Antichrist
     Somebody forgot to inform Lars von Trier about the first rule of making a horror film: leave the pretense at the front door. In his attempt at genre filmmaking, the oft lauded Danish director treads familiar woman-on-the-verge-of-insanity thematics, ground that Roman Polanski already covered quite brilliantly with Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby.       Charlotte Gainsbourgh (The Science Of Sleep) and Willem Dafoe (Spiderman) portray a couple mourning the death of their son and dealing with grief in different ways.  Both actors are focused and intense in their characterizations, but there’s a severe clinical and sterile nature to their characters which leaves the audience feeling no attachment to them whatsoever. Thus when important personal transformations occur it’s all rather anticlimactic.     & nbsp; There is no question that this... READ MORE >>>

Black Dynamite
Michael Jai White is like the Rumplestiltskin of action movie heroes. He burst onto the scene in Spawn back in 1997, kicked a little ass in both Universal Soldier movies, and then faded from the bone crunching genre to focus on dramas. Well the sleeping giant has reawakened thanks to the blisteringly hilarious blaxploitation send-up/royal homage Black Dynamite. Unlike other blaxploitation tributes (think I’m Gonna Git You Sucka! and Undercover Brother), Black Dynamite isn’t set in modern day times and it’s not just another film paying compliments to the low budget black action films of the ‘70s. Instead it’s actually... READ MORE >>>

Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant
     Ever since the success of the Harry Potter film adaptations Hollywood has been scrambling to find the next young adult oriented fantasy series that can be turned into a money making franchise. There has been Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Golden Compass, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and others, none of which have come close to rivaling the cinematic incarnation of JK Rowling’s wizard. Cirque du Freak is the latest contender, one that also appears to be cashing in on the recent wave of vampire mania (an interesting footnote: the film is directed by Paul Weitz, whose brother Chris is helming the second installment of the Twilight series).      The story, culled from the pages of the books written by Darren Shan, follows the... READ MORE >>>

District 9
     The echoes of Apartheid, government internment, mistreatment of refugees, racial profiling, and big business’ interests often being at odds with the human condition ripple throughout South African director Neill Blomkamp’s feature film debut, District 9.  Yet underneath the sociopolitical commentary lies a genre film that owes no small debt to the vintage work of Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., specifically) and David Cronenberg.      However, this is not your typical alien invasion effort, though it contains plenty of recognizable elements from that sub-genre. Instead this is, at its core, a story about empathy, family bonds, and ultimately survival in the face of insurmountable odds. Okay, maybe that’s a bit over-the-top, but those elements play heavily into the story and... READ MORE >>>

Inglourious Basterds
     In the 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!, Quentin Tarantino enthuses about how he loves to shove a weed up the collective ass of cinema’s elite, thereby explaining his undying love of Drive-In and Grindhouse cinema aesthetics. What he fails to mention is how he wraps said aesthetics in the trained eye of a literate cineaste and instills his dialogue with language that leaves most contemporary linguists at a loss for words; in short he makes B-movies for the arthouse set.      Case in point, his latest endeavor Inglourious Basterds, which drops more references to German and French cinema than the average cinephile will be able to easily digest, gratuitously embraces the use of subtitles (it features no less... READ MORE >>>