The Fast and the Furious franchise goes Karate Kid-hokey with Tokyo Drift, a perfunctory and unintentionally goofy attempt to keep the series running without its stars Vin Diesel and Paul Walker. In Justin Lin’s cross-cultural racing drama, hot-rodding delinquent Sean (Lucas Black) avoids jail time by traveling to Tokyo to live with his father (Brian…

A Rashomon-style riff on the Red Riding Hood fable that’s visualized with Make Way for Noddy-grade animation, Hoodwinked is so lacking in cleverness or humor that it makes the similar fairy tale-rewriting Shrek series seem downright Shakespearean by comparison. Director Cory Edwards’ film involves a frog detective’s (David Ogden Stiers) investigation into a goodie bandit,…

Scream 2 opens promisingly, with a sneak preview showing of the based-on-Scream film Stab at which an African-American couple (Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett-Smith) lob volleys about the horror genre’s racial inequity before being slaughtered by a new, copycat Ghostface killer. Ending with the sight of a victim collapsing in front of both the screen…

For a film whose genre self-awareness has now become as culturally prevalent as the very cinematic conventions it addressed, Scream remains a highly polished piece of meta-slasher mayhem. Chockablock with references to its classic horror predecessors, Kevin Williamson’s script manages the considerable feat of paying endless homage while at the same time simultaneously subverting and…

Rarely has a sequel followed its predecessor’s exact template like Stepfather 2: Make Room for Daddy, a thoroughly imitative follow-up in which Terry O’Quinn’s serial family-killer Jerry Blake escapes mental-hospital imprisonment – after a lengthy intro inside the facility that affords no further insight into his psyche – and then poses as a suburban psychiatrist…

Love ignites the City of Lights’ magic in Midnight in Paris, the first Woody Allen film in forever to not wholly grate on the nerves. That status isn’t immediately apparent, however, as Allen’s latest opens with a beautiful if unimaginative day-to-night travelogue montage of Paris’ most famous sights (the Eiffel Tower! The Louvre! The Arc…

Over every grassy hilltop and around a jungle stream’s every bend, The Thin Red Line poses open-ended questions: Is there goodness and truth? Are we noble or savage? Do love and hate define us equally? Are those qualities bestowed upon us by a higher power, or are they our inheritance from our animal ancestors? Can…

Awash in reveries of outlaw fame, tabloid romance, and futures that either never could or would be, Badlands exists in a hypnotic dream-state of young love and murder. When garbage man Kit (Martin Sheen) meets teenage baton-twirler Holly (Sissy Spacek), it’s an instantaneous marriage of likeminded deluded souls. With Kit driven by psychopathic notions of…