In spite of ranking on the top ten lists of many, many movie fans since its release, my love for "Leon: The Professional" was not immediate. As a matter of fact I pretty much disliked it on the first and second outings because I couldn't quite gra...

While deep down Sony engineered a reboot of "Spider-Man" in an effort to secure the rights, "The Amazing Spider-Man" uses the opportunity to correct the mistakes made by previous franchise runner Sam Raimi. Where Raimi opted for camp and schlock w...

Director Dan O'Bannon's 1985 zombie picture is about as pitch perfect a horror comedy you can get. The film itself re-imagines the walking dead and manages to deliver oodles of comedy and horror nuggets to its audience that has kept it alive and k...

George A. Romero's "Creepshow" is almost a spit in the face of everyone who decried comic books a sheer stain on humanity and the youth, blaming the colored pages for the evaporation of morality in the fifties and sixties. "Creepshow" is an absolu...

I'd be so bold as to say that "The Descendants" is quite possibly Alexander Payne's finest film yet. He has the ability to touch upon hallmark moments in his characters lives and turns their utmost unlikable traits and make them endearing somehow....

For all of its flaws, 1995's big screen adaptation of Casper the friendly ghost, actually manages to be a dark fantasy worth watching. Not only does it play all the right chords by casting in vogue and talented child star Christina Ricci as the he...

That's Hollywood for you. They love you. They love your book. They buy your book. They adapt it in to a big budget feature, and in the end only really bring bits and pieces of your story to the big screen for audiences to see. In this instance it'...

I spend a lot of time debating and exploring "Night of the Living Dead" to an almost obscene degree. While today it's been passed around more than a bong at a Grateful Dead concert, has been included in every horror boxed set imaginable, and has b...

Before the comic book movie revival of the twenty first century, the nineties didn't have that many notable comic book movies to brag about. There was the awful "Tank Girl," and the even worse "Barb Wire." There was "Spawn," and "Generation X," an...

It's not a surprise why "Titanic" ended up becoming one of the highest grossing movies of all time and was later de-throned by "Avatar" by the very same director that brought us the aforementioned movie. Both films are so utterly broadly written a...

As a person who has taken part in lucid dreams, it's refreshing to see a sequel strive to turn the premise of "A Nightmare on Elm Street" completely on its head. With states of dreaming and forms of the sub-conscious there is so much one can do wi...

One of the many aspects about filmmaking that Michael Bay never perfected is subtlety. None of his films are ever about the more quiet and inconspicuous moments in story and characterization. "Armageddon" as a whole is an often loud, bright, irrit...

When Ottway and his group of oil workers aboard a very shaky and shifty airplane, the surviving group of men find themselves in the middle of a frozen tundra after a horrible storm brings down the entire plane. Protagonist Ottway is often plagued ...

Though it's true that the Joker is nowhere to be found in "The Dark Knight Rises," this film is less about the character and much more about the taint he's left on Gotham city as a whole. In the end of "The Dark Knight" the Joker won, even when he...

It's funny. Back in the day when I used to love any superhero movie that came in to theaters, I found myself getting excited by "Batman & Robin." Why? Because he mentions Superman in the opening for a brief second. Nevertheless that was when fans ...

Burton out. Keaton out. Score out. And apparently, Bruce Wayne, out. "Batman Forever" is where the series started to eventually fall off the fails and Joel Schumacher's approach toward these movies are completely different and absolutely radical f...

In the first "Batman," the dark knight is described and thought of as something of an urban legend. He hides in the shadows, is mistaken for something of a myth, and only arrives to instill justice when the police are outnumbered. In "Batman Retur...

After all these years, it's safe to say that Tim Burton's entrance in to the pantheon of Batman films is an admirable effort but one that doesn't really master the lore or the character. "Batman" is a very fine film. It's watchable and occasionall...

Basically what's hypothesized in "Prometheus" is what if the thing that created us sought out the answers to what created it? And what if in the process of figuring out its own creation, it managed to accidentally create us? And what would happen ...

In director John Carpenter's masterpiece of contemporary horror cinema entitled "The Thing," we're told that not only is the beast of the film weak, thus forced to take on the shape and form of humanity, but it also acts as an independent species....

You can usually tell when you're watching a Paul WS Anderson film. For one, you can often hear him salivating at the presence of his wife Milla Jovovich, an untalented waif of a woman who Anderson persists in turning in to an action star, placing ...

John Carpenter is a son of a bitch. Why? Well, in this climate of modern movie making, remakes are all the rage. It's the go to source for marketing on a well known product to ensure a quick profit at the box office for general audiences who just ...

Back in early 2011, there were rumblings of audience members in attendance of "The Tree of Life" screenings who were asking for their money back. Primarily because they didn't understand the film. Sitting here I can safely say that this movie isn'...

During one point in the half concert film half documentary "Conan O'Brien Can't Stop," the interviewer asks Conan if it's possible for him to have fun without an audience. And if you watch the movie you'll see why he looks on in response baffled a...

You can feel the youth of Steven Spielberg and JJ Abrams permeating through every film cell of "Super 8." The 2011 movie veiled in mystery has become one of the most highly regarded films that isn't directed by Spielberg but very well may have bee...

What with so many horror movies offering up a surprise ending we will not see coming for the last ten years, it's a given that the lure for "Scream 4" is not so much the surprise ending and the revelation, but the nostalgia. Hallelujah Wes Craven ...

Unpleasant, unfunny and uninspiring, "Hop" is so much more awful than I'd originally predicted primarily because it took my rock bottom expectations and dashed them by delivering an even worse movie than my optimism would have allowed. I had hopes...

You have to appreciate Zack Snyder's ambition for at least trying to tell a story. The man has proven himself in many regard, and with "Sucker Punch" he tries his best to deliver crowd pleasing entertainment that won't polarize his fan base. The p...

No one in "Big Momma's" acts like an actual person you'd see on the street. No one would actually chase down and violently tussle with a mailman but hey, Martin Lawrence is grasping at straws in the final film series he really seems to be holding ...

I'm still not sure if it was a large bid of admirable faith or mind numbing stupidity for Lorne Michaels to fuel an adult comedy based around a Saturday Night Live sketch that barely anyone is familiar with on a show no one really talks about anym...

I think "Let Me In" will be deemed as a respectable companion piece to the infinitely superior "Let The Right One In" if only because Matt Reeves directs this version with his eye on convention more than edge. The original was already so gruesome ...

It's Pinhead. In space! With his cenobites. In space! Someone opens the puzzle box. In space! And people are tortured and turned in to cenobites against their wills. In space! The aspect about "Bloodlines" is that even though it closes the origina...

It's always been said that an animal always knows when it's about to die. And sometimes even humans can. So... are these apocalypse movies merely our perpetual fear of impending doom brought on by forces of nature? Or do we know something that we'...

Like it or not, "Paranormal Activity" was the indie success story of the decade. After the big take off of "The Blair Witch Project," director Oren Peli proved a valuable successor to the end of the twentieth century sensation by providing a horro...

Was this remake entirely necessary? Actually no. Especially when you consider Meir Zarchi's 1978 revenge film continues to be a widely revered, and critically reviled piece of volatile grindhouse cinema that not only set the stages for future reve...

Hi there, this is me. In the minority. Again. It's a comfortable place, I've built an ass groove, and everything. Anyway. "Easy A" is one of the most smug movies of 2010, and when I mean smug, I mean every single inch of dialogue is so intent on b...

You could have called this "Fist of the East," or "Test of Fortitude" and it would have grossed obscene amounts of money at the box-office, regardless. It's a movie that is so meticulously built to appeal to audiences and tickle every emotion poss...

For the past four films, director Paul WS Anderson has taken what was once a very entertaining horror franchise and turned it in to a series of movies fetishizing his wife and doing nothing more than further his muse-like view on her. We nearly sa...

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" isn't so much about mental patients in an institution but about the male spirit and how society outside the walls of this small facility has in one way or another emasculated and broken down the men who are still ...

When Mattie Ross first meets Rooster Cogburn, it's behind the walls of a ramshackle outhouse behind a farm house where Rooster is attempting to ward off his young hire while pushing off the runs in his privacy. He holds no pretense about keeping h...

Unnecessary back story, toilet humor, and overlong gags involving gore, yes, this is a sequel to "Hatchet" alright! While "Hatchet" was a serviceable genre installment that consumed time with a smile and didn't change the genre as many movie criti...

Director Danny Boyle's dramatic thriller chronicles the hours of Aron Ralston and his battle with a lodged rock that sealed his fate and brought Aron down to Earth to come to grips with his own life and mortality. Much like "In to the Wild," direc...

Ree Dolly is smart enough to know not to have sex at her young age and have a child. She is in a world of poverty and goes to school with friends who are barely out of puberty and strapped down with a baby. The tragedy though is with her mother be...

While scouring reviews for "Nightmare," I read a comment online that suggested the reason why Samuel Bayer's absolutely lethargic lazy remake of the horror classic is so bad is because he wasn't recruited by Platinum Dunes to re-imagine this world...

I'm still trying to wrap my head around why the Strause brothers included a very superfluous prologue of Balfour's character being sucked in by the bright lights of the alien ships and then suddenly zooming back to him and his girlfriend in a plan...

Director Darren Aronofsky has always had a talent for delving in to the human psyche and offering us deeper more complex looks in to our souls and perceptions of reality. "Requiem for a Dream" was a film constantly teetering between a life of mise...

It should have been a no-brainer. A Greek myth about a hero being called upon to battle the gods while also fighting with various creatures is a concept begging to be made in to an amazing movie. "Clash of the Titans" is the Harryhausen movie that...

I grew up with two kinds of movie fans. One (my mom) was a hardcore horror buff, and the other was an unabashed action buff (my dad), so for most of my life before I sought out various genres, all I sat and watched were sleazy action flicks and go...

Vincenzo Natali's science fiction Frankenstein tale of 2010 may and will eventually be misunderstood by a greater portion of the movie audiences expecting a simple monster flick about an experiment gone awry. While in essence it is just that, "Spl...

The stellar Edgar Wright has finally made it to the American shores by way of a cult series of graphic novels and in typical Wright-fashion, he's not prone to just making any movie that would appeal to an audience of the PG-13 sector. "Scott Pilgr...