At least this remake doesn’t try to pump up the B-movie elements of its 1976 source with A-list pretensions. This is exploitation material that’s happy to stay that way. Once again, an ill-equipped band of cops and criminals at a nearly abandoned precinct – it is scheduled to close the next day – are attacked

The Sentinel deals in political intrigue, rumor and assassination plots, so it makes sense that the movie has the demeanor of a conspiracy theorist. Fidgety and jittery, it’s as calm and collected as a puppy trotting down the aisles of PetSmart. As a narrative, the picture is so clunky it’s hard to determine which star

Clint Eastwood’s prolific, uneven directorial career unsurprisingly began with a stinker. The story of a disc jockey named Dave Garver (Eastwood) who has a one-night stand with an obsessive listener, Play Misty For Me is a schlocky, laughable precursor to Fatal Attraction. Appreciate the film, then, for its unintentional laughs, which go beyond the dated

An early Alfred Hitchcock effort, when he was still making films in England, The Lady Vanishes begins as an ensemble farce before it settles into the familiar motions of mystery and suspense. The movie opens in a small European hotel, where a band of international travelers vie for limited rooms and meals before leaving on

Brick employs a simply brilliant movie high concept: It’s a classic film-noir detective story set in a contemporary high school. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays an intelligent teen loner who has been recently dumped by his social-climbing girlfriend. He’s still infatuated, of course, so when she disappears he sets out to find her by winding his way

Spike Lee borrows a page from Woody Allen’s recent book for the heist drama Inside Man, in which the idiosyncratic director (Do the Right Thing) plays servant to genre material (as Allen did with Match Point). The result reminds us that even the most familiar of movies needn’t always be formulaic. Denzel Washington (as the

This lyrical import from director Peter Weir may be a thriller, but it essentially runs on anti-suspense. Set in 1900 in Weir’s native Australia, the film follows a field trip taken by boarding-school girls to the title locale, an isolated, desolate outcropping where the rock formations look like melting faces. When three of the students

This gory take on the Jack the Ripper legend, starring Johnny Depp as an opium-addicted detective, wants to be a thinking person’s slasher flick, even quoting the killer as saying, “I gave birth to the 20th century.” That’s an intriguing boast, but sibling directors Albert and Allen Hughes, adapting a graphic novel by Alan Moore,