“You have the hands of a craftsman, not an artist,” says a friendly village priest (Paolo Bonacelli) to an American expatriate whose identity is ambiguous but whose face is recognizable to the rest of us as George Clooney’s. This fellow, temporarily assuming the name Edward, having been Jack before, but known to two different women as Mr. Butterfly, has showed up in a picturesque town in Abruzzo, a mountainous region East of Rome, where he’s pretending to be a photographer. His actual profession, though never quite specified, is more malevolent, and he is currently working on a commission to supply a sexy assassin (Thekla Reuten) with a custom-made weapon.

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Quantum of Solace is no Casino Royale, but then it never could be that. What made Casino Royale not only the best James Bond film to date but also a great film in its own right was its emphasis on Bond the man, its retelling of how he became 007, and his tragic relationship with the treacherous Vesper Lynd. Those are all unique to that particular story and can never be duplicated. Instead, QoS is content with being an extended but action-packed epilogue to its more thoughtful and romantic predecessor.

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Big Nothing is the second film of the year that tries to resurrect the magic formula that made Fargo such a success. Unfortunately, the other film, the slight and dippy The Big White, made a better job of it. The fact is that neither film is likely to be remembered for long, and sadly Big Nothing is the more aptly-titled of the two.

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As I watched Fantastic Mr. Fox and gradually sensed the darkness of the theater lose out to the autumn-colored, classy, stop motion shenanigans on screen, I began to accept that every silhouette in the audience—fat and small, rich and me—was dressed in ship-shape, semi-formal attire. I pictured moms silently imagining themselves speaking in snooty English accents and serving cups of Earl Grey. And kids ages five through nine on the verge of zzz’ing in handsome jackets of tweed and corduroy; mildly stimulated by what equates to a visually dazzling hipster Sunday School lesson taught with Adderall on its gums and Tryptophan in its belly.


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Turistas is the first film from 20th Century Fox’s new “youth-oriented” division Fox Atomic. If Turistas is symptomatic of what they’ll be offering, “youth-oriented” apparently means violent, gory, rated-R torture movies. Well, that’s not really fair. The film takes quite awhile to get to the violence and gore; before that it’s mostly excessive drinking and gratuitously exposed boobs. Hi kids!

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Based on a short story by Ron Carlson and making some noise in the international film festivals, Keith is a love story about two high school teenagers whose lives intersect at a crossroads. The short time they choose to spend together becomes a wish for it to be a lifetime.

Natalie, played by Elisabeth Harnois (Point Pleasant, One Tree Hill), has it all. She’s smart, beautiful, and popular. Her parents raised her with the highest expectations which will gain her top admission to the best colleges. With a tennis scholarship within her reach and a suave Latin boyfriend, nothing stands in her way until she's partnered in an AP Chemistry lab with a “truck geek” named Keith, played by teen pop star Jesse McCartney.


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A distinct improvement over Nora Roberts' Tribute, Nora Roberts' Midnight Bayou is another in the series of four telefilms based on the best-selling author's novels that were produced in 2009 for Lifetime. While the story isn't anything new to lovers of historical fiction, basic melodrama, or supernatural ghost stories, Nora Roberts' Midnight Bayou sports some interesting directorial touches, a quick pace, and the very sexy presence of Lauren Stamile as our heroine (or in this case, hero).

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When this 2008 made for cable TV action movie starts out, an undercover cop named Jack Barrett (Casper Van Diem) is wailing away on his guitar, rocking the crowd at a Los Angeles night club while his fellow detectives wait outside. One of their own is impersonating a drug dealer while wearing a wire and they're waiting for the right time to strike. When he's found out, Barrett jumps off the stage and saves the day thought shortly after the guy with the wire on gets a phone call. For some reason, Barrett takes the call - it's the dude's girlfriend, a hot Japanese chick named Miko (Kristy Wu) and she's in trouble.

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If there's one thing that 2009's remake of '80s Canadian slasher My Bloody Valentine isn't, it's scary.

Thank goodness for us, then, that it happens to make for cheesy, corny, gimmicky, gory fun -- if only in its 3-D theatrical presentation. Director Patrick Lussier may forsake genuine suspense and tension in his quest to create an overblown small-town soap opera with no shortage of nifty kills (though they may not be enough to save the film from itself in 2-D or on DVD), but the man knows how to use today's technology to create an amplified visceral horror experience. It's low-brow entertainment with high-tech execution, and while it's anything but scary, it's also pretty much everything but scary.

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You can shoot two hours of guns, violence, sex and explosions, but if you don’t have a story to tell you might as well not bother. This stands doubly true for anything labeled “Based On A True Events” – if it’s not an interesting narrative who cares if it really happened. Fortunately, not only does George Gallo’s Middle Men have a true story to tell, but a completely insane one.

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Before some genius PR person decides to package this as another ‘coming-of-age’ film, please note that, while Stella (2008), by writer-director Sylvie Verheyde, does have a few of the traditional elements that go into a typical ‘feel-good’ picture, this film is an original.


Yes, there is a little girl in the title role, played by an amazing Léora Barbara. And she does have to struggle against considerable odds before showing that she just might make a success of it – life, that is. We know all that, because we know that Stella is Sylvie Verheyde’s own story, and that Verheyde is a successful woman of film, as writer, actress, producer, and director.

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This time around, to ensure “veritas” and “aequitas” not as a Boondock Saint vigilante but as an officer upholding Albuquerque, New Mexico law, Sean Patrick Flannery portrays an honest cop who finds himself placed in an impossible situation near the start of this flawed yet surprisingly taut thriller.

Forced into a classic cop vs. maniac style standoff, Flannery finds he must weigh the aequitas heavier this time around, when he must choose within the opening ten minutes between one life and several. The horrific beginning turns a standard situation we've seen far too often in cop movies wiggle its way out of technicalities or a sudden deus ex machina to throw the villain off course.


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Several students on a school holiday discover a mysterious camera, but after several of them start showing up dead after having their picture taken, they start to realize this camera is much more than they bargained for. In looking at the photos that have been taken of everyone, they find that the deaths correlate to the image. As time runs out, they must piece together the puzzle before they become the next victims.

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American journalist Nick Orton is caught up in the world of Chinese gods and monsters while on a search for the long lost manuscript to Hsi Yu Chi (The Journey to the West) by Wu Cheng En. He is accompanied on his journey by a humanoid ape with incredible strength and magical powers, a humanoid pig-man, and his brother-in-arms, an ex-cannibal. Based on one of the greatest stories in Chinese history.

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