In every scene in this film Tom Cruise’s character wears a uniform with a swastika on the lapel. One might think he’s taking a risky career move with his role in “Valkyrie.” In fact, he’s not. Here he plays a character so morally incorruptible and so zealously anti-Nazi, you can’t mistake him for one of [...]

“Seven Pounds” isn’t the same feel good holiday movie like Will Smith’s previous melodrama “The Pursuit of Happyness.” Instead, he and “Happyness” director Gabriele Muccino deliver a dark, brooding think-piece that will probably divide critics and audiences alike. “Seven Pounds” qualifies as memorable cinema, even if no one considers it a great film.
Smith stars as [...]

Hehehehehehe, this commercial warms my blood. Nothing says Merry Christmas like Darth Vader and Freddy Krueger in a holidays Direct TV ad. Only in a non-English-speaking country could you get away with this level of yuletide wrongness. If they had thrown Ronald McDonald in and you’d have kids screaming and spilling hot cocoa on each [...]

Looks like some eggheads at a university in Edinburgh (Heriot Watt University to be precise) have confirmed something I’ve hypothesised for years…
Romantic Comedies, A.K.A. “Rom-Coms,” while highly entertaining, give people unrealistic expectations about love and relationships. Read the article here.
My two cents?
Look at it this way: The writers that create these stories are often socially [...]

A very interesting study of a man whose real-life research broke sexual taboos in America.
Taking place in the 1940’s and 50’s, Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) is a brilliant scientist/college professor who bores his colleagues and students with 20 years of research on the gall wasp. Eventually he gets the opportunity to teach a sex education [...]

Bear with me here…
During WWII, the Nazis had Stalingrad under siege. The Russians shot their own retreating soldiers and deported the families of those soldiers in an attempt to threaten their troops into fighting harder. Instead, morale plummeted and they became desperate. In a flash of brilliance, the Russian propaganda mongers invented a sniper (super) [...]

Here’s a derivative, yet nasty little number that mooches from a few classic horror flicks but wins out on simplicity and quality.
Skinny biology PhD pansy-dude (Paulo Costanzo) and his unbelievably hot and fit survivalist-type girlfriend (the sublime Jill Wagner) go camping in the wilderness near some sort of experimental research lab. They get carjacked by [...]

You can view the proto-site here. Before my reign of terror begins… Lemme inject some humor into your miserable life…
There’s a show that’s been tickling my funnybone of late. It’s called “>Estate of Panic” on the Sci-Fi Channel. It’s a nutty gameshow where a-holes get sent to this mansion in hells-knows-where to go into f’ed-up [...]

Coop here.
Apparently, I’ve been struggling with a shadowy part of myself I was unaware of. In between my regular review postings, others have pointed out to me that I’ve done a lot of B-movie, horror, grindhouse, direct-to-DVD trashy reviews. I was alarmed to look back at the archives and realise… I HAD.
My “Dark Side” has [...]

I’m one of those naysayers who thinks the Golden Globes (handed out by the less-than-scrupulous Hollywood Foreign Press Association) are no longer valid or coveted. Due to the writer’s strike last year, no one attended and it made for an exceptionally shallow and pointless televised ceremony. When the stars actually attend the ceremony they usually [...]

I recently discovered an entertaining horror website run by the witty “Final Girl” who challenged her readers to watch “Grindhouse” and write something about it. “Grindhouse” is old news but her challenge got me thinking about it. It’s an anomaly that almost (along with the continued support of Quentin Tarantino ) single-handedly resurrected the grindhouse [...]

As I write this, I’m thumbing through my old “Punisher” comic books. I have some pretty valuable ones here: “Punisher #2,” “Punisher Limited Series #5,” “Punisher War Journal #1.” To say I’m a casual fan of the character is a bit of an understatement. “The Punisher” began as a minor-league villain of “Spider-Man,” quickly becoming [...]

Here’s a hilariously fun and gory slasher flick.
It starts off a lot like “Halloween.” A little boy assembles a naughty jigsaw puzzle in the comfort of his bedroom. His mom catches him in the act, then verbally and physically beats him. How does he retaliate? He takes an axe to her head, saws her body [...]

Is “Wanted” starring James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie the new “Matrix”. The answer is no. But I don’t think that filmmaker Bekmambetov was really trying to do that. Sure he rips it off and plenty of other genre and non-genre films to boot, but that’s not what this movie is all about. Its about having [...]

Baz Luhrmann’s directorial debut, “Strictly Ballroom,” gave him success in his native Australia and a cult following in America. Later, he pushed boundaries with the stylized, modern version of “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet,” then surpassed them with the Academy Award winning “Moulin Rouge!” No doubt, fans and critics have been waiting for his grand [...]

To say the film-makers missed the mark with this movie is an understatement. In a genre meant to be thought-provoking and nerve-jangling, “Untraceable”, starring Diane Lane as a “cyber-cop” tracking a serial killer, fails miserably. Just the title alone is uninspiring.
The story revolves around three detectives trying to find a madman whose method of killing [...]