J-Shap

Drive is, hands down, the single most exciting and involving film to come out all year. The best part is, you also can't really figure out what makes it so engaging. It just is. Too many films think. This once acts.

Melinda and Melinda is not a particularly bad film, but just a limp one. In many ways, that's worse. The switching between a comic and tragic interpretation of the same movie keeps afloat with thought, but the film itself is rather empty, and neither story is particularly strong on its own.

This film is what Allen would call in his better years, 'mental ****.' I don't need to talk about how the story and jokes are shamelessly recycled from other Allen movies, or how all the characters are either boring or unpleasant, or how out of touch the film is with how college graduates talk, or how sick I am of listening to people talking about their fear of death. All I need to say is this: I would rather watch anything else than Anything Else.

What are some of these uninvolving and tedious set pieces you may ask. I donâ

Enjoyably pulpy and confidently hokey, Captain America is more or less the same package you got with Iron Man 2 and Thor, which is to say, "Let's just keeping hyping that goddamn Avengers movie, until everyone is guaranteed to hate it."

To save you valuable hours of your life, here's a summary of the whole movie: Big action scene with monsters, Bad CGI, People talk fast, Big action scene with monsters, Big action scene with monsters, Big action scene with monsters, People talk fast, Big action scene with monsters, Bad CGI, Big action scene with monsters, faux-dramatic scene, Big action scene with monsters, Bad CGI, Bad CGI, Fin.

Catwoman isn't even really a movie. It's a music video that somebody expanded out under two hours, by padding out shots of Halle Berry pinup fodder.

Allen takes an interesting enough premise into sitcom territory in Hollywood Ending, an astonishingly boring and vacuous excuse for comedy, full of recycled jokes, plot, ideas, and scenes that ramble on forever with no end.

In DC comics lore, there exists an Anti-Life Equation, which serves as proof of mathematical certainty that life, hope, and freedom, are all pointless. Good Luck Chuck is the Anti-Funny Movie; it proves that even in a modern world where we get to see films like Superbad and Knocked Up, the idea of laughing is not worth it.

Sin City is, in every respect, a masterpiece of kistch. Simultaneously celebrating shallowness and gratuitousness while offering twisted spins on the themes of noir stories, Robert Rodriguez (and Frank Miller, but he is not technically a director of this film) paints a pulp art story then enjoys itself, while allowing the audience to enjoy it. Provided you have a strong stomach.

It looks nice, and that's about it. The dialogue and one-liners are rather dry and limp compared to Allen's previous films, and whatever potential it has is wasted due to Allen ironically being miscast in his own film. This would have benefited from a younger, or at least different actor in Allen's role (perhaps Tom Hanks). Above all, Jade Scorpion is a rather insincere and ill-conceived homage.

While it drags in parts and has a slim margin between hits and misses, Small Time Crooks does a number of funny (and unexpected) plot developments, and a nice role reversal for Allen's character.

A rewarding and satisfying drama, that satirizes biopics while embodying Allen's love for jazz into a great character, brought to life with a terrific performance by Sean Penn. Sweet and Lowdown is Allen's finest dramatic work.

I suppose if you can tolerate the annoying characters and swiss cheese sized plot holes, there is a sense of wonder in its own cheesy, B-movie right. It could be considered a guilty pleasure if nothing else, but no one could honestly call it good.

Rob Schneider, I don't care if you are friends with Adam Sandler, there are many more comedians more deserving (and more funny) to have the their own movie than you.

I'm pretty sure this was written as a comedy and then the director thought he could get Denzel two Oscars. It's the only explanation for a film this simultaneously ridiculous, preposterous, and incredibly earnest.

I honestly find it hard to believe that any sensible person would want to subject themselves to this utter tripe. Full of character archetypes, shameless manipulation, trite dialogue, and contrived drama, A Walk to Remember is unmistakably the work of a hack; a hack thinks this is the only way to write a compelling romance. Excuse me, but I like romances where I feel for the couple because I like them as people, not because they're religious and contrived illnesses separate them. That's how you can tell when a movie does not care for its own integrity, and simply chooses to manipulate. There are no characters in this mass, only archetypes and contrivances.

Mastering the tonal shifts of life with a look at the problems one can face, both serious and trivial, Sideways comes around as simply excellent. It can have scenes of high humor, scenes of sad despair, and scenes to marvel at just how something managed to end up the way it is, and the director and cast can handle the shifts between these in a way that feels so natural it's almost frightening.

Scott Pilgrim succeeds where Kick-Ass failed. Yes they share the same wink-and-a-nod style of humor. Yes, they both push effect to ridiculous extremes. Yes, they both try way too hard. But what Scott Pilgrim has is a corny thing to root it in the hearts if its audience: love. Love for every cheesy moment of nerdy quirks that it celebrates, and love for its own characters and **** protagonist. Where Kick-Ass mocked itself while still trying to appeal to those who wanted it to celebrate what it was. Scott Pilgrim is in love with itself and all those who love it in return. Technically, that would make it smug, but when a film can honestly say the line "Once you were a ve-gone, but now you will be gone" do you even want to complain about that.

Kick-Ass, despite all its grandiose, action, pop songs, violence, swearing, humor, and commentary, ends up to a film that simply wants to be cool and doesn't know when to stop. Eventually, all this effort and need to be important kills any sense of wonder, and the final product comes up as rather tame. The violence never has any punch because it is so forced (without the creative wit of some like Quentin Tarantino, it comes across as shock), and the comedy is too wink-and-a-nod to entertain.

Battle: Los Angeles dismisses everything that filmmaking has taught us over the last century. There are the obvious dismissals in dumb action movies (character, coherent plotting, subtlety), and then there are the dismissals of everything we've come to evolve to in film (craft, focus, effort), and then there are the dismissals of the basic logic that we humans take for granted (vision, thought, sound, reason). This is not a film. This is a series of shots taken with a camera, that are spliced together to vaguely resemble some abortion of a faux-film.

Nowhere Boy manages to leave all the recent musical biopics in the dust by doing the exact opposite of what they've been doing: Painting our God-like figure of music as a normal guy with a lot of problems. Who knows? Maybe if his mother had loved him more, he wouldn't have sung about it as much.

Fright Night is a great horror not because it is the scariest (it isn't), or the most richly layered (it isn't), or speaks the most about the genre as a whole (it doesn't). Fright Night is a great horror film because it remembers that just because it can be scary doesn't mean it can't be a lot of fun. It's an antidote to the sickening "torture porn" craze as much as an antidote to the "soft vampires" that Stephanie Meyer and Anne Rice have sickened us with for the last 18 years.

Benjamin Button is a great mixed bag of a film. Despite it's many problems (length, similarity to Forrest Gump), however, aren't its undoing. The undoing comes in the form of a distinct clash of ideas, inappropriately trying to mesh screenwriter Eric Roth's sentimental and wonderful view of the world with director David Fincher's cold nihilism and rewarding distance from connection. It is these two moods that tear apart Benjamin Button.

Don't believe those who say that Brokeback Mountain redefines anything. What this is is an incredibly well-made Titanic story with a interesting look into a self-loathing mind set. However, you shouldn't even listen to those who try to dismiss its premise of "gay love story" as a gimmick. Not because it rises above that, but because assuming that audiences would respond differently if it were about a man and a woman is an unfair comparison because the entire story revolves around the idea that it is a GAY romance. It's the equivalent of saying "Would you still like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner if everyone was white?"

In spite of excellent performances and carefully crafted dialogue, Tarantino can't hide the fact that Inglourious Basterds is smug and glacially paced, feeling more like Quentin Tarantino's celebration of himself as opposed to the violent, frenzied fantasies that made his early work so brilliant. That said, a good chunk of Tarantino celebrating himself is a celebration of other movies, so that does help to ease down and enjoy what's here.

I could hardly believe myself when I told a colleague of mine that the movie about a brilliant scientist who is transformed into a gamma ray-powered green monster that fights the military who intend to destroy him was the dullest experience of the year. But it was. Hulk is a clunky drama that moves at a glacial pace, which is never a desirable trait in a movie about a giant green monster.

If someone dares to say that Fargo is not one of the greatest films of all time, promptly slap them over the head, walk into the nearest hunting supplies store, return with an axe, chop the nay-sayer in half, and feed the corpse into a wood chipper. If that seems too harsh, you don't get Fargo.

X-Men: First Class is such an accomplishment of superhero sci-fi allegorical work, that it lays the recent comic flicks to waste. It accomplishes everything that made the earlier X-Men movies promised but never delivered, and it is an incredibly entertaining summer movie, not because of its effects, nor its action scenes, nor its cheesy (in a good way) plot, but because watching McAvoy and Fassbender fires up the screen.

Iron Man 2 is a satisfactory sequel to a kick-ass comic book movie. It is nothing more than that: satisfactory. Some will call that a good thing, and some will call that a bad thing.

Iron Man is not a great superhero movie due to its action scenes or even its humor, but rather a central performance that truly does transform an illustrated creation of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee into a real person, and, get this, he's kind of a jerk.

Ultimately surrenders the depth and conflict of South African race relations to a sports game, which is disappointing given the performances by Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman, and the direction by Clint Eastwood.

Hollywood Homicide isn't so much an awful comedy as it as an astonishingly dull buddy cop flick. Nothing feels natural, from the "quirky" jobs that the cops have on the side, to the "goofy" dialogue they have, to the "far-fetched" murder mystery. It's an incredibly forced farce.

Hot Tub Time Machine is the ideal example of a movie that you like in spite of yourself, it applies to all the lowest forms of comedy and half-assed homage, but succeeds simply as a laugh generator due to its own enthusiasm and confidence in itself to be such.

Grown Ups is as awful as any comedy could conceivably be, and then doubly awful once you realize that five comedians cannot generate one funny line or gag, and that there is, in fact, no story or resemblance of any kind of plot, but a string of unfunny notes.

This film is a misfire. It begins with a great spin on the concept of a superhero, and ends with a half-baked idea for a lame sequel, that they idiotically decided to patch into a killer film.

There's not much to analyze in Get Him to the Greek. All you need to know is that it is a very funny film, due to Russell Brand's tactic to make his ridiculous character seem like he could exist in real life. And, come to think of it, he probably did.

As bland as nineties rip-offs of E.T. could get, Free Willy copies that classic down to the smallest detail, but the bond is never felt between the boy and the whale, instead coming across as assembly mind fodder.

Wes Anderson is a filmmaker who can run along a bizarre path, stop, look over at some odd detour, contemplate about it, and then keep on running. Fantastic Mr. Fox is Anderson in his purest form, and arguably his most entertaining.

It's good enough for a historical drama, especially given the absolutely brilliant performance by Daniel Day-Lewis, but Gangs of New York sprawls over its dull story with themes that it never dives into, and a plot that doesn't hit with the same power as Scorsese's previous films.

Perhaps one should call me a hypocrite for not penalizing The Social Network for evoking that feeling of non-reality that destroyed Frost/Nixon and A Beautiful Mind. But what Fincher succeeds to keep this from being an issue is keeping creating a story that, while it does indeed seem false in real life, it retains all of its power by upholding a central idea that speaks true to the real life story it emulates. Thus, The Social Network creates itself not as piece of real-life information feeding (like so many of the bland biopics we see today), but as a case that uses real life to create something that is a brilliant work of art. The richness of ideas and drama, all multi-layered and all fascinating, is simply too much to argue with.

Frost/Nixon has all the right makings for an incredibly good historical drama, but curiously doesn't end up going there. It's almost as if this film is too perfect. The degree that everything is processed and controlled to the slightest moment oddly becomes the film's undoing, as such a desirable trait in film fails because it is used on real life, where things should come as more of a surprise and as more of a victory, than in Frost/Nixon. Perhaps that wouldn't matter so much if it felt like the idea it had from real life was still there (see: The Social Network), but everything has disappeared in this felt facade. This is an oddly artificial film.

Aronofsky is adventurous in ways that many filmmakers are not. He is able to be bold, grab an idea by the horns and take it where he wants to, and choosing to do so in the methods he sees as the most clear. The Fountain is a misfire on this concept. It is a film disconnected from any sort of root (which is odd, given that trees show up a lot in it), the audience or it's own story. It has all of its interests into itself, but never bothers to actually care for what it's trying to do, because it's too busy thinking. Can't it just stop to smell the roses. Kubrick could do that.

The Fighter is a lot like Good Will Hunting: It's rife with thick accents, family issues, big dreaming, and more than few moments of violence. Now, that I've gotten that out of the way, I'll get to my real point. The Fighter is like Good Will Hunting because it looks like a routine genre flick, that actually ends up being an interestingly idiosyncratic drama, built on a focus on the scene behind a rather obvious, to reveal a new layer and poignant story.

For a superhero that's supposed to be so dark and tortured by guilt (emotional and Catholic), Daredevil is a rather goofy movie. It's dialogue feels like it was written by someone who had never read a comic book trying to emulate one, and scene after scene of forced drama (and by drama, I mean play a ton of emo songs).

Adam Sandler is somewhat talented comedian who approaches his incredibly successful films in the most annoying manner of combining unfunny, mean-spirited humor with cloyingly schmaltzy sentimentality. This is especially true in Click, a film that would have been just another unfunny Adam Sandler movie, but instead becomes a cloyingly bad drama, rife with histrionic and sophomoric moments of tearjerking and bookended by ridiculous cop-outs.

Perhaps Chicago is meant to be self-analytical in commentary on shallowness in nearly everything, but that doesn't forgive the fact that it is indeed shallow. While it's flashy and pretty funny when it needs to be, in the end, Chicago is still a miraculously vapid movie underneath it all, and that, in the end, makes it boring when it's not belting.

Daniel Craig still shows himself as one of the best Bonds ever, and I applaud the filmmakers for wanting to veer away from the campy days of yore, but this Bond film is so morose, in a bad way, that it comes across as a bland actioner disguised as something more. Quantum of Solace is an average film, and that's arguably the worst thing one can be.

Big Fish is a sad film, but not in the way it wants to be. It is a film of such tremendous imagination and such poignancy in its moments of genuine emotion, that when it betrays itself for a shallow and unfair resolution, you're astonished at how everything about it has gone to waste. The audience feels betrayed that everything they've come to enjoy takes a turn for something they would like to avoid, such as unresolved emotion disguised as closure, and selfish actions being accepted.

What Almost Famous has on its side is something that is seldom seen in Hollywood pictures. It is sincerity. There is something so endearing about every character and every scene in Almost Famous, and the genuine that Crowe has and gives to characters reflects onto the audience.