After.Life
After.Life could have been a decent episode on The Outer Limits, but instead it’s a lost feature about being lost. Anna Taylor (Christina Ricci, Black Snake Moan) is a schoolteacher dissatisfied with everything: her boyfriend, Paul (Justin Long, Live Free, Die Hard), her hair color, her whole life.  That’s all we need to know about Anna before she gets into a fatal car wreck, and wakes up, dead, in Eliot Deacon’s (Liam Neeson, Schindler’s List) funeral parlor.  Deacon tries to counsel Anna into accepting her death, but is she really dead? The remaining hour and twenty minutes is spent guessing if Anna has really kicked the bucket, or if Deacon is playing a morbid trick on... READ MORE >>>

Alice In Wonderland
I was excited when I heard Tim Burton was making an Alice in Wonderland movie.  It feels like something that’s been that’s been sitting in the rumor mill for over a decade, just waiting to happen. Burton’s films have always had a sense of wonder about them, from the man-child road movie, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, to the more serious Big Fish, where a father and son bond through the power of imagination. Burton’s vision is surreal and expressionistic, producing just enough fantasy to make us acknowledge the smallest bits of real magic in our world. With that in mind, part of me likes the new Alice in Wonderland, and the other part is unsatisfied.      The setup of the new Alice is similar to... READ MORE >>>

Kick-Ass
Is that a bazooka and a jetpack?  Yes. Yes it is.    Kick-Ass is the latest take on the super hero movie, bringing out the gruesome humor and comic violence normally reserved for the inked page to life on screen.  The hero, Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson, Nowhere Boy) is tired of super heroes being works of fiction and decides to fulfill every nerd’s fantasy of becoming a real super hero..  After ordering supplies off the internet, Lizewski becomes Kick-Ass, a neighborhood crime fighter who tries to do-good, while ironically getting his ass kicked.  Joining Kick-Ass is Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz, 500 Days of Summer) and Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) who are ultra violent and extremely competent heroes, and Red Mist (Christopher “McLuvin” Mintz-Plasse) who’s a super-ficial-hero,... READ MORE >>>

Kites
Kites is a combination of a variety of concepts and ideas: it’s an Indian Studio production of a Spanish revenge story about a Hindi hustler and a Mexican seductress that takes place in Las Vegas, Mexico and the sprawling American South West. It’s more complicated to explain the production details than it is to explain the actual story.    Jay (Hrithik Roshan) is a suave player in the streets of Las Vegas, scamming and slumming, whatever it takes to make bucks. He’s charming, but he’s vain and shameless. When’s he’s not performing slight of hand tricks or giving sexy dance lessons, his metier is marrying immigrants in need of a green card in exchange for their savings.  Linda (Barbara Mori) is one of those immigrants, and... READ MORE >>>

Our Family Wedding
As a young dude, I admit that movies about weddings are not my favorite. They seem to be put together like Mad-Libs: there’s a word bank the filmmaker draws from to fill in the blanks, the zanier the better. Characters can include a racist grandma, dysfunctional bridesmaid/groomsman, alcoholic or painkiller abusing parents, etc., while the story always takes a dramatic twist towards the end that tests the integrity of the institution of marriage.  However, like in any genre, it’s the deviations from a familiar story that can make or break a film. Our Family Wedding succeeds straying far enough from the wedding-movie mold to be fun, and even endearing.    Set in Los Angeles, Our Family Wedding is about two young lovers, Lucia Ramirez (America Ferrera),... READ MORE >>>