I forgot how much I like period dramas. I used to enjoy the sumptuous costumes, the ornate dialogue, the spectacular buildings, and the historical intrigue of movies like The Other Boleyn Girl all the time. I guess they’ve fallen out of fashion since their heyday in the 80s and 90s when Merchant-Ivory productions (like A…

The title says it all: Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a well-written movie (based on a series of illustrated books) about enduring the first year of middle school told from the perspective (complete with narrative voiceover) of a smallish, less-than-popular young middle-child boy named Greg. We all know how tough school can be at…

Believing the hype about its scariness, I decided to watch Paranormal Activity in the daytime. I’d always figured that horror movies are barely scary without the creepy music, but I guess this one was designed to be frightening without the soundtrack. The entire film is staged as video camera footage taken by day-trader Micah Sloat…

The best parts of the Michael Jackson concert-rehearsal film This Is It were the numbers which were closest to complete, with full blown choreography, spectacle, and music. As most people already know, Jackson’s untimely death prevented him from performing the 50 sold out shows for which this movie showed him preparing. In lieu of actual…

Drag Me To Hell definitely wastes no time living up to its title: in the first ten minutes of prologue, some poor kid, who stole a silver necklace from a gypsy, literally gets dragged kicking and screaming into Hell. So without further ado, the tone is set for this B-movie horror film. This is not…

I can’t remember exactly how I heard about a small film called Stone of Destiny, but I typically enjoy light-hearted British movies like this one. Though there was a bit of a more serious political-historical flavour to it, this story of a group of young Scots, stealing the Stone of Destiny (an ancient symbol of…

The Lookout had me fooled to the point that I was losing interest in watching to the end. The movie is about Chris Pratt (played by a typically subdued Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a young guy coping with brain damage after a very serious car accident. He has trouble remembering things and keeping events in sequence, so…

The Losers, ironically, had a lot going for it. It was adapted from a comic book (which is always a good start these days, since comic movies are so hot); and it featured some big-budget action scenes as well as some geek-friendly marquee up-and-comers such as Jeffrey Dean Morgan (remember him from The Watchmen?), Chris…