One of the great elements about 1985’s “Fright Night” was its love of movies, specifically a hunger to mimic the mood and blood-spurting symphonies of the old Hammer horror pictures. It was a tongue-in-cheek monster party, and while crippled by a few troublesome ideas, the majority of the feature displayed a plump personality and delightful ‘80’s attitude toward teen sex. The 2011 remake doesn’t share the same appetite for widescreen amusement, slimming down the vampire antics to fit today’s glossy CGI appetites, creating a slick, needless, and only somewhat inspired update.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

While watching “The Help,” there was never a moment where I felt a secure, deeply felt story was being told. Instead, the film is a highlight reel of exaggerated emotions and social concern, struggling to find its voice while incomplete scripting and overly emphatic performances keep the feature’s bloated intentions blurred. Spending more time tugging on heartstrings than exhaustively studying the characters, “The Help” can’t avoid feeling wholly insincere.

(more…)

The last sequel was titled “The Final Destination,” but clearly New Line Cinema is run by a bunch of sneaky little liars. Thanks to a 3D boost at the box office and renewed interest in the slaughter of no-name actors, the franchise has been pulled out of retirement, revving up again with an all-new multi-dimensional gore show. While the thrill was officially snuffed out once the end credits rolled on the first “Final Destination,” that hasn’t stopped the producers from mounting a surprisingly snoozy fourth sequel.

(more…)

The hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest has been lauded for decades now, blessed with encouraging record sales and a consistent vibration of love emanating from the rap community. However, they’ve rarely been explored in full, leaving actor Michael Rapaport to step behind the camera and investigate the inner workings of this musical union with his thumpy, riveting documentary, “Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest.”

(more…)

Brevity is a good friend to the mediocre comedy “30 Minutes or Less.” Running roughly 75 minutes long, the film is tidily arranged by director Rueben Fleischer, who has enough sense to hit his slapstick bullet points and bail. I just wish he had better material, at least something substantial that would prevent the picture from becoming yet another R-rated comedy cursed with crummy improvisation-addicted actors and their distracting potty mouths.

(more…)

Full disclosure: I’ve never seen a single episode of the Fox television smash “Glee.” I know frighteningly little about the series; however, after viewing “Glee: The 3D Concert Movie,” I’m now extremely curious about the program. At the very least, I’d like to see how the show continues on now that Charlie Sheen has been fired.

(more…)

I want a varied landscape of cinema as much as the next person, but did the world truly need a movie based on the depravity of Uday Hussein, son of Saddam? It’s difficult to ascertain exactly why the story behind “The Devil’s Double” required a feature film treatment, a quibble inflated to flat-out disgust by the end of the picture. Unsophisticated and unnecessarily ugly, the movie seems to favor Uday’s sadism instead of condemning it, making its ultimate purpose too fogged for comfort.

(more…)

If “The Tree of Life” is a full-course dinner of philosophy and emotional reflection, the sci-fi snoozer “Another Earth” is a particularly chewy intellectual amuse-bouche. A plodding melodrama concerning the effects of loss and the potential for soulful rebirth, “Another Earth” doesn’t pursue its provocative ideas with any sort of narrative momentum. Instead, it’s all dreary navel-gazing and cinematographic posturing hoping to wade into a profound philosophical bath, using the mysteries of the universe as a way to hypnotize an audience more likely to be annoyed by this story than entranced.

(more…)

After five motion pictures, two television series, and a 2001 Tim Burton remake, it seems a prequel is the only logical place to go in the exhausted “Planet of the Apes” saga. The origin tale of apes and their early stages of domination is surprisingly fertile ground for the producers, who loosely rework 1972’s “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” into “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” a frequently thrilling, emotionally resonate reboot that takes advantage of today’s vibrant motion capture technology to help articulate the complexity burning within these damn dirty apes.

(more…)

Thanks to various works from Judd Apatow and the smash success of “The Hangover,” the summer of 2011 has played host to a resurgence of hard R-rated comedies, each sharing the same improvisational DNA while declining a cheery spirit of punchline imagination, more content to primitively shock than organize surprises. While the bar was set low by the intolerable June belch, “Bad Teacher,” the body-swap extravaganza “The Change-Up” stumbles into August to claim its prize as the worst feature of the new batch.

(more…)