Wood Harris

What starts out as a smart, sassy comedy about infertility gets bogged down in its own potty humour, ultimately becoming a dull caper romp that's impossible to care about. This is a real shame since the cast is clearly up for something more sophisticated and knowing, and the filmmakers seem to have some amusing ideas up their sleeves.

The film opens as Audrey and Tommy (Munn and Schneider) are celebrating their third anniversary and decide to start a family. When Audrey doesn't get pregnant, tests show that Tommy's low sperm count is to blame, due presumably to too many groin injuries while goofing around with his chucklehead pals (Heffernan and Faxon). But since he had donated to a sperm bank years earlier, he decides to make a withdrawal, only to discover that the last batch has already been sold. So he and his friends hire a crazy-eyed Indian criminal (Chandrasekhar) to orchestrate a heist.

Munn and Schneider are gifted actors who create an engaging sense of chemistry in the feisty first act, grounding the comedy in real marital issues that are riotously funny because of the unexpected frankness of their discussions about sex. But as this starts to drift into a series of one-note gags about semen and genitals, our patience wavers. And then the caper kicks in, and it's so contrived and stupid that we lose all interest in the film and the characters. We may still care about Audrey and Tommy, but the situation they get into is just as idiotic as the people around them.

Continue reading: The Babymakers Review

It's the not-so-distant future, and 800 million people are crammed into the only remaining inhabitable area in North America, a mega-city that covers the East Coast. With so many people, crime is out of control, so cops and lawyers have been replaced with judges who arrest, try and execute criminals on the spot. Dredd (Urban) is a particularly efficient judge, assigned one day to take trainee Anderson (Thirlby) with him for evaluation. But they walk into a nasty gang war in a 200-storey tower block, where snarling gang boss Ma-Ma (Headey) locks them in and starts hunting them down. And while Dredd and Anderson have to be careful not to kill the block's innocent residents, Ma-ma doesn't care how many people die.

Continue reading: Dredd Review

The familiar story told in "Paid In Full," the story of a good ghetto kid seduced into the drug trade with tragic results, covers no new territory. But it's a story told so well -- with veracity, raw compassion, well-drawn characters and strong performances -- that its common cautionary tale feels as compelling as it might have been in the 1980s, when the film takes place and before this type of movie became its own genre.

"Paid" plays as if it were made by people who lived it. People like Ace (Wood Harris), a reticent clerk at a neighborhood dry cleaners who has always been happy to blend into the woodwork and just be a survivor, even as he sees his closest friends becoming flush with cash, clothes and cool cars."That ain't my flow, man," Ace says when his best friend Mitch (Mekhi Phifer) tries to lure him into his small-time drug empire.

But as temptations mount (a local Colombian cartel middleman leaves him a cocaine "tip" in a jacket pocket at the cleaners), power becomes attractive (he'd like to get his sister away from her pimp-dealer boyfriend) and opportunities present themselves (Mitch gets arrested, leaving his street business up for grabs). Ace succumbs, in small increments, to the enticements of what seems like an effortless road to living well.

Continue reading: Paid In Full Review