Morgan P Salvo

The Town is one of those movies you watch, all the while wishing it were better. It's not awful and some parts are engaging, but there is either something amiss or else too much stuff crammed into each prolonged scene. What we're left with is a decent TV show with swearing.

Be warned: Resident Evil: Afterlife really isn't a movie, it's a great big video game that you can watch, but not play. Shot in Real-D, rather than the horrible post-shooting 3D conversion process, the cutting-edge effects are of the Avatar variety and are a welcome dose of visual improvement on the fourth installment of this franchise.

Machete's origin stems from a pseudo movie trailer (and one of the highlights) in the B-movie homage Grindhouse, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s' double bill. Machete is a fine gory action thriller about a hit man/ex-cop professional slasher seeking revenge on very bad people. Not only do things start off with an immediate bang and an El Mariachi feel within the first five minutes, but Machete delivers ample badass dudes with big knives, guns, sluts and gore… this is my kind of flick.

The Last Exorcism is a pain in the ass. A lot of movies tick me off, but this one takes the cake. Movies with either “Exorcism” or “Haunting” in the title have a high rate of sucking, but with The Last Exorcism I thought I'd found something completely different. I was once again duped and mistaken because this flick had me entertained with its initial direction, but in the last ten minutes defeated its entire purpose with an utterly stupid ending. The super creepily shocking previews are beyond misleading. I mean, I counted five bone cracks in the previews and there was merely one in this flick (not that more would have redeemed it).

Piranha 3D is not necessarily a good movie but it's one of the best movies I've seen all year. The fact that it doesn't skimp on the blood, gore, carnage or splattering and bouncing bikini-clad, buxom women unafraid to take off their tops and swim naked might just give it three stars right there. Throw in the demonic flesh ripping, meat-chewing little sea devils and you have a CGI masterpiece of underwater hideousness.

No, this isn’t a re-issue of the excellent documentary about The Who. This Kids Are All Right is a cinematic attempt to showcase how married lesbian parents go through life's same hardships while trying make sure that the happiness of their children comes first – in other words that they're normal people. Kids starts off cool with a Larry Clark’ Wassup Rockers feel as a hand-held camera covers Laser and a pal skateboarding and knocking down garbage cans. We then get the family dynamics setting up the gay relationship and how it's really no different than any other couple with maybe a tad too much info.
The film opens with lesbian couple Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) who have been together for almost 20 years and their two teenage children named Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), show their devotion to themselves during a witty-banter-laden dinner. Through some New Age-y and mostly superficial emoting, it becomes apparent how hip the filmmakers want their audience to be. Unbeknownst to their mothers, Joni and Laser seek out their biological father, a restaurant owner and entrepreneur named Paul (Mark Ruffalo). Complications arise when the teens bond with Paul and invite him into their lives on the eve of Joni's heading out to college. Things get tricky when the sperm donor turns out to be a cool guy eventually liked by all and as his relationship with the family intensifies, more dysfunction follows.

Angelina Jolie kicks ass! Angelina Jolie chucks hand grenades! Angelina Jolie doesn't adopt any kids or grimace with Brad Pitt! There you go; that's essentially what happens in Salt.
Apparently Tom Cruise dropped out of the project and the filmmakers rewrote this Salt thing for Jolie. Too bad, when a movie is this awful you sort of expect someone like Cruise to be in it. It used to be that when a plot was so luridly far-fetched it was a bad thing, but now we've been subjected to so much pedestrian crap that expectations have shifted. Opening up the potential floodgates with a PG-13 rating, mainstream filmmakers churn this stuff out and people unquestioningly accept it.

Mark and Jay Duplass, the directing/writing team of the Puffy Chair (winner of Bend Film's Jury Prize in '05) and the offbeat horror comedy Baghead, venture out of super indie mumble-core mode to semi-mainstream mumble-core mode in their newest flick Cyrus. The signature style of the Duplass bros somewhat mesmerizing in Cyrus, mainly because it hasn't progressed, it just employs more recognizable actors.
John (John C. Reilly) is a big, goofy, disheveled, middle-aged loser who meets Molly (Marisa Tomei) at a party. Breaking all the dating rules, things move too fast and hit a wall when John encounters Cyrus (Jonah Hill), Molly's 21-year-old son still living at home who exudes heartfelt yet bogus politeness, undermining his hostility and resulting in an escalating war of wills with John.

The combo of Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Planet Terror) producing and Nimrod Antal (Kontroll, Vacancy) helming Predators, the latest installment in the dreadlocked-lizard-mantis-space-beasts franchise, sounded promising. With subject matter that's clocked in two features, two Alien crossovers, countless novels, video games and comic-book spin-offs, a spicy version seemed called for. What we get is a watered-down redux of the 1987 Schwarzenegger version with just a few twists.

Director M. Night Shyamalan became a Hollywood success with the hauntingly supernatural Sixth Sense in 1999 before stumbling badly with critical disappointments like The Village and The Happening, and now The Last Airbender, which again veers far from his earlier success. It doesn't help that he's hamstrung himself with the subject matter; this family-friendly adventure flick is based on a successful Nickelodeon animated TV series.
The story kicks into gear when the Fire Nation launches a brutal war, leaving Aang (Noah Ringer) caught between combat and courage. He soon discovers that he's the lone Avatar (not the blue, James Cameron kind of Avatar, though) with the power to manipulate all four elements. He teams up with brother and sister (Jackson Rathbone and Nicola Peltz) and a flying behemoth that looks like a big sheep to restore balance to their war-torn world.