James Remar Page 2

It's a rare movie that holds back information, allowing the audience to get inside it and ask questions about its strange universe, like Nicolas Winding Refn's "Fear X."

The film stars John Turturro as Harry Caine, a mall security guard who becomes obsessed with finding his wife's murderer, which was captured, muddy and distant, on the mall's video security system.

Like another angle on Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up," the plot follows Harry as he studies the tapes and digital pictures, looking for connections and clues. He becomes obsessed with a house across the street from his own, breaks in and finds a strip of film -- a vague clue that leads him to Montana. Once there, his crosses paths with a cop (James Remar) and his wife (Deborah Kara Unger).

Continue reading: Fear X Review

Robert Zemeckis' self-indulgent direction hangs like an albatross around the celluloid neck of "What Lies Beneath," a soft-peddled yuppie horror flick that could have been -- with some fine tuning -- a sharp and genuinely scary thriller.

Forty minutes longer than necessary and featuring a cry-scream-and-run climax so drawn out that every ounce of tension evaporates from the screen half an hour before the credits roll, it's a frustrating movie to watch because of all the wasted potential.

Anything but a standard teens-in-peril slasher movie, "What Lies Beneath" stars Michelle Pfeiffer as a New England mom with empty nest syndrome after packing her daughter off to college in the opening scenes. Now alone in the house a lot, she becomes a busy body, spying on the new next door neighbors and witnessing what she thinks is a murder.

Continue reading: What Lies Beneath Review

When even a skillful writer-director with soul to spare like John Singleton ("Boyz 'N' the Hood," "Shaft") can't lend a street-racing movie an ounce of personality, it becomes abundantly clear that the trendy genre never had anything worthwhile to offer in the first place.

Stepping behind the camera for the carbon-copy sequel "2 Fast 2 Furious," Singleton frontloads the film with one scene of enjoyable B-movie flair -- a midnight drag race punctuated by car-wake camera shakes, colorful background-blur effects, and cheesy close-ups of revving tachometers, needle-buried speedometers and bad actors squinting with determined concentration as they grip the wheel.

But as soon as the movie is sideswiped by its imbecilic plot, Singleton loses his ironic sense of style and the flick crashes and burns.

Continue reading: 2 Fast 2 Furious Review

A gratuitous wise-cracking sidekick and a tummy-baring, tight-top-wearing eye-candy vampire hunter have been added to the cast of the sequel "Blade: Trinity," but it's the gal (Jessica Biel) who gets most of the laughs, albeit unintentionally, with her lethargic, ludicrously inept kung-fu fighting.

Playing the hitherto unknown hottie daughter of Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) -- that crusty veteran of the underground vampire wars who is mentor to the titular half-vamp Wesley Snipes in all three "Blade" pictures -- Biel can't swing a convincing punch or kick to save her life.

But giving Biel a run for her money as the movie's most absurd character is ironic indie-flick darling Parker Posey, disastrously cast against type as the leader of yet another tiresome uber-Goth vampire faction that pouts around in skyscraper hideouts when they're not busy reviving their millennia-old master.

Continue reading: Blade: Trinity Review