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Starship Troopers (1997): B+
Ironically, Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers – a special effects-infested sci-fi saga about humanity’s war against a race of giant bugs – is more effective as a satire than as an action extravaganza. Like in Robocop, Verhoeven employs the basic trappings of genre as a ruse to sneak in cynical criticisms about contemporary society, and his…
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Murder at 1600 (1997): C-
1997 was a bad cinematic year for the President, who was implicated in two different films as the prime suspect in the murder of a pretty young blond. And though Clint Eastwood’s Absolute Power was a star-studded dud, it was still leaps and bounds better than Murder at 1600, a thoroughly ridiculous Wesley Snipes vehicle…
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The Bad News Bears (1976): A-
Made during an era when pre-teens weren’t required to wear protective padding before leaving the house and adults felt comfortable swearing and getting plowed in front of impressionable youths, 1976’s The Bad News Bears remains the best film ever made about kids and sports. An endearingly foul-mouthed tribute to sportsmanship that illustrates the emptiness of…
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The People Under the Stairs (1991): D
Throughout the past season of Project Greenlight, Wes Craven was repeatedly referred to as “the master of horror,” a lofty title immediately refuted by The People Under the Stairs, perhaps the most staggeringly incompetent movie in the director’s uneven canon. Imagine The Goonies via Alice in Wonderland but with mild gore, swearing, deviant sexual imagery…
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Darkness (2004): D
“Darkness is very wise,” says Giancarlo Giannini’s doctor during the climax of Jaume Balagueró’s ghost story Darkness. He must have been watching a different movie. Petulant American teenager Regina (Anna Paquin) and her dysfunctional family move to the Spanish countryside and into a haunted mansion that, unbeknownst to the new tenants, was constructed years earlier…
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Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005): C
Thankful it’s over, I am. After two pathetic prequels and an avalanche of out-of-proportion hype, George Lucas’ intergalactic saga concludes with Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, a ponderous series finale that finally depicts Anakin Skywalker’s (Hayden Christensen) transformation into Darth Vader. Lucas still hasn’t learned how to infuse his technically impressive…
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The Interpreter (2005): C
The fate of fictional world diplomacy hangs in the balance in The Interpreter, Sydney Pollack’s crummy – and politically gutless – suspense yarn about a Secret Service agent (Sean Penn) who investigates a United Nations interpreter’s (Nicole Kidman) claim that she overhead a plot to kill a visiting African dictator, only to discover that she…
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House of Wax (2005): C
House of Wax argues that for every pair of twins, one is awful and one is good. When it comes to classic films and remakes, the same also usually holds true, a fact bolstered by this lousy Jaume Serra-directed reimagining of 1953’s Vincent Price chiller. Maintaining only the title and central conceit of its predecessor,…
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Visitor Q (2001): A-
No one does taboo-smashing, boundary-stretching outrageousness quite like Takashi Miike, and Visitor Q is the scandalous pinnacle of his extreme cinema canon. A family of degenerates is falling apart: TV reporter Kiyoshi (Kenichi Endo), interested in filming his whore daughter for a news program, has sex with her instead; his son Takuya (Jun Mutô), tormented…
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Oldboy (2005): C+
Like so many of its vengeance-driven genre brethren, Chan-wook Park’s stylish but slight Oldboy wants to have it both ways. The tale of a loudmouth named Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-Sik) who is imprisoned in a grimy hotel room prison for 15 years and, once released, is given five days to uncover the reason behind his…
