Film

Unfortunately, Zack Snyder, the guy who brought us the fast-paced Dawn of the Dead redux and the intriguing Watchmen, has softened to PG-13 territory. I went into the widely anticipated Sucker Punch wondering, will this film deliver or not? The previews looked promising. The premise of Catholic-school-meets-Victoria Secret girls fighting demons, dragons and kicking ass was somewhat appealing. Well, Sucker Punch not only doesn't deliver, it's a wretched mess. I can only assume the reason for its title is that it lands a roundhouse blow to the back of the audience's skull for not anticipating how incredibly lame it would be.
The extremely ridiculous plot unfolds in music video bravado and I half expected some titles in the corner to tell me which horrid rock band was doing “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).”

Yes, there’s a certain validity to the pitch-meeting shorthand that would describe this science-fiction thriller as “Groundhog Day meets Quantum Leap” – but that doesn’t detract from what it manages to do right.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Capt. Colter Stevens, a military pilot who awakens disoriented in the middle of a strange experiment: He has been transported into the body of a train passenger eight minutes before the train is blown up in a terrorist attack. And no matter how many times, he has to keep going back to those same eight minutes, because failing to find out who is behind the bombing is not an option.

Limitless plays havoc with the old adage that most people use just 10 to 20 percent of their brain. But what if the other 80 or 90 percent were suddenly made available? Interested in what might happen? Thought so.
Broke, facing extreme writer's block and rejected by his girlfriend, deadbeat New York writer Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) is convinced that he has no future. Things change quickly when a shifty figure from his past introduces him to NZT, a new synthetic drug that enhances mental abilities. Immediately after popping a clear little pill, Eddie's neurons get turbocharged. Stoked on NZT, Eddie rises to the top of the financial world. He attracts the attention of tycoon Carl Van Loon (Robert De Niro), who believes he can use Eddie to make a fortune. But Eddie also suffers from terrible withdrawal side effects, a dwindling supply and bad decisions (including Russian mob involvement) that threaten to destroy his future.

When it comes down to it, with a movie like Paul, only one thing truly matters: that it makes you laugh. Were there times when you laughed out loud? And the true test of a film like Paul, did you laugh consistently through the whole film, or were most of the jokes wasted in the preview? Remember that in a dorky stoner comedy, technical details don't really impact your enjoyment of the film, as long as the movie makes you laugh.

It seems that recreating classic fairytales has become one of the latest trends in Hollywood moviemaking. Last year, Tim Burton took on the fantastical Alice in Wonderland, and instead of following the beloved original storyline, created a sequel. Now, Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight) directs Red Riding Hood, shifting the story to tell of a not-so-little red riding hood.
Viewers be warned, the new film takes next to nothing from the original story. Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) lives in a medieval town on the outskirts of a dark forest. For two generations, a wolf has tormented the town and in order to keep the wolf at bay, the townspeople offer an animal sacrifice. When the wolf kills Valerie's sister, a wolf hunter arrives to rid the town of the beast. Meanwhile, Valerie is stuck in a love triangle with her arranged fiancé Henry (Max Irons) and her childhood friend Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), whom she loves deeply.

Miguel Arteta (Chuck and Buck, Youth in Revolt) deserves credit for being the only director to yank a decent performance out of Jennifer Aniston in the past decade with The Good Girl. In Cedar Rapids, he provides a straightforward story about a fictional Wisconsin town, Brown Valley, and the heroic turn of its dweeb insurance man, Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), who is sent to Cedar Rapids to represent his company at a convention. Lippe soon finds himself mixed up with three veterans of the convention circuit.
Simplistic to the hilt with real-life scenarios, Rapids is not a wacky comedy, but a heartfelt look at a man doing right no matter how messed up things get. Like Fargo, we find corruption amidst the small-time wheeling and dealing – only sans the wood chipper.

The Adjustment Bureau is a sci-fi action thriller, love story and parable all rolled into one and writer/director George Nolfi combines all the elements to tell a somewhat balanced story.
Based on Phillip K. Dick's 1954 short story, “Adjustment Team,” about an insurance salesman who learns that he's a puppet on a string controlled by a clandestine organization. Writer/director George Nolfi, who also penned The Bourne Ultimatum screenplay, has made considerable, ahem, adjustments to the story, though it looks like the business suits (especially the hats) are holdovers from Dick's era.

Here's the irony of motion-capture animation, one that Mars Needs Moms only serves to reinforce: For a technology that's intended to make animated humans look more real, it sure hasn't been used to tell stories that are more human.
When Robert Zemeckis pioneered the idea for a feature-length film in The Polar Express in 2004, plenty of critics picked on the creepy-looking characters with their hollowed-out mouths. But even as Zemeckis fine-tuned the technology for Beowulf and A Christmas Carol, the narratives themselves remained remote and uninvolving. Always a filmmaker fond of his state-of-the-art toys, Zemeckis focused almost entirely on what he could do with this particular approach to visual storytelling, forgetting that somewhere along the line, he needed to have us care about what was happening to these strange-looking people.

Wild at Heart, Raising Arizona, Birdy… these are films that come to mind when I think back to when Nicolas Cage was good. Maybe it all started with Captain Corelli's Mandolin. That's when I realized that maybe Cage wasn't cut out for “mood pieces.” Now all he does are somber monotone performances in flicks that put me in a bad mood.

When telling a person's life story, there are several different versions, depending on who tells the story. In our own versions, we may gloss over certain events and leave others out completely, which is just what Barney Panofsky did in the film Barney's Version.
Barney's Version tells the story of Barney's life over three decades and three wives. Barney is a politically incorrect, brash, curmudgeon of a man who drinks too much and has an unhealthy obsession with hockey. His story begins when he marries a free-spirited girl (Rachelle Lefevre) who soon after kills herself. He then marries a well-to-do momma's girl (Minnie Driver) and at their wedding meets Miriam (Rosamund Pike), his third wife and the mother of his children.