (was there a huge outcry [...]

I consider myself a very big horror buff, and many of my favorite movies are in the horror genre. Horror does something that no other types of movies can do – when they’re done right, they can make you feel for the characters that are being put through such emotions like fear and agonizing pain. [...]

This can’t be good, can it? Sandra Bullock is back in a movie that requires her to do something other than look pretty. Why, oh why does Hollywood make movies like this? Surely, they know that Mrs. Jesse James, isn’t a bankable commodity anymore. This is a woman who starred in The Lake House last [...]

The basic premise of the movie: a family man takes his daughter from their city home where a tragedy had occurred, to a country cottage where all hell breaks loose. Hide and Seek has a great cast so I expected good things. Robert DeNiro still has some acting left in him. Dakota Fanning is an [...]