Have you ever wanted to change a major event in your past, something that you’ve reflected on for several years, but always felt could have gone a different way? Changing a few things might seem like a good idea, but you’d have to take a few other things into consideration, such as how that change would affect you and the people you know. Furthermore, would it really make your life turn out for the better...[more]...

“The Cabin in the Woods” has had a heck of a time trying to get released. Shot back in 2009, it was originally delayed so that it could pointlessly be converted to 3D, something that luckily never happened. In the delay, the studio that made it went bankrupt, causing many to wonder if the film would ever make it to theaters. Eventually the film was picked up by another studio, but instead of releasing it around October as many expected, they delayed the release even longer. Usually this many delays means terrible things for the film in question. However, in this case, it merely built anticipation for what becomes the first great film of 2012...[more]...

“The Raid: Redemption” is a non-stop action film that is filled with wall-to-wall martial arts, gunfire, and blood. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if it weren’t for the complete lack of any reason to care about anything going on in the film. The main reason that it seems to have been made is as a showcase for as many fight scenes as the filmmakers could fit into its brief running time of about 90 minutes. Apparently the plot was merely an afterthought...[more]...

Daniel Nettheim’s “The Hunter” is a dark, brooding film that depends just as much on scenes of silence as it does on scenes of dialogue. Half of the film is simply a man hunting in the woods, setting traps and trying to find signs of his prey, while the other half incorporates a more human element into the story. Both of these are interesting parts of the story, which makes it unfortunate when they don’t end up getting put together particularly well...[more]...

Imagine “Jaws” without the interesting storyline, engaging characters, memorable dialogue, thrills, suspense, and entertainment and you’d have a pretty good idea of what awaits you with John Stockwell’s “Dark Tide.” What these filmmakers did was basically take all of those elements and found their polar opposites to put together a film that is one of the most tedious movie-going experiences of recent memory...[more]...

Here we have “Wrath of the Titans,” a sequel to the special effects extravaganza “Clash of the Titans,” itself a remake of the 1981 film. While most people were turned off by the remake of “Clash,” I had found it to be a fun and silly spectacle of action and effects. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for its sequel. Where there was fun there is now tediousness. Where there were exciting special effects there is now boredom, and even worse, there is even less story than there was before...[more]...

“Intruders” is a horror film that has absolutely nothing memorable or noteworthy about it. So much so in fact, that even hard-core horror fans will have difficulty staying awake through this snoozefest. For a film that claims to be a horror-thriller, it is strangely lacking in both areas. This is probably a big part of the reason that the studio is attempting to slip this film out into theaters in a limited release...[more]...

There’s a kind of unwritten rule when it comes to sports films that says they should be about more than just the sport. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. Take last year’s excellent sports drama “Moneyball” for example. There we had a film about how to put together a great baseball team which was all about the sport. Most of the time however, sports films deal with larger issues such as those tackled in “Remember the Titans” or “The Blind Side.” Now we have the hockey film “Goon,” which doesn’t attempt to do anything of the sort...[more]...

“Snow White” is one of the most beloved stories in the Grimm fairy tales collection. When the most well-known adaptation of the story came to film, it represented a landmark in animation and the first full-length feature film from Walt Disney. Over the years, there have been several more adaptations, which brings us to “Mirror Mirror,” the first of two big “Snow White” films coming out this year that offer a twist on the old tale...[more]...

“The Hunger Games” is basically a far tamer version of a story already told over a decade earlier in Kinji Fukasaku’s masterpiece “Battle Royale,” itself based on a book by Koushun Takami. Both stories are set in a dystopian future and tell of young kids forced by the government to fight each other to the death in a gruesome battle where there can only be one victor. The author of “The Hunger Games,” Suzanne Collins, claimed to have never heard of “BR” before getting her book published. Did anyone actually believe her? Not really, but she did make a few changes in an attempt to make the story her own, and what results is a decent take on this already-told tale...[more]...

It seems like it’s been awhile since we’ve had a “good teacher trying to make a difference in a bad school” movie. It’s a premise we’ve seen many, many times before in films like “Stand and Deliver” and “Dangerous Minds.” We’ve even seen the principal get involved when it comes to getting those low test scores up in “Lean on Me.” Now we have “Detachment,” a film that attempts not only to be this same genre, but also several other things at the same time...[more]...

“John Carter” is a strange combination of genres that we don’t get to see very often. On the one hand, it wants to be a western, borrowing several elements of the genre, and on the other, it wants to be a science-fiction action epic with its multiple action sequences featuring lots of bizarre alien technology. The last time we saw these two genres blended together (“Cowboys & Aliens”), things didn’t turn out quite so well, but that didn’t deter these filmmakers from attempting to bring Edgar Rice Burroughs’s story to life...[more]...

“Friends with Kids” adds a new level of frustration to the same old romantic-comedy formula that we’ve seen thousands of times before. Usually that frustration merely stems from the fact that you have to wait for the couple, whether they’re first meeting or have been longtime friends, to finally figure out that they love each other and want to be together. The couple in this film not only does that, but they are also completely thoughtless about their actions before getting to that point...[more]...

“Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance” was very similar to another recent disastrous film-going experience I had. You may recall how I described “Underworld: Awakening” as “a film that was so soulless and so lifeless that it had not made a single bit of impact while it was playing.” Well, the “Ghost Rider” sequel made me feel that way all over again. Here was another movie that played out on screen, but was also inconsequential and unmemorable, leading to the question of why anyone would bother making it...[more]...

“This Means War” features a premise that is incredibly preposterous, yet it wants us to believe that this could really be happening. The problem is not that two men can’t be vying for the same woman, that kind of thing probably happens quite a lot. Nor is it the indecisiveness of a woman when it comes to choosing between two guys who seem like good catches. The absurdity lies in how two CIA agents could fit something like this into their schedules when they are on the hunt for a criminal bent on revenge...[more]...