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 [...]

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 [...]

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 she’s [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]