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The Rock is here to teach you about being a man, while man-handling tiny elephants and riding around on giant bees. The Rock is strong but sensitive, and he's downright eager to guide you over the threshold into a new world of confusing sexuality, in which the scat of massive birds sprays all over people's faces and chests. You want a male role model who's not afraid to give advice about macking on girls, while in a cave full of mega-fauna? That's The Rock. More »
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Everybody thinks that Woman In Black, the old-fashioned ghost story featuring Daniel Radcliffe (AKA Harry Potter), is about Edwardian England. But in fact, it's about the 1960s - at least stylistically. Full of silly plot devices, hyperbolically drawn characters, and menacing Victorian geegaws, this movie feels exactly like a Hammer classic from the UK studio's heyday in the 60s. But sadly there are no sexy Christopher Lee scenes, or lesbotic vampires lurking in the shadows. Hammer's first gothic horror film in decades is actually closer to Scooby Doo than Taste the Blood of Dracula. More »
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Chronicle cost approximately 1/20th as much to make as last year's Green Lantern — and it looks way cooler. This movie about teenagers who get superpowers has some of the coolest depictions of superpowers we've seen in ages. Whether they're flying or tossing shit around, the teenagers in Chronicle always feel like they're really doing this. More »
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Most people cover their eyes during horror movies, which is why The Innkeepers may be one of the scariest movies you've seen in a while. In this flick, the terror creeps in through sound. It's the story of two slackers who work at The Yankee Pedlar, an old Connecticut hotel that's about to close, and their quest to record sounds from the ghosts who supposedly haunt the place. More »
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Moviegoers are familiar with two vintages of The Wicker Man. There's Robin Hardy's 1973 still-potent horror flick and playwright Neil LaBute's accidentally hilarious 2006 remake, which is most famous for Nicolas Cage caterwauling about bees. More »
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I've spent the week sending dispatches to io9 from a remote planet of intense cold and blood-thinning high elevation. More »
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Quentin Dupieux's cult hit Rubber had the good manners to open with a direct pronouncement of its philosophy: "No reason," Stephen Spinella's layers-deep meta impresario (Officer Chad) repeated again and again. More »
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During Hollywood's golden era, it was common for a picture (they called 'em pictures back then) to be based on a popular stage play. It still happens, but rarely. The biggest and most visible movies are based on comic books these days (they called 'em graphic novels back then, they'll say of us) but maybe we're about to witness a paradigm shift. More »
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Here's how I imagine Red Lights' elevator pitch: "It's The Prestige, but set in modern times, and instead of illusionists, it's a psychic versus a debunker." More »
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The Beasts of the Southern Wild is very much one of the most buzzed films at Sundance right now. Everyone either loves it or respects it greatly. Whether or not this movie about a young girl facing a flood and terrible hog-monsters catches on with a wider audience remains to be seen — but I feel confident saying that he is a sincere new talent on the scene and that this is in a fresh, exciting film floating up from what feels like another world. More »
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In the movies, technology is usually represented one of two ways: a hallelujah-worthy miracle or a soul-deadening trespass on the natural order of things. Robot and Frank, a film receiving near-unanimous praise at the Sundance Film Festival, is smart enough to know better. Technology, like everything in life, isn't black and white, and is only as good or bad as the people who interact with it. More »
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Death-dealing vampire Selene and her tight, tight pants are back, in what is surely the most violent addition to the Underworld franchise. With original series director Len Wiseman stepping out of the director's chair, will this supernatural "underworld" finally get a color pallette beyond the ubiquitous teal? Of course not. But at least this film gives us silver whips, and an Über Lycan. More »
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One of the things that critics of torture porn rarely single out for scorn is the sheer boredom of watching people rape and beat each other for two hours. I can only hope that post-apocalyptic flick The Divide will finally convince the world that indifference is worse than disgust - at least when it comes to movies. Should you watch this tale about a handful of neighbors who survive nuclear holocaust in the basement of their New York apartment building? If you always wondered why Lord of the Flies wasn't about horny grownups, then yes. More »
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Found footage exorcism flick The Devil Inside, out today, is one of those cult movie paradoxes. It has a cool premise and ultra-creepy special effects, but they're wrapped inside a shoddily-plotted mashup of The Rite and Elimidate. You'll kind of love it, especially if you're a sucker for supernatural horror - but this movie is so aggressively nonsensical that your forehead will be sore from all the slapping. More »
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Alien invasion flick The Darkest Hour, released this morning, is like a bad holiday fruitcake that somebody tried to spruce up with a zillion lumps of neon-colored, soggy jellybean guts. Put another way, this movie is what you get when you add the plot of Skyline to the creature effects of The Happening. It is truly the greatest bad monster movie of 2011. More »
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the second retelling in less than a decade of Stieg Larsson's preternaturally gripping book about hackers, investigative journalists, rape and murder. Larsson's novel, published posthumously in 2005, spawned a Swedish film, an international cult following, and finally David Fincher's Hollywood flick, out today, complete with terawatt star Daniel Craig in the lead role of journalist Mikael Blomqvist. More »
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Despite boasting internationally lauded source material, the most famous populist auteur in film history, and lavish special effects, The Adventure of Tintin is a tough sell stateside. The film's androgyne hero remains an unknown quantity over here, and the previews' hyper-caricatured CGI may scare away those expecting a 107-minute safari through the uncanny valley. More »
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By all rights, a fourth Mission Impossible film should be a disaster. A played-out film series, a leading man who's pushing 50 and a tired Cold War premise should add up to total boredom. But somehow, instead, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is a splashy festival of crazy. More »
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If you weren't sure whether steampunk had gone mainstream, the new Sherlock Holmes movie should convince you. This is the second entry in smart-macho director Guy Ritchie's reimagined Victorian detective franchise, where the cerebral Holmes uses his brains to deliver the perfect punch and Watson is his gun nut buddy. It's packed with all the oil-and-gear trappings of a classic steampunk tale, sprinkled over with a charming bromance that's played with anachronistic irony. If you love gleeful homoeroticism, tweed, and nineteenth century weaponry, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows will provide you with a diverting, though bumpy, ride. More »
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How many Lost Boys must you stab with a rusty knife to get to the heart of Peter Pan? Quite a few, according to Syfy's new miniseries Neverland. More »
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Arthur Christmas may look like your generic store-bought egg nog holiday treat. But this coming-of-age Santa Claus feature humanizes the people of the North Pole by turning them into the fallen heroes and not-so-perfect parents from our past. It will make you laugh then make you cry. More »
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For some, Sigmund Freud's name is synonymous with medical quackery and sexual obsession. But in David Cronenberg's new movie about Freud's circle of colleagues in the 1910s and 20s, the founder of psychoanalysis emerges as a complicated figure, fighting for scientific recognition in a society where he's treated as an interloper for being Jewish — and a pariah for daring to point out the hypocrisy of European sexual morality. More »
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There's no actual robot in Martin Scorsese's new movie Hugo — although there is a totally gorgeous clockwork man, whose workings are nothing short of magical. But the whole movie is a celebration of the earliest roots of our rising cyber-culture, and the ways in which people use technology to tell stories that live on after we're gone. More »
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About halfway through the new Muppet movie, a TV executive in a nice suit explains to the Muppets that they're not famous any more. They've literally fallen off the cultural map. (This scene is in the trailers, so I'm not really giving away a spoiler.) And it's sort of true: the Muppet cultural moment was over a long time ago, long before 1999's Muppets in Space. More »
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There are so many reasons why teenage girls hate their bodies that it's basically impossible to list them all. But Twilight: Breaking Dawn tries. The flick is basically a surreal, humiliating music video about teenage body panic. Every fleeting moment of self-hatred you've ever had about yourself is chronicled in excruciating detail here — and I think that's why so many of us love to watch. It's also why we hate ourselves afterward. More »
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Yesterday — at 1:10 PM on November 11, 2011 — I saw director Darren Lynn Bousman's (Saws II through IV, Repo! The Genetic Opera) new supernatural horror flick 11-11-11. More »
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Filmmaker Tarsem Singh can make slaughtering animals look pretty, so imagine what he can do with genuinely pretty things. You'll have your answer when you see Immortals this weekend. This flick truly embodies the gorgeous excess of the Greek myths it retells, filling the screen with beautiful people in sumptuous robes, swirling arcs of magic blood, and smeary light cast by golden armor. More »
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Three unmarried sisters are looking for love, while their mother gently teases them from the kitchen. Except the mother is talking to her daughters via videophone, because one is in Australia, one is on a movie set, and another is on the Chinese space station. Luckily, you can still find love even in the crazy future! More »
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You've probably heard that Melancholia is depressing and nihilistic — after all, it starts with the world being destroyed, and then rewinds, so that the rest of the film takes place on an Earth we know is doomed. More »
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It's likely that the first Human Centipede movie wasn't your cup of tea. But if you're like me and enjoy disturbing cult movies, it's one of the very best. The "ass to mouth" horror of Human Centipede wasn't gross — it was suggestive and existential. Plus it was darkly funny, with a mad doctor (Dieter Laser) who was full of bizarre zeal. More »
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Well, that's not entirely true. Calling the new 3D Hindi superhero flick Ra.One the Bollywood Tron or Iron Man would be a bit of a misnomer. The most apt parallel for Ra.One would be Automan, that swiftly cancelled 1983 cop show about a crime-fighting hologram. And like Automan, Ra.One is shitstorm preposterous in all the right ways. More »
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Andrew Niccol must be thanking his lucky stars that In Time, his dystopian movie about a world where the rich live forever and the poor die young, is coming out just as the fervor over the Occupy Wall Street movement is at a peak. In Time is all about the 99 percent versus the 1 percent. More »
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Home movies full of murder and ghostly carnage? It must be time to check in with Katie, Kristi and the family of the damned! While the third installment of the Paranormal Activity saga is a massive step up from the godawful second movie, the scares couldn't save PA3 from suffocating under all its unwelcome over-explaining. More »
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The Thing, a prequel to John Carpenter's 1982 gory scifi thriller of the same name, is a solid horror movie with a great leading performance from Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a heroic scientist with a flamethrower. It's tense, creepy, and even has a pretty well-developed sense of wonder. Though it's definitely worth seeing, the movie suffers from one fatal flaw, and no — it's not prequelitis. More »
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In The Skin I Live In, Antonio Banderas keeps a woman prisoner in his house and experiments on her. He uses her as a human guinea pig for an super-strong artificial skin that will resist burns and bug bites. More »
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Real Steel comes from the same studio as the Transformers films, and it's clearly intended to hit the same sweet spot of computer-generated effects, fucked-up action and goofy fun. More »
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Dream House is one of those rare movies that proves a work of art can be worse than the sum of its parts. Of course, the parts of Dream House aren't very good to begin with: half supernatural haunting story, and half psychological whodunit, it's a Frankenmovie that can't figure out what to do with the story it has set up. Instead of deciding, director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot) throws plot details at us randomly, most of which involve Daniel Craig running around shirtless, Rachel Weisz wearing a slip, and Naomi Watts looking troubled in a fur coat. More »
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What if a deadly virus ripped through the world, shattering cities and killing millions, but you had the chance to view the carnage from sealed government labs and well-appointed boardrooms? That's the promise of Contagion, a fascinating plague procedural from Steven Soderbergh, where more tension radiates from powerpoint presentations about viral amplification than it does from a shot of mass graves. More »
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I have burning visions of Apollo 18 becoming one of the most misunderstood movies in history. It purports to be the "real story" of why humans never returned to the Moon, and is artfully recreated from footage that looks ripped directly from the mid-1970s motion-capture cameras that supposedly filmed it. Years from now, conspiracy fans will be trading the choicest bits of footage from Apollo 18 on YouTube, fooling millions of people into believing the Moon is anything but empty. More »
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Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, produced and co-written by Guillermo del Toro, comes out today, promising tiny, Gremlins-style creature terror. As a look at a family trying to find common ground during a stressful time, it's okay. But as a monster movie, it fails in the most frustrating way possible. More »
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