The Blind Side

Question: When is a sports movie not about sports?

Answer: When the story behind the sports is as compelling as the life of Michael Oher, currently a starter in his rookie season with the Baltimore Ravens.

Based on the 2006 book of the same name by Michael Lewis, “The Blind Side” is an overwhelmingly sentimental movie. But thanks to earnest storytelling by director John Lee Hancock (“The Rookie”) and a knockout performance by Sandra Bullock, its emotions are honest and earned.

Life was hard for young Michael Oher, known for obvious reasons as “Big Mike.” One of 13 children born to a drug-addicted mother, he grew up in Tennessee knowing nothing other than poverty, receiving little education and spending time both in foster homes and on his own.

Bram Stoker's Dracula

I was 13 in 1992 when I saw "Bram Stoker’s Dracula," and it changed my life.

Francis Ford Coppola’s take on the classic 1897 vampire novel might not be the definitive film version that its title suggests (another studio owned the rights to the simpler title "Dracula"), but it is a gorgeous motion picture, an immersive experience that presents the infamous count and his tale as never realized before.

Coppola, stinging from the critical and fan backlash against "The Godfather: Part III" (1990), originally intended his "Dracula" to be a small, low-budget film with the goal of winning him some measure of independence from the Hollywood studios. His ambition, though, could not be contained, and his little movie grew into a $40-million, centuries-spanning epic.

Zombieland

A movie titled Zombieland brings a certain set of expectations with it. There will be zombies—lots of ’em. There will be blood—lots of it. And there should be a healthy dose of campy humor. What you do not expect is character-based comedy and genuine human emotion.

We get all of that and more from Zombieland, the debut feature by director Ruben Fleischer. As soon as the beautifully filmed slow-motion opening title sequence—set to Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”—starts to roll, it’s apparent that this is far from your run-of-the-mill, B-movie horror flick.

When the movie opens, the zombie apocalypse, caused by a virus, already has occurred. There are survivors, and two of them—obsessive-compulsive, cowardly, college-age Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg, Adventureland) and Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a free-wheeling cowboy-type for whom zombie-killing is a sport—meet on the road. They link up with the wily sisters Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), and make for Pacific Playland, a Southern California amusement park rumored to be zombie-free.

The Invention of Lying

You don’t realize how important lies are until you can’t tell them. I’m not talking about deceitful, hurtful lies that can ruin relationships and lives, but the small fibs and half-truths that we all use—often unconsciously—to brighten each other’s days.

The Invention of Lying takes place in a world very much like our own, except that no one has ever told a lie. Instead, everyone always says exactly what they’re thinking, no matter how embarrassing or mean it might be. Without the ability to lie, there is no imagination, no fiction. Lecture Films, where Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais) is a screenwriter, produces movies featuring a single actor reading stories from history, such as Napoleon 1812-1813 and The Invention of the Fork.

Surrogates

-->Though there is not a single original idea in Surrogates, the ideas and issues it presents are deep and intriguing enough that it could have been worth 88 minutes of your time. “Could” is the operative word, which means that it is not.

Instead of exploring what it means when, in the near future, people spend virtually their entire lives in their homes, living vicariously through robot surrogates, or “surries,” that they send out into the world, director Jonathan Mostow (Terminator 3) and screenwriters Michael Ferris and John Brancato (adapting a graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele) wallow in an uninvolving and underdeveloped whodunit.

Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds is a war film and revenge picture, but writer-director Quentin Tarantino's muse is what it's always been—the movies. Not just a handful of classics and obscure pictures that only a lifelong film geek like Tarantino would love, but the entire world of cinema—glamorous movie stars, the grand movie palaces of yesterday, star-studded movie premieres, even the film stock.

In Tarantino's mind, movies are all that matter—even history is tossed aside if it doesn't suit his needs. Only he could make a film about a group of Jewish-American soldiers scalping Nazis behind enemy lines and turn it into a love letter to the movies. The pure, unadulterated joy that permeates all of his films and a continued knack for creating memorable characters and cracking dialogue make Inglourious Basterds one of his best.

District 9

It’s hard to remember a film with a more bleak outlook on humanity than the sci-fi tale District 9.

Directed by Neill Blomkamp, whose resume includes only commercials, music videos and the 2005 short Alive in Joburg, upon which District 9 is based, and produced by Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings), the movie offers a frightening take on human nature and what might occur if aliens ever make it to Earth.

The setup is genius. About 20 years ago, a giant spaceship parked itself here—not above New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, but Johannesburg, South Africa. It hovered there until humans forced their way inside and found the insect-like alien inhabitants, more than a million malnourished worker drones, their leadership gone and now lacking the ability to make their own decisions.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Though I was not hopeful, I wanted to like G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. G.I. Joe—both the toys and cartoon—was a big part of my childhood.

But watching the movie is like watching a prequel to a film that doesn’t exist. Director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy) and his three writers spend the whole movie trying to sell us on a sequel, but they neglected to make this one good enough for us to care about what happens next.

G.I. Joe, which always was a very American fighting force in the toy line, animated series and comic books, is now a multinational, top-secret military group. Led by General Hawk (Dennis Quaid), its base of operations lies beneath the deserts of Egypt (a lot going on down there in the Hasbro universe). The bad guys, led by Scottish arms dealer McCullen (Christopher Eccleston), are holed up underneath the polar ice cap. My head hurts thinking about the construction costs.

Funny People

In a movie called Funny People, you expect the people in it to be, well, funny. There are flashes of it—the natural comedic talents of the people involved won’t stay hidden forever—but maybe the inherent unlikability of the characters is part of the point of Judd Apatow’s third directorial effort.
The movie concerns George Simmons, an Adam Sandler-like comedy superstar, conveniently played by Adam Sandler, whose esteemed resume includes titles like Merman and Re-Do, in which his head is placed on a baby. George is a miserable, manipulative man who sleeps with a different girl (or two) every night and has an ego that desperately needs regular attention.

Then a doctor diagnoses him with a form of leukemia and ... nothing changes. He uses his likely fatal illness to reconnect with Laura (Leslie Mann), the one who got away years earlier because he cheated on her. She’s now married, with two kids.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

There is so much to like about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the best movie yet based on J.K. Rowling’s insanely successful books.

Let’s start with the title character and the actor who plays him, Daniel Radcliffe. For the first time, Radcliffe gets to loosen up and have a little fun, even as the tale grows darker than ever, a sense of dread hanging over Hogwarts as pervasive as the ever-present gray clouds.

It’s the first time “wooden” isn’t the word that immediately springs to mind when thinking about Radcliffe’s acting. A real chemistry has developed among him and his two principal co-stars, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson.