In The Other, To Kill a Mockingbird director Robert Mulligan does a great job engendering sympathy for a schizophrenic child who is channeling the spirit of his deceased twin. Chris and Martin Udvarnoky do a commendable job playing the boy and his ‘other,’ and famed acting teacher Uta Hagen is good as the Russian aunt who begins to put two and two together after a series of tragic ‘accidents’ happen on the family farm.
Pacific Rim is good, dumb summer fun. It’s beautiful, sexy, exciting, funny, and it kinda made me feel like a kid again. The premise involves Kaiju and Jägers… scratch that. Let’s call it like it is: this movie is about big fucking robots fighting big fucking monsters. The monsters come from another dimension, entering our world from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The robots, each manned by two psychically linked people (often blood relatives), are humanity’s last hope for survival. The concept sounds like the germ of another big, loud, stupid summer movie — you know, the kind Michael Bay makes. But director Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth) handily beats Bay at his own game with Pacific Rim, imbuing the film with more style and substance than any of Bay’s Transformers movies ever had.
In this Howard Hawks production, an arctic science team finds an alien buried in the ice, so they bring it back to their facility for closer inspection. Things go awry, the monster gets loose, and before long, all the men are in danger of becoming food for the alien’s progeny. This is a great atomic-age monster movie that well exceeds expectations for the genre and the period it was made.
In this horror comedy from director Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings), Michael J. Fox stars as a charlatan ghostbuster who can communicate with the undead. After many of the local ghost community start disappearing, Fox gets roped into solving the mystery, which involves a 20-year old mass-murder at a nearby mental institution. If it sounds convoluted, it is. The narrative is over-complicated, involving too many characters and flashbacks, but there are enough elements here that you’re likely to find at least some of them interesting.
Brad Pitt admirably carries this big-budget zombie apocalypse flick that has more in common with Outbreak or Contagion than it does your standard zombie fare — don’t expect blood and gore, horror fans. Director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Stranger Than Fiction) succeeds in ratcheting up the tension with a script (based very loosely on Max Brooks’ book) that is essentially one dramatic escape sequence after another.
If you wanted to remake William Lustig’s 1980 slasher cornerstone with an abundance of point-of-view shots, you probably couldn’t do a better a job than Franck Khalfoun did with this remake. Maniac is beautiful and imaginative, photographed almost entirely from the killer’s (Elijah Wood’s) point of view. You really only see him in mirrors and other reflective surfaces. On one hand, the conceit is clever and cool, but on the other hand, it ends up being what I’m paying attention to — not the thin storyline or the operatic depiction of its psychologically scarred central character. I think less would have been more where the back story is concerned, and I’m not sure the perpetual POV tactic is the best way to tell this story.
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.
