A film designed to rattle claustrophobics, Buried situates itself exclusively inside an underground wooden coffin inhabited by Paul Conroy (a suitably frantic and furious Ryan Reynolds), a U.S. contractor working in Iraq. Armed only with a lighter and a cell phone, Paul tries to make sense of his predicament while not completely losing his mind,…

As with Megamind, Despicable Me concerns the humanity of a super-villain, in this instance lifelong baddie Gru (Steve Carell). In Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud’s inspired if slight animated saga, Gru operates in a world accustomed to his nefariousness – his neighbors hardly blanche at his malevolent-looking residence amidst their cookie-cutter planned community homes, and…

John Carpenter’s widescreen compositions not only lend beauty to Escape from New York but also enhance its paranoia over (and disgust with) military-industrial complex tyranny. In a future 1997, a spike in crime leads the U.S. government to wall off Manhattan to make it a maximum-security prison for the nation’s criminals. When terrorists hijack and…

After Halloween and Prom Night, Jamie Lee Curtis cemented her “scream queen” status with Terror Train, a run-of-the-mill slasher film whose central gimmick is setting its action on a train. In truth, however, this routine horror effort is most notable for featuring a young David Copperfield in a runtime-padding role as a magician wowing the…

“From M. Night Shyamalan” no longer portends positive results, and true to form, his producer’s credit on Devil accurately reflects the generally cruddy nature of this B-movie, in which five people get trapped in a high-rise elevator – and one of them turns out to be Satan! John Erick Dowdle’s film has a compact set-up…

A young boy works on a nude-woman jigsaw puzzle while singing “Humpty Dumpty,” and when his mother viciously chastises him for such obscenity, he hacks her into bits and pieces and then poses as a traumatized victim to the police. This 1942 prologue sets the stage for the prime narrative of Pieces, in which a…

John Carpenter makes the best of a difficult situation with Christine, a faithful adaptation of one of Stephen King’s lesser (and more ridiculous) works. There are few scares lurking in this 1979-set haunted-car saga, in which nerdy high-schooler Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon) falls dangerously in love with a 1958 cherry-red Plymouth Fury named Christine, since…

Initially unsettling and then increasingly ridiculous, Insidious follows a well-worn template while attempting to maximize the benefits of jump scares. Saw masterminds James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s tale concentrates on the seemingly happy Lambert family, who move into a new suburban house and promptly begin noticing strange occurrences explainable only by supernatural means, be it…