Oliver Stone’s epic bio of the Macedonian military legend, like so many pet projects, is a glorious mess of a movie. The screenplay goes back and forth in time, mixing scenes of Alexander’s youth with scenes of his conquests. The result is jarring, never allowing you to get to know the character in any time. The narrative also relies far too much on Anthony Hopkins’ narration to explain what is going on. Stone has an Academy Award for writing Midnight Express, but his writing on Alexander seems like the clunky work of an amateur.
Neill Blomkamp’s stellar directorial debut is an unpredictable blend of intelligence, emotion, and cinematic whoop-ass that defies convention and leaves you breathless. It begins like a documentary, outlining how a race of stranded aliens (the space kind) came to be ghettoized in South Africa. We follow a character named Wikus, a bumbling government agent who is tasked with herding the aliens to a new camp (the concentration kind) further away from Johannesburg. The aliens aren’t pretty, but you’ll be surprised how emotionally invested you’ll get in a couple of them — a father named Christopher, and his tiny young son, who are desperately trying to find a way back to their home world. When Wikus subjects himself to a dangerous alien chemical, he begins a Kafka-esque transformation into one of the aliens, or “prawns” as they are called derogatorily.
Hellraiser fans rejoice. This is the best Clive Barker movie in twenty years. Director Ryuhei Kitamura hits the nail on the head (or the meathook through the ankles) in his handling of the story, which centers around an urban photographer (The Hangover‘s Bradley Cooper) in search of brutal subject matter. He finds what he’s looking for after stalking a stern-looking butcher onto a subway car late one night. As Cooper’s character and his girlfriend (Leslie Bibb) begin to connect the mysterious butcher to a series of missing persons reports, they fall head-first into some supernatural shit that will change their lives forever.
My favorite Pixar film features two robots who say little more than each others’ names, but somehow, as if by magic, WALL-E manages to convey more emotion than films that try twice as hard to do so. There’s a charming purity in the characters of WALL-E and EVE, who to differing degrees struggle against their ‘directives’ to form a bond. The fact that these two odd ‘bots end up protecting the last sliver of life on Earth — a tiny plant — could have been cloying, but Pixar knows how to handle the material. When WALL-E finds the fragile vine, he simply collects it in an old shoe and places it on a shelf with other artifacts of a bygone era. 
