Made during an era when pre-teens weren’t required to wear protective padding before leaving the house and adults felt comfortable swearing and getting plowed in front of impressionable youths, 1976’s The Bad News Bears remains the best film ever made about kids and sports. An endearingly foul-mouthed tribute to sportsmanship that illustrates the emptiness of…

Throughout the past season of Project Greenlight, Wes Craven was repeatedly referred to as “the master of horror,” a lofty title immediately refuted by The People Under the Stairs, perhaps the most staggeringly incompetent movie in the director’s uneven canon. Imagine The Goonies via Alice in Wonderland but with mild gore, swearing, deviant sexual imagery…

“Darkness is very wise,” says Giancarlo Giannini’s doctor during the climax of Jaume Balagueró’s ghost story Darkness. He must have been watching a different movie. Petulant American teenager Regina (Anna Paquin) and her dysfunctional family move to the Spanish countryside and into a haunted mansion that, unbeknownst to the new tenants, was constructed years earlier…

Thankful it’s over, I am. After two pathetic prequels and an avalanche of out-of-proportion hype, George Lucas’ intergalactic saga concludes with Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, a ponderous series finale that finally depicts Anakin Skywalker’s (Hayden Christensen) transformation into Darth Vader. Lucas still hasn’t learned how to infuse his technically impressive…

The fate of fictional world diplomacy hangs in the balance in The Interpreter, Sydney Pollack’s crummy – and politically gutless – suspense yarn about a Secret Service agent (Sean Penn) who investigates a United Nations interpreter’s (Nicole Kidman) claim that she overhead a plot to kill a visiting African dictator, only to discover that she…