All of this street dancing and street living and street cred is very Disneyfied and while the look is slightly rougher than High School Musical, we are definitely in the same territory. The plot is every "hey, let's grab all these losers and be winners by being ourselves, which is a-ok" movie you've ever seen. Most of the dancers can't act very well and Evigan (daughter of famous truck driving monkey owner Greg Evigan) is not a particularly strong dancer. ...more

With the ongoing popularity of high stakes poker, greenlighting a film like 21 would appear to be a Tinseltown no-brainer. After all, you've got the true story of how a group of MIT students broke the bank in Vegas by applying their highly trained analytical minds toward counting cards, beating Sin City's blackjack tables in the process. It's a mega-dose of Mensa wish fulfillment. But leave it to Hollywood to fiddle with the facts. Ben Mezrich's non-fiction book entitled Bringing Down the House centered on a group of mostly Asian geniuses grifting casinos for all the cash they could. Somehow, that translated into a cast consisting of Kevin Spacey, Jim Sturgess, and Kate Bosworth....more

There is probably no character in the history of comic books, and specifically comics adapted to other mediums, as open to individual interpretation as Batman. Don't belive me' Just think of the different versions of Batman that have been committed to film: Adam West's sillier, multicolored version; Tim Burton's Gothic hero, flawed as much as his rogues gallery; Joel Shumacher's nipply super-hero - a sort of combination of the two; and Christopher Nolan's more realistic version of the character ...more

Based on some unspeakable, super classified bank robbery that took place in 1971 London, the investigation of which yielded no recovered money nor any arrests, Roger Donaldson's The Bank Job throttles its engines and tosses in just enough criminal bottom-dwellers to keep the viewers' minds away from the fact that it's still just another heist flick with a cockney accent and a taste for pints. Names changed (get this) to protect the guilty, the whole mess breaks out when political revolutionary Michael X (Peter De Jersey) snaps some shots of Princess Margaret getting double teamed by two young men on a secluded island....more

Ray (Farrell) and Ken (Gleeson) are two hitmen who just completed a difficult job where Ray accidentally kills a child. Their boss, Harry (Fiennes), a family man who happens to be in the business of killing people, is not happy with the results of the hit, so he holes them up in Bruges, Belgium - which could be the last destination for one of the men. ...more

The majority of movies based in the Middle Ages are droning or action packed (therefore mostly catering to an audience of the male persuasion). While this is neither droning nor action packed it still hasn't added anything entirely new to the genre. It wishes it could be In Her Shoes/Grey's Anatomy yet it obviously falls short. ...more

When you hear that a film has been sitting on the shelf for a couple of years (since 2006, apparently), certain reactionary red flags go off in your head. Of course, the makers of the new political thriller, Vantage Point, could argue that it was the subject matter, not sloppy filmmaking or underdeveloped characters, that required some temporal displacement. After all, the narrative revolves around the attempted assassination of the U.S. President at an anti-terrorism summit in Spain. The argued novelty of writer Barry Levy's script and director Pete Travis' approach is the Rashomon-styled multiple perspective of the participants. We view this event from every possible point of view except a logical -- or entertaining -- one....more

The good old video home system really changed the world of home entertainment. People bought the films they loved for a one-time charge, and they watched them whenever and wherever they wanted, over and over again. Although you don't see much of the VHS anymore in today's world, it still plays a big role in Michel Gondry's good-hearted comedy Be Kind Rewind, a charming little movie about how amateur filmmaking can bring people together to achieve great things. ...more

Unfortunately for Will Ferrell, Semi-Pro will probably go down in history as "That basketball movie with Will Ferrell wearing an afro," or, "That movie where that poor stunt double got mauled by a bear." Either way you put it, both of these unfiltered quotes could probably be combined to sum up the movie as a whole: Will Ferrell. Playing basketball. With an afro. And getting mauled by a bear. There really isn't much more to this lackluster, sport-themed comedy than that. ...more

It would be easy to blame most of the tedium in Jumper on star Hayden Christensen, who transfers the wooden acting/blank facial expressions he picked up on the last two Star Wars movies to his role of David Rice. Christensen's non-acting certainly doesn't help, but he looks positively charismatic next to the truly terrible Rachel Bilson (The O.C.), playing David's girlfriend/damsel in distress, Millie Harris. The plot, dialogue, and pacing also do their part in killing the possibilities inherent in the premise. ...more