THE FILM:

I was not expecting much from Crush after reading the synopsis on the back of the case that makes it sound like yet another Fatal Attraction rip-off for teens. Since Swimfan kind of sucked, I assumed Crush wouldn't be much better. Then I watched the movie and damn if this tricky thriller didn't entertain me. All-American high school athl...Read the entire review

Richard Kuklinski was a real-life mob hitman whose career spanned across three decades. He killed more than 100 people before he was finally brought to justice in 1986. He was referred to as "the Iceman," not because he was so cold-blooded, but because he would freeze the bodies of his victims and keep them under wraps for extended periods of time so that their time of death would be harder to pin down.

The new movie The Iceman is based on a non-fiction book by crime writer Anthony Bruno, who profiled Kuklinski in 1993. Twenty years later, Ariel Vroman's film version takes what one assumes is a less exacting approach, dramatizing the career of the notorious killer as a combination of historical biopic and gangster hagiography.

Michael Shannon (Read the entire review

THE FILM:

During the opening scenes of So Undercover, in which a borderline obnoxious Miley Cyrus scales rooftops during a private-eye gig, I assumed the worst. Cyrus, with her two-packs-a-day smoker's voice and penchant for sass, was going to make these 94 minutes into a movie reviewer's hell. But then, So Undercover sticks Cyrus in a New Orleans sorority, and turns into something resembling passable, Disney Channel entertainment. Cyrus is Molly Morris but pretends to be sorority girl Brooke Stonebridge, which really does sound like a WASPY neighborhood, after the FBI asks her to guard the daughter of a high-priority asset. By no means is So Undercover a great movie, but its target audience - adolescent girls - should eat it up. ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Tibor Tak cs is no stranger to horror movies. In fact, he's got some pretty fun credits in his filmography - Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Child, I, Madman and of course The Gate to name just a few. Unfortunately these days he's being doing a lot of TV movie and straight to video work, and the latest of these projects is Spiders 3D, a movie so astonishingly unoriginal that the title pretty much tells you what to expect. And while truth in advertising is generally a good thing, so too is creativity and originality, two traits in which this feature is severely lacking.

When the movie begins, we're in outer space - the starting point of many a creature feature over the years. Here we see a space station once full of space guys now littered with corpses and... spiders. Big ones. Soon enough, some meteors lay waste to what's left of the spa...Read the entire review

McMillan & Wife - Complete Series is an attractively and compactly boxed set of the popular and lighthearted 1971-76 murder mystery series starring Rock Hudson. Indeed, the set actually contains much more than its title might suggest, for it also includes McMillan, the 1976-77 continuation of McMillan & Wife produced after co-star Susan Saint James, the "Wife" of the title, left the show following a contract dispute. And it also has the entire run of The Snoop Sisters (1973-74), a short-lived whodunit that, like McMillan & Wife, was also part of the NBC Mystery Movie program but otherwise is unrelated.

The NBC Mystery Movie was a "wheel show," a format with some variations long popular in Britain but rare on American television. Essentially, different movie-length shows rotated within the same time slot. The NBC Mystery Movie, airi...Read the entire review

Note: This review iscovering the 38-disclimited edition set released by VEI available here. There is also a 32-disc non-limited editionthat is in wide release. The smaller setdoes not include the first TV movie, the first season of the show, thefour 'reunion' made-for-TV movies, and presumably many of the extras.

The Show:

Why can't Cagney & Lacey get any respect? Theshow had several false starts when it wason TV, but finally earned critical and popular acclaim. It was nominated for a slew of awards wh...Read the entire review

The Paperboyis a strange noir-infused mystery from Oscar-nominated filmmaker LeeDaniels (Precious). It's essentially a pulpymovie based upon a pulp novel by writer Pete Dexter (...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The Paperboy is based on a 1995 pulp novel by Pete Dexter, who Sacramentans may recognize from his Sacramento Bee column in the 1980s. The screenplay was written by Dexter along with director Lee Daniels.

The story takes place in a small Florida town during 1969. A sheriff is murdered one night and Hilary Van Wetter (John Cusack) is arrested for the crime but claims to be innocent. Newspaper reporter Ward Jansen (Matthew McConaughey) is prompted to return to his hometown to investigate the situation along with colleague Yardley Acheman (David Oyelowo), and stays at his home with relatives including his brother, the title character Jack (Zac Efron). Jack works for Ward's newspaper as a delivery person. Nicole Kidman plays Hilary's fiancee Charlotte Bless (she has somehow fallen in love with him even though she has only met him as a prisoner) who provides Ward with inform...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Simon West, 2012's Stolen stars Nicholas Cage as Will Montgomery who, along with his pal, Vincent (Josh Lucas), joins up with Riley (Malin Akerman) and Reginald (M.C. Gainey) to pull off a robbery big enough to let them live the good life. Unfortunately when Detective Harlend (Danny Huston) gets word of what's going down, he busts Will, the other three men make it out of there in time. This lands Will eight years in prison which gives his daughter Alison (Sami Gayle) plenty of time to grow into a young woman without him. When he is let out after doing his time, he wants nothing more than to reunite with her but things get complicated when Vincent shows up seemingly out of nowhere and kidnaps Alison.

Vincent thinks that Will still has the ten million dollar in missing cash from the botched robbery - hence the kidnapping plan. The problem here is that W...Read the entire review

The Film:

THE MOVIE:

It's rare to see a movie with a decent premise fall apart as thoroughly as Red Lights does in its final act. This is largely due to an ending so monumentally dumb that it can't help but tank everything that came before it. Director Rodrigo Cort s may have scored points with genre fans with his last offering where he buried Ryan Reynolds alive but some of that good will is definitely squandered here.

Before I go off on a rant about the film's stupefying climax, let me exercise some restraint and start at the very beginning (a very good place to start). Margaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver) and Tom Buckley (Cillian Murphy) are paranormal investigators with a twist. Rather than entering haunted houses with an arsenal of cameras and acting terrified for no particular reason (like every supernatural r...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Red Lights hooked me for the first 90 minutes before unraveling in spectacularly inept fashion. Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy play physics professors who travel around the country debunking paranormal myths and unexplained occurrences, and Robert De Niro portrays a famous blind psychic who comes out of a long retirement to challenge the pair's assertion that all things can be explained rationally. Red Lights, from Spanish director Rodrigo Cort s, gets its title from the term used to describe the tricks behind staged supernatural phenomena, and the film initially takes on a sort of "X-Files" vibe. Unfortunately, a decent set-up is spoiled by an unsatisfying ending that renders everything preceding it moot. I will not compl...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Martial arts noir...does that sound appealing to you? If the thought of that genre coupling gets you all hot and bothered then you're in the target demographic for The Girl from the Naked Eye. The action scenes take prominence over the noir trappings to yield a film that is entertaining without being completely successful.

Our protagonist is a broke gambler named Jake (Jason Yee). In order to pay off his debts, he works for a sleazy club owner named Simon (Ron Yuan) who runs an escort business on the side. Jake drives Simon's girls from client to client and steps in as a bruiser when things don't go as planned. It's a simple enough job that gets complicated when Jake meets Simon's newest girl, Sandy (Samantha Streets). He has his guard up and she has secrets of her own but over time they develop a friendship. Unfortunately before their relationship can bl...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Please Note: The stills used here are taken from promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

If you've ever been on the fence about having kids, seeing The Babymakers will make up your mind. Not because it features toddlers doing cute and/or annoying things (is there a difference?), there are actually very few children in the movie. The Babymakers will make up your mind because it's so bad, you'll never want to reproduce for fear that one of your progeny will turn out to be the kind of humor-impaired Idiocracy-extra who will find The Babymakers funny.

Because it's not funny. Not at all. Not even a smidge. Never cr...Read the entire review

The Movie:
As far as action films go, Girl from the Naked Eye is the perfect example of the B movie. It's produced on a low budget, but still has well executed action, good performances and decent characterization, though it isn't as polished and spot on as a bigger budget production would be.

Jason Yee stars as Jake, a troubled man who is working as a driver for an escort service to pay off a gambling debt. He's working for Simon (Ron Yuan), who owns the Naked Eye club of the title, and the girl is Sandy (Samantha Streets), an underage runaway who Simon has talked into working for him as a call girl.

The film opens with Jake cradling the murdered Sandy in his arms, and the story, told with generous flashbacks, follows him as he tracks down her killer. His quest for vengeance is stymied for a time by Simon, who doesn't want to give up his client book, and by the police who don't ...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Richard Linklater's Bernie begins with an irresistible disclaimer: "What you're fixin' to see is a true story." It sets the table appropriately for the picture that follows, which has the inquisitiveness of a true crime story, but a documentarian's fascination with time and place. The setting is Carthage, a small town in East Texas, and in a wonderful early scene, a local resident explains how you should really think of Texas as five different states, including East Texas and the People's Republic of Austin--and that's not counting the panhandle, he explains, which nobody does.

A couple dozen locals appear in the film, which uses their documentary-style talking heads to introduce the characters and the location (which is like another character). Linklater mashes up those interviews with his recreated scenes, telling the story of Bernie Tiede (Jack Black), the pro...Read the entire review

Jay Chandrasekhar's The Babymakers is a happily low-rent, cheerfully dirty sex comedy, raw and ribald but nowhere near as mean-spirited as what tends to pass for sex comedy these days. Director Chandrasekhar hails from the Broken Lizard troupe, and a few members of that group (including him) pop up, but it's not a "Broken Lizard movie,"; it's a fairly conventional love-and-marriage comedy, with some sperm theft thrown in.

Paul Scharder and Olivia Munn play Tommy and Audrey, three years married and ready to start a family. After months of trying, however, they find out that Tommy's sperm isn't quite up to the task. "They look drunk!" remarks Audrey, when shown a slide of his sluggish swimmers. Tommy can't believe it--especially since, just a few years earlier, he made ...Read the entire review

Two years back, the Spanish director Rodrigo Cort s directed Buried, a taut, tense little potboiler that didn't get nearly the attention it deserved. (It's that movie where Ryan Reynolds is trapped in the coffin for 90 minutes. Go rent it.) It's such a good film that there was every reason to anticipate his latest effort with eagerness, even excitement. That excitement last about ten minutes into his new film Red Lights, peeling away in layers as the film progress: Okay, so maybe this one's not up to par. No, it's mediocre at best. No, wait, it's actually quite bad.

So many things can go askew in the making of a motion picture that it's something of a miracle we ever get a good one, so it's alway...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Director Juan Carlos Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's first feature film in roughly five years (his last being 28 Weeks Later, 2012's Intruders is a slick and incredibly atmospheric horror film that is set in Spain and which follows the story of a boy named Juan (Izan Corchero). He lives at home with his mother, Luisa (Pilar Lopez de Ayala), where he works on a horror story of his own which seems to be based on the fact that he and his mother are haunted by a creature they know only as Hollowface who has no face of his own and who is out to steal someone else's. Luisa is obviously very concerned for her kid and does what she can to help him, while miles away in England a young girl named Mia (Ella Purnell) passes off a ghost story she's come across as her own work and impresses her classmates and her teacher. Of course, the story she tells is the one which Juan wrote, and...Read the entire review

The story of Bernie Tiede is too good to be true. By all accounts, Tiede was a sweet fellow, generous to a fault, professional, a perfectionist, and had the voice of an angel to boot. So it was a surprise to the folks of Carthage, Texas when Tiede was arrested for the murder of Marjorie Nugent, an 80-year-old millionaire who spent most of her time with Tiede. Or was it? The same townsfolk who believed Bernie to be a saint knew Marjorie as a bitter old woman who hated everyone around her and was even estranged from her own family, who tried one to sue her for her money.

Bernie, directed by Richard Linklater and co-written by Linklater and Skip Hollandsworth, adapts Hollandsworth's January 1998 article about Tiede for the big screen. Starring Linklater's School of Rock companion Jack Black in the title ...Read the entire review

There's something about the way the title card declaring that Bernie is based on a true story that compels you to think that maybe you're being conned. Perhaps it's just that Fargo has made the moviegoing audience a bit suspicious of quirky films about a murder in a small town, but it's not helped that co-writer and director Richard Linklater and star Jack Black, who previously worked together on The School of Rock, don't even try to hide their tongues in their cheeks. They're pushing those suckers hard against the inside of their mouths. The bulges are evident.

And yet, Bernie is taken from real lif...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

The Woody Harrelson renaissance of late is a wonderful thing. The man can act, and his wild-eyed magnetism lights up the silver screen. Harrelson impresses as Dave "Date Rape" Brown, an out-of-control cop in 1990s Los Angeles, in Rampart, titled for the law enforcement scandal of the same name. Harrelson joins his The Messenger director Oren Moverman again, but their latest collaboration cannot match the emotional depth and precise narrative of their first. A plethora of big-name stars - Ben Foster, Anne Heche and Sigourney Weaver, among others - fill out the film's smaller roles, but Rampart is Harrelson's show. The rogue cop begins to take heat for his ...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 South by Southwest Film Festival

Richard Linklater's Bernie begins with an irresistible disclaimer: "What you're fixin' to see is a true story." It sets the table appropriately for the picture that follows, which has the inquisitiveness of a true crime story, but a documentarian's fascination with time and place. The setting is Carthage, a small town in East Texas, and in a wonderful early scene, a local resident explains how you should really think of Texas as five different states, including East Texas and the People's Republic of Austin--and that's not counting the panhandle, he explains, which nobody does.

A couple dozen locals appear in the film, which uses their documentary-style talking...Read the entire review

"I guess I don't have to say 'bomb' if I just said 'abortion'."

Wait! That's just a line from the movie, not me railing into High Road or anything. I mean, I guess I was kinda disappointed, but it's

[click on...Read the entire review ]]>