Marc John Jefferies

What we are presented instead is Notorious, a dutifully celebratory, profoundly inept retelling of the rise of Wallace from fatherless coke slinger on the corner of Fulton and St. James to the still-praised Shakespeare of hip-hop and best friend to that other don of hip-hop culture, Sean "Puffy" Combs. The film, which is directed by Soul Food helmer George Tillman Jr., opens on the infamous shooting of Wallace outside the Petersen Automotive Museum in LA. As the first bullet is fired, the screen pauses and the voice of the deceased rapper kicks in and rewinds us back to the beginning of the tale with a 12-year-old Wallace, played by Christopher Jordan Wallace, the son of Wallace and R&B singer Faith Evans, sitting outside Queen of All Saints Middle School in Bed-Stuy, waiting for his mother Voletta (Angela Bassett).

Continue reading: Notorious (2009) Review

A thinly veiled biopic of 50 Cent's road to gangsta rap success, Get Rich or Die Tryin' is at times a wildly successful portrait of human perseverance and at others a weakly plotted study in cinematic cliché.

Continue reading: Get Rich Or Die Tryin' Review

As mechanical as an old Disneyland automaton, "The Haunted Mansion" is the third movie in a year from the Mouse House studio based on one of its own theme park rides -- and while it's certainly no inspired delight like "Pirates of the Caribbean," at least it's not as insufferably brain-dead as "The Country Bears."

Eddie Murphy is at his family-flick hammiest as a typical workaholic Movie Dad in need of a trite examination of his one-dimensional priorities. A sycophantic phony of a real estate agent, he often misses soccer games and anniversary dinners to make a sale, so his wife (Marsha Thomason) and smart-lipped, eye-rolling kids (Marc John Jefferies, Aree Davis) are especially chagrined when he takes a detour during a family outing to try to land the account to sell a cobweb-covered manse out in the boonies.

Scripted for maximum cluelessness, it takes Murphy's clan half the movie to catch on that the house is cursed and its occupants are ghosts, and the other half to realize what any half-astute viewer can ascertain in the first 15 minutes: The family becomes trapped in the house by its dead-by-his-own-hand Edwardian master (Nathanial Parker) because he thinks Murphy's wife is his reincarnated long-lost love who can lift the curse by marrying him.

Continue reading: The Haunted Mansion Review