As amusingly stupid as advertised, Hot Tub Time Machine milks the ‘80s for laughs but gets most of its comedic mileage out of a more general strain of boys-being-morons insanity. In Steve Pink’s visually cruddy film, Adam (John Cusack) is reunited with friend Nick (Craig Robinson) when their high-school buddy Lou (Rob Corddry) almost kills…

Body horror of a most repulsive kind, The Human Centipede (First Sequence) pushes at, and finally barrels straight through, the boundaries of modern cinematic shock-imagery. Tom Six’s exploitation film is designed to elicit not simply revulsion but urgent questions of “why?”, as his story – about two American tourists who fall victim to a German…

Based on a popular comic book series, The Losers approximates the macho guns-blazing fantasies peddled by not only its source material but also countless run-of-the-mill Xbox and PS3 shoot-‘em-ups. Director Sylvain White’s saga involves an A-Team-ish squad of soldiers who, after being framed and left for dead during a Bolivian drug raid by mysterious spook…

John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness has heady ideas it’s incapable of fully working out, but its tale – about John Trent (Sam Neill), an insurance investigator hired by a publishing firm to look into the disappearance of Stephen King-ish horror author Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow) – is finely attuned to the disquieting realm…

An opening image of an intricately embroidered carpet beautifully suggests the knotty drama to come in Everyone Else, Maren Ade’s superb depiction-cum-dissection of a young German couple’s fraying relationship. The twists and turns of romance are at the epicenter of Ade’s follow-up to 2003’s excellent The Forest for the Trees, with architect Chris (Lars Eidinger)…

John Carpenter eschews horror and sci-fi for jokey action-comedy in Big Trouble with Little China, which benefits from a rollicking wise-ass performance from Kurt Russell but otherwise falls limp courtesy of too many corny gags. Mashing up Eastern kung-fu and Western westerns, the film involves big rig driver Jack Burton (Russell, playing a tongue-in-cheek parody…

Plot deficient to the point of formlessness, New Moon ups the Twilight franchise’s schmaltzy teen-lit melodrama without providing any sort of narrative backbone to sustain it. As with its predecessor, this sequel is built around the chaste romance between human teen Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and hunky vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), a pair of…

Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans may be a re-do of the beloved 1981 Ray Harryhausen fantasy saga, but in its thudding rock soundtrack, its grim, bloody vision of ancient Greece, and its horror-movie-monstrous mythological beasts, the template the film really follows is that of the Playstation’s God of War franchise. In said comparison, this…