Marvel second-stringer Thor gets his own summer-blockbuster vehicle with the unimaginatively titled Thor (what, he couldn’t even get a preceding “The Mighty”?), a merely adequate introductory saga coated in hammy regality by director Kenneth Branagh. Visualizing the god-realm of Asgard as a metropolis of golden-glittering towers, spires and rainbow bridges – the last of these…

A slasher-film homage that reimagines Santa Claus as an undead demon, Saint accurately rehashes genre conventions, even if it chooses not to be the least bit scary. Going for more grind-and-gristle than the superficially similar, more fantasy-oriented Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, and working from the Dutch conception of the jolly old soul, Maas’ film…

On the basis of Neon Flesh, writer/director Paco Cabezas really loves Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, except he wishes it had done more to celebrate misogynistic immorality. Ricky (Mario Casas) decides that, to please the hooker mother (Macarena Gómez) who abandoned him on the streets at twelve and who’s now getting out of prison,…

A Japanese “pink film” (i.e. soft-core porn) that’s also a giddy musical set to the absurdist tunes of French-German pop duo Stereo Total, Underwater Love concerns the difficulties that arise for factory worker Asuka (Sawa Masaki) after she meets a kappa – a mythological human-fish creature that has a beak, a turtle shell on its…

Fight Club ostensibly celebrates the very things it eventually decries, though that’s in keeping with its fundamental schizophrenia. David Fincher’s 1999 cult classic isn’t a simple A-B construct – its cinematic (and, thus, mass-market) glorification of its characters’ bruised-knuckle anti-materialism may be contradictory, but Jim Uhls’ script (based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel) is at heart…

The battle between divine determinism and free will takes mundane form in The Adjustment Bureau, the story (loosely inspired by a Philip K. Dick tale) of a hotshot young politician named David (Matt Damon) who, after meeting the apparent girl of his dreams in ballerina Elise (Emily Blunt), unwittingly walks in on a group of…

A female-centric bit of Tarantino/Almodovar-ish nonsense, Women in Trouble offers a cornucopia of chatty intertwined tales concerning women whose common links are both their need to tell special someones how they really feel, and to engage in long conversations while dressed in bras and panties. Writer/director Sebastian Gutierrez’s story is structurally clichéd – what with…

The Rock cooks up a return to kick-assery in Faster, and the smell is borderline-rank. A transparent bid by its star to reestablish his badass credentials after a string of family films, George Tillman Jr.’s B-movie is a revenge saga about Driver (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), who gets out of prison hell-bent on killing those…

The last will and testament of an emotionally remote mother sparks an investigation into the past in Incendies, Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad’s play. That inquiry is carried out by French-Canadian Arab twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) after they hear from notary and family friend Jean (Rémy Girard) that their mom…

Nothing more than a cheapo regurgitation of its predecessor, Fright Night Part II once again finds teenager Charley (William Ragsdale) enlisting the help of TV horror-movie host Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall) to combat the forces of vampiric evil. This time, that bloodsucker is a woman, Regine (Julie Carmen), and she temporarily gets her fangs into…