Category: Movie Reviews

Film critic Elvis Mitchell and director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders collaborated on another series of fascinating interviews with a mix of African-American artists, activists, academics and athletes. Many are instantly-recognizable icons who need no introduction, such as Tyler Perry, Laurence Fishburne, Melvin Van Peebles, Bishop T.D. Jakes and Angela Davis. Others are a little less known, like […]

As first adapted to the screen in 2001 from William Steig’s popular children’s book, Shrek was an enchanting fairy tale with a marvelous moral about appreciating each other’s inner beauty. While delivering that heartwarming message, the picture kept you in stitches via the hilarious antics of the title character (Mike Myers) and his trash-talking companion, […]

BIG BUDGET FILMS Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (PG-13 for intense action sequences) Medieval action fantasy, based on the video game of the same name, about a rogue prince (Jake Gyllenhaal) who reluctantly joins forces with a rival princess (Gemma Atherton) in order to keep an ancient dagger said to have supernatural powers […]

How do you make a movie that feels totally fresh despite the fact that it follows a fairly-transparent blueprint for a romantic comedy formula? Ask Sanaa Hamri, for not only did she first achieve this same feat back in 2006 with her directorial debut, Something New, but she’s now done it again with Just Wright, […]

Zoe Saldana was basically unrecognizable playing the lead role of Neytiri in Avatar because her character was covered from head to toe in gobs of blue makeup when not a completely computer-generated, digital creation. So, if you want to see Zoe in the flesh, she currently has two movies in theaters, the dreadful remake of […]

Death at a Funeral sounds like a classic case of a production that probably sounded like a “can’t miss” when its assorted elements were being pitched to studio execs. First of all, it’s a remake of a recent British hit which quintupled its $9 million budget at the box office. The fact that the original […]

For movies opening April 9, 2010 BIG BUDGET FILMS The Black Waters of Echo’s Pond (R for gore, graphic violence, profanity, drug use, nudity and sexuality) High attrition-rate horror flick featuring 9 friends whose dream vacation in a Victorian mansion on a remote island turns ghastly when they decide to play an ancient game they […]

If the ostensible objective of each generation of raunchy road comedies is to up the ante in terms of debauchery, then Hot Tub Time Machine definitely deserves to be given its due, since this relentlessly vulgar exercise in depravity easily outdoes many of the earlier examples of the shock genre. For instance, remember that moment […]

Is the idea of a Chicano marrying an African American really all that shocking? Maybe it is in L.A., where gang warfare has brothers and cholos gunning down each other in bloody drive-bys. Elsewhere, I suspect it’s not that big a deal, but don’t tell that to the Ramirezes and the Boyds, the clans that […]