Reviews

"10,000 BC" does not deserve its bad rap. It is not the worse reviewed film in director Roland Emmerich's oeuvre (that distinction belongs to "Moon 44"), but it is perhaps his most infamous. "Boring" is a word that I often hear from casual moviegoers who have watched this flick. Indeed, I hear that adjective so frequently that "10,000 BC" has quickly become something even sadder than a guilty...

The “Pulse” trilogy is to the Internet what certain episodes of “The Twilight Zone” are to space travel and computers. (I am going to focus on the second movie, “Pulse 2: Afterlife,” but also discuss the other two films.) That anachronistic take on tech is one of the main things which draws me to the “Pulse” movies, again and again. I have a soft spot for sci-fi horror that attempts to predict a...

I want an action figure of Robby the Robot... but with a metallic face under his translucent dome, as opposed to the tubes, wires, spheres and flashing lights seen in the 1956 sci-fi film "Forbidden Planet." The reason for this is simple: Without that cold, cruel visage staring back at me, I wouldn't know for sure that I was holding a plastic statuette of Uncle Simon II. Uncle Simon II is the...

The opening scene in "Paths of Glory" should appear in a dictionary next to the word "Machiavellian." It is World War I and a French military official, Major General Georges Broulard (Adolphe Menjou), has been given an impossible assignment. His superiors, who are grossly out of touch with the realities of battle, have ordered him to retake a key hill to turn the tide against Germany, which...

Call it "Final Prayer," as they do in the USA, or call it "The Borderlands," as they do everywhere else. Just don't forget to call it the best found footage horror ever! The concept of found footage horror has, alas, usually been better than the execution. In theory, the found footage format — one in which a movie is created to seem like real-life that just happened to be taped by an observer —...

"Space Jam: A New Legacy" did something I had not anticipated: It was a sweet, smart, funny and engaging movie. I suppose I did not expect this because the word-of-mouth buzz for the film has been negative. I base this on anecdotal experience; people I know cringe at the thought of this movie existing because the 1996 original is so cherished. Critics didn't like that one either, to be sure, but...

There have been eight movies in the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” series, but only two are worth watching if you want to feel real horror. One is the original film, “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” which was released by director/co-writer Tobe Hooper in 1974 and is rightly regarded as a classic. Like “The Blair Witch Project” a quarter-century later, it did not allow its low budget to get in the way...

A movie like “The Deaths of Ian Stone” makes you lament the fickle nature of show business. I know only two things about director Dario Piana and writer Brendan Hood: Together they made one of the most unique science fiction thrillers I’ve ever seen, and they have not done much other filmmaking work since. I don’t know anything about why their cinema resumes have dried up, but I can say that I...

It is a shame that movie remakes usually cover films that were already perfect the first time. The ones that truly deserve a second shot are those based on interesting concepts but which, for one reason or another, collapsed upon execution. "Darkness Falls," a 2003 horror film directed by Jonathan Liebesman, is Exhibit A for this argument. At first glance the premise may seem too silly: A killer...