Charlie St. Cloud
If Zac Efron wants to be taken seriously by moviegoers who aren’t 13-year-old girls, he’s going to have to do more than sit-ups. Charlie St. Cloud is the High School Musical star’s latest attempt at serious acting, but it offers little to redeem itself to anyone other than his prepubescent fan base.

Efron plays Charlie, a college-bound boy who miraculous survives a car accident that kills his kid brother. Following his brush with the other side, Charlie seems to be granted the ability to communicate with the dead. Abandoning his college ambitions, Charlie takes up a job in a graveyard, where he has daily hangout sessions with the spectral version of his brother. Things get complicated for the siblings as Charlie finds a love interest and a Nicholas Sparks-esque romance develops. What follows is a mess without explanation, that may or may not result in Zac Efron banging a ghost.

Director Burr Steers (Igby Goes Down, 17 Again), who seems to have his sights set on becoming a poor man's John Hughes, again focuses on the difficulties surrounding the transition from youth to the grown-up world. He manages to throw in some pretty visuals, but it’s not enough to distract from the weak plot and Efron’s under-developed acting chops.

Unlike The Sixth Sense, Charlie St. Cloud is a supernatural tale that doesn’t play by its own rules and, by the conclusion, you’re left trying to figure out an incoherent mess with vague religious overtones that seems to have no sensible explanation.

Efron spends most of the film sailing or working in the graveyard, both which provided him ample opportunities to shed his shirt. If that’s enough for you, you may be satisfied. Otherwise, Charlie St. Cloud is a silly and sentimental supernatural wannabe tearjerker that can’t play by its own rules.

—Eric Pulsifer
 
 
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While most tikes in the '80s were wearing out copies of kid-friendly cartoons on VHS, the movies I grew up on were scary as hell. My father's genre of choice has always been horror, and during the decade-and-a-half when I had little to no say in the evening's entertainment, the two of us sprawled out on the living room floor and watched nearly every scary TV show or video released in the horror section of our local video store at least once. Being brought up on a diet of buckets of blood and boobs circa 1985 (blame evolution or casting directors, but they're notably different than modern boobs) makes me hopeful whenever I see a promising trailer like the one for sci-fi thriller Splice.

In those 90 seconds, I could still hold out hope that the genre responsible for the stupid shit that kept me up at night as a child (The Brain, The Gate, Gremlins) matured with my taste in film, offering solid scares but finding a way to work in a reasonable plot and at least an attempt at acting.

Does Splice deliver? More after the jump.
 
 
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Either movies are getting too predictable, or I'm too smart for my own good. Since I doubt the latter is the problem, I can only assume Hollywood has recycled plots and last-act twists so much that nothing can be truly surprising for the seasoned viewer.

Shutter Island—director Martin Scorsese's first return to drama since 2006's The Departed—tells the story of U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio). Daniels is brought in to investigate the disappearance of a patient at Shutter Island's Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, an inescapable Alcatraz-like prison hospital for the psychologically disturbed violent criminals. In his search for the missing patient, Daniels begins to uncover a conspiracy about what the doctors are doing on the island and seeks out the man responsible for his wife's death, who may be somewhere on Shutter Island.

Read more after the jump! 
 
 
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District 13 Ultimatum is a French film with subtitles, but—as you may be able to gather from the terrible title—not the boring kind. This sequel to parkour cult classic District 13 is the kind of movie that needs no translation: good, dumb, high-octane fun with countless asses getting kicked, a few explosions and a pinch of sex appeal.

As with the Transporter series, Luc Besson (director of The Fifth Element, The Professional) serves as writer and producer here, and, like those films, the action is over-the-top. Cars rip through buildings like they're made of tissue paper, and countless hordes of goons are creatively overcome in ways that made me hope stuntmen are thoroughly compensated for their suffering.

More after the jump...
 
 
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I've always liked to think of Mel Gibson as a crazy uncle who makes inappropriate comments about Grandma's cleavage and still says things like "colored folk" and "the gays." It doesn't matter if he's bat-shit insane or just a prick, I can't help but love him. My favorite wacky Uncle Mel moment: When asked about criticism from GLAAD concerning homophobic comments he made in the early '90s, Gibson responded to his interviewer, "I'll apologize when hell freezes over. They can fuck off." You can be offended by his ignorance if you'd like, but it's hard not to take note of the balls on this guy. Maybe it's even those hateful, fury-filled balls that make Gibson such a magnetic force on the big screen.

Even if you don't have a soft spot for Gibson, it's hard to deny that the short-fused Aussie can act. Unfortunately, Edge of Darkness isn't the best vessel for his talents.

Sex toys, buckets of blood, and Liam Neeson after the jump.
 
 
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It's frustrating when a review spoils a movie for you. You just want to know if Generic Summer Flick 5 is going to suck ass or not, and some jerk on the internet ruins a surprise cameo or gives away the ending. That's no good, but it's even more frustrating when a trailer spoils a movie for you.

The previews for Leap Year left me with the sneaking suspicion I was seeing the whole film in a condensed 90-second form, and it's true: If you've seen the trailer, you've seen Leap Year. Granted, this isn't the worst thing in the world. Unless you're startled every morning as the sun rises again, you know not to expect surprises from most romcoms. Leap Year plays it safe, following the fail-proof romantic comedy formula (uptight girl meets carefree guy with a five o'clock shadow, and the sparks fly) and you can see the conclusion coming from a mile away, but Leap Year does some things right.

More after the jump.
 
 
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While the youth of America was watching Thundercats and Care Bears, our neighbors to the north were tuned into Astro Boy. This is based off my very scientific research of talking to two of three Canadians I know and checking Astro Boy's Wikipedia page, which says the show was also a smash hit in Asia and Australia. This soccer of Saturday morning cartoons may not have taken off in the states, but you've no doubt seen the spiky-haired, nearly nude robo-boy at some point. 

Astro Boy takes place in Metro City, a pristine floating city in the sky, and tells the story of scientist/world's worst dad Dr. Tenma (Nicolas Cage), who loses his son, Toby, in an accident and attempts to bring him back as a robot equipped with his boy's memories. Tenma quickly decides this robotic reincarnation of his son can't replace the real thing and Astro Boy is left on his own to find a place in the world.


More after the jump...
 
 
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In the realm of computer-animated films, there seem to be two choices: Pixar movies and a bunch of crap with talking animals.  Fortunately, 9 falls into neither of those categories and, if nothing else, offers a break from the monotony of the aforementioned options. Rather than targeting aging mothers and their snot-nosed brood, 9 seems to set its sights on the angsty teen crowd, an audience that wants something a bit "darker" and would roll their eyes at the thought of chatty penguins. To that degree, 9 delivers. It's certainly more mature than something like Ice Age and is free of the heavy-handed preachiness of Wall-E.

The world of 9 is a post-apocalyptic one populated by pint-sized sack people with numbers for names and predatory machines that hunt them in a gritty game of cat and mouse. For younger viewers who this concept might resonate with, it's a plus they've yet to sit through too many cookie-cutter Orwellian tales of a bleak future, but anyone who's familiar with more than one dystopian tale will find no big surprises in 9's plot. In typical end-of-the-world fashion, mankind's reliance on technology eventually yielded super-powered, independent-thinking machines that turned on their makers and left the earth a barren hellscape. Survival is now the only order of business, but this time, rather than humans it's enchanted voodoo dolls that are fighting for tomorrow.

more after the jump...
 
 
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If you would have asked me this time last week, I would have told you I had no doubt The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard was going be abysmal. It's partially my own fault--I feel I'm pretty hard on comedies: like horror movies, they rarely deliver on what they promise. I'm also not-so in love with The Goods star Jeremy Piven. Sure, when HBO first suckered me into watching Entourage—a new show about a group of douchebags and their famous friend—it was in no small part thanks to Piven's charm, but after a couple seasons of Piven's one-trick pony take on a hyperactive Hollywood agent, I swore the whole mess off.

Well, after actually watching the movie I swore I'd hate, I'm pleased to say that The Goods is actually funny--not enough to suck me into watching Entourage again--but funny enough to overlook my differences with Piven's career choices and sit through 90 minutes of desperately politically incorrect comedy.

Piven motorboats Flight of the Conchords' groupie Kristen Schall, and Kathryn Hahn tries to seduce a 10-year-old boy after the jump!
 
 
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Being asked to direct a movie like G-Force is the equivalent of a singer being offered a gig as frontman for the FreeCreditReport.com band: it's not exactly what you had in mind when you got into the business. But when you've been working with Jerry Bruckheimer, the man partially to blame for at least one awful summer blockbuster a year since Armageddon, your taste in film is probably a tad questionable to begin with.

To be fair, first-time director Hoyt Yeatman has spent years doing visual effects, and G-Force is nothing if not visually exciting. Talking secret agent guinea pigs look as realistic as their flesh-and-blood co-stars, whether they're narrowly escaping the jaws of a guard dog or taking down a coffee maker-turned-battle mech. This marks Bruckheimer's first venture into the undeniably gimmicky world of 3-D and the film takes full advantage of the technology. Nearly every shot features something bursting out of the letterbox to a series of "ewws" and "ahhs" from the audience.