Being an action movie junkie as I am I've sat through truckloads of garbage films - really, this genre just begs for hacks, horrible stories, mind-numbing acting. So long as you get things blowing up or faces punched or shots fired you've met the sole, basic, clarifying criterion. You get quickly familiar with action stars, too, since these films get made seemingly solely on their presence (and sacrificing a good deal else in the bargain). Jean-Claude Van Damme, the ex-dancer, the "Muscles from Brussels," is one of these folks. I'd reckon about 90% of his films are pretty much unwatchable (at least sober), pretty reflective of the state of the genre on the whole...[more]...

Coming off the box-office success of Passion of the Christ writer/director/anti-Semite/misogynist Mel Gibson goes for broke with a nearly 2.5-hour subtitled action movie. Filled with passionate fascist undertones (virility, fate, birthright, physical endurance, nameless family members - yep, it's got 'em all here) Apocalypto still manages to entertain, acting more like First Blood but with fewer politics...[more]...

Despite looking like it was shot on the crappiest 16mm stock in years and despite being produced by MTV Films The Foot Fist Way is the film that launched Danny McBride and very deservedly so...[more]...

I was 16 and just getting back into the world of comic books. "Graphic novels" didn't really exist yet but that was soon to change due to the monumental releases that year of Alan Moore's Watchmen and Frank Miller's Batman: Year One. While that latter work has been fitted nicely to the film franchise now the former has always stood alone, like an unassailable figure on an isolated peak. Its author and one of the finest cinematic minds of the 80s, Terry Gilliam, both called the series "unfilmable...[more]...

No, not Chocolat (tho' I did like that but, having only seen it on a plane, never reviewed it - I refuse to review movies edited for airlines). No, I'd call this one, "Retard-Strength w/ Thai Peanut Sauce." And that's a compliment so don't get bent outta shape by my non-P.C.'ness, m'kay...[more]...

Thinly-veiled political messages seem to be the bane of the sci-fi genre. Older films such as Metropolis and Things To Come, and The Day the Earth Stood Still, then into the likes of Silent Running, 2001, and Solaris, up to the present with the likes of Sunshine - there's a tradition of commentary on social, environmental, and political issues allowed by the spectacular, the distinctly "other-ness" of the mixture of science and fiction. Its broader allegorical structure just seems to fit nicely with pointed critique without being blatant...[more]...

It's been a while since I've watched a movie that truly shook me to my core. I like to think of myself as pretty heavy-duty when it comes to a tolerance level for shocking or provocative films - so long as it has integrity and is central to the film's point. For example, a great deal of gore films I detest and can't watch because the shock effect is simply done for its own sake. That's misguided filmmaking and unfair to all involved, exploitational and degrading at worst (since a great deal of that violence is, of course, directed at the female characters in a movie...[more]...