I have a confession to make: In the celebrity feud of 2004, I side with Lindsay Lohan and against Hillary Duff. That said, I could barely stand Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, last year’s pre-Mean Girls Lohan vehicle which – with its inattention to narrative or character development (aside from watered-down after-school special lessons)…

As the late Henny Youngman might have said, if this is what the serial killer genre has come to, take my life, please! Perhaps the most derivative Hollywood serial killer thriller since, um, well, since the last one, Taking Lives involves Angelina Jolie’s pseudo-psychic F.B.I. agent (she lies in victims’ graves to “understand” what happened…

Here are the three things I learned from Nick Hamm’s Godsend: Don’t ever let your kid hang out alone on a New York City sidewalk while you sign a credit card receipt in a store; don’t ever trust Robert DeNiro if he offers you a deal too good to be true; and don’t ever attempt…

Unless you like your romantic comedies light on romance and even lighter on comedy, I’d suggest shunning Adam Sandler’s 50 First Dates at all costs. Although it reunites Sandler and Barrymore (who previously paired up in the superior, but still mediocre, The Wedding Singer), this dopey film has virtually nothing going for it but its…

Dear Mr. Dynamite (Jon Heder), As both a critic and a semi-compassionate adult, I’m writing to inform you that director Jared Hess’ movie about you, Napoleon Dynamite, is a work of such crude, cruel nastiness that you should seriously consider filing a lawsuit against the filmmaker. This “comedy,” which tracks your adolescent misadventures in small-town…

Considering the intrinsic geopolitical underpinnings of John Frankenheimer’s 1962 Cold War classic The Manchurian Candidate, not to mention the stellar work by Frankenheimer and his illustrious cast (including Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, Laurence Harvey and that creepy mustached Manchurian brainwasher), remaking the film for modern audiences seemed like a dubious undertaking. Yet Jonathan Demme –…

Nothing more than a bland inside joke for genre aficionados, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is writer/director/star Larry Blamire’s campy ode to square ‘50s sci-fi adventures. Shot in faux-amateurish black-and-white by Kevin Jones, and featuring a group of largely unknown actors who deliberately go overboard in caricaturing the stilted acting performances of those bygone Cold…

Tom Cruise’s skin-deep posturing as a business-like assassin, enhanced by his ludicrous gray hair and beard, goes a long way towards contributing to the implausibility of Michael Mann’s Collateral, the story of a killer named Vincent (Cruise) who hires Max (Jamie Foxx), an L.A. cabbie, to drive him to his evening’s five murderous appointments. Cruise’s…

(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn) Director Joel Schumacher never met a movie he didn’t almost ruin, but even if the flashy filmmaker exhibits a persistent aversion to dramatic depth, there’s much to appreciate about his Brat Packers-as-stylish-vampires camp-a-thon The Lost Boys. Starring Jason Patric as a teenager who moves to a seaside California town…