Iron Man 2 (2010)

My Rating : 3/5 STAR
MovieStudio Quote >> “It’s all about more for sequels now a days. More transformers, more Iron Men. And screw them all making the flick an absolute shit-hole!!”

With the world now aware of his dual life as the armored superhero Iron Man, billionaire inventor Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) faces pressure from the government,

the press, and the public to share his technology with the military. Unwilling to let go of his invention, Stark, along with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow),

and James “Rhodey” Rhodes (Don Cheadle) at his side, must forge new alliances — and confront powerful enemies.

Coach Carter (2005)

My Rating: 4.5/5 STARS
MovieStudio Quote >> “A truly inspiring and sensational sports drama I’ve ever seen!”

Based on a true story of the man who locked his boys out of the gym until they focused on their schoolwork, this by-the-numbers crowd-pleaser holds together because a steely Samuel L. Jackson refuses to notice the parade of clichés he’s trumpeting (the dialogue sticks to platitudes like, “Success in here is the key to success out there”). Coach Ken Carter (Jackson) takes over an unruly team of Richmond, California basketball players and teaches them how to play–and behave–like champions.

His plight, which pits him against an uncooperative school board and parents who’ve given up hope, holds some interest, but the film is too concerned with giving us a Big Game every twenty minutes or so.

The teens all have the spark of life in them (including pop star Ashanti, who features in a surprisingly well-handled teen pregnancy subplot), though the film’s plodding familiarity means it’s never really rousing, adding up to simply a good-natured amalgam of Stand and Deliver, Hoosiers, Dangerous Minds, and even Dead Poet’s Society (one of the tougher players actually recites some inspirational poetry).

Unthinkable (2010)

My Rating: 2.5/5 STARS
MovieStudio Quote >> “The flick revolves around torture, but realizes less on plot and morals!”

A psychological thriller centered around a black-ops interrogator and an FBI agent who press a suspect terrorist into divulging the

location of three nuclear weapons sets to detonate in the U.S.

Lakeview Terrace (2008)

My Rating : ****

MovieStudio Quote >> “A family terror let loose at Lakeview!”

A quick perusal of any of LAKEVIEW TERRACE’s promotional materials–its nervy trailer, its foreboding (and painterly) dawn-hued poster featuring Samuel L. Jackson looking less-than-neighborly in his squad car–not only reveals it as a thriller, but offers up aesthetic evocations of several popular home-invasion suspensers made in the early 1990s. Like UNLAWFUL ENTRY and PACIFIC HEIGHTS, LAKEVIEW TERRACE takes place in upper-middle-class Californian suburbia. The film’s ubiquitous purple sky and poolside lighting create an air of domestic bourgeois comfort just waiting to be upended by deadly social unease.

lakeview terrace

In this mode, the surprises start when the film opens with intimate household scenes not of the film’s purported heroes, an interracial couple who’s about to move next-door, but of its not-entirely-apparent villain–a curiously middle-aged beat cop (Jackson) who raises a few eyebrows when he close-mindedly bullies his children, but seems sad and sympathetic. The cop, a black man named Abel Turner, watches blankly from his home when the first new neighbor he sees is an African-American wife (Kerry Washington)–and then reacts with quiet shock and disgust when he realizes that the white mover is actually her husband, Chris (Patrick Wilson). The invasion in this home-invasion thriller is, ironically, the one perceived by its psychologically damaged bad guy. Abel, offended and ostensibly law-immune, immediately begins jabbing Chris with a toxic passive-aggression that quickly becomes impossible to ignore. LAKEVIEW TERRACE adheres to a satisfying thriller construct. It’s also a little interested in exploiting the archetypes of squirm-inducing domestic threat–all the nasty scenarios viewers recognize from those earlier movies–to consider several facets of American racism: its inevitability in familial and casual issues and its existence in liberal white guilt as much as its poisonous mixture with mental illness.