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Welcome to A1 Movie Reviews!

This site is your destination for new movie releases and films on DVD and Blu-ray. Our team of critics are dedicated to bringing you the best movie ratings and movie essays around, and they’ll always do so in an original and unbiased fashion. So take a look around, read our movie reviews, and feel free to comment by email or at our movie forum.

If you’re looking for movie reviews or movie essays, then you’ve come to the right place. In business since 2000, A1 Movie Reviews changed management in 2009 and brought in a crack squad of talent to make the site even better (think G.I. Joe, but with more corrective lenses and excess body fat). Based in the great state of Texas, we also boast writers from New York City in order to add a dash of cosmopolitan flavor. So take a look around, browse our reviews and movie essays, and prepare for an experience that’s without equal (that may be stretching it a bit, but you get the idea).

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The kids may not need it, but a spoonful of sugar might help Nanny McPhee Returns go down many an adult gullet. Sadly, sugar appears to be on ration in this World War II-set sequel. But poop isn’t. Emma Thompson (who also serves as screenwriter) is back as that other magical nanny. In the first film, she came to the rescue of a Victorian widower with seven unruly children. This time around, she arrives to the English countryside farm of harried Isabel Green (Maggie Gyllenhaal with a surprisingly believable English accent). Isabel is temporarily a single mum of three–to responsible Norman (Asa Butterfield), tomboyish Megsie (Lil Woods) and youngest moppet Vincent (Oscar Steer)–while her husband (blink-and-you’ll-miss-him Ewan McGregor) is off fighting the Germans in the war. As if her hands weren’t already full, her spoiled, wealthy niece and nephew, Cyril (Eros Vlahos) and Celia (Rosie Taylor-Ritson) have just recently come to live with them because London is no longer safe thanks to the Blitz. The big-city cousins are not happy with their new rustic surroundings, what with all the pig, horse and chicken dung flowing in rivers around the property. They slip and slide in it and Celia loses her suitcase of new clothes to it, inciting a war between the country mice...

When I saw the trailer for The Switch, my first thought was: didn’t I just see this movie? With Jennifer Lopez? Then I realized that, no, that was a totally different romantic comedy centered on a lonely woman finding love through artificial insemination. Apparently, Hollywood thinks that we need two of its kind (three, if you add The Kids Are All Right to the sperm bank movie bank) in one viewing season. They’re wrong. This time around, it’s television executive Kassie (Jennifer Aniston), who has had it with trying to find true love and decides to take the sperm by the horns. When she tells her best friend, neurotic equities analyst, Wally (Jason Bateman), he is resistant to the idea. You see, they dated several years ago before he and his peculiar habits were banished to the friend zone. Because he’s still in love with her–a fact that everyone can see but him–he’s hurt that not only does she not want to date him, she doesn’t even want his special sauce. She’s decided instead to hit up Craigslist in search of Mr. Right Seed. Kassie finds him in a tall Feminist Lit-teaching blond named Roland (Patrick Wilson). She throws an insemination party, complete with confetti sperm and fertility goddess statues, to fete the occasion where Roland leaves his donatio...

Vampires Suck is the latest film from Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (Epic Movie, Date Movie, and Meet the Spartans). I have a better title: This Movie Sucks. ...

Watching The Expendables is similar to attending your high school reunion. There’s an initial rush of excitement at seeing so many familiar faces. Then, after an hour in the same room, you can’t wait to leave. What’s the old saying about not being able to go home again? The Expendables, a group of American-based mercenaries, are comprised of Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone, who also co-wrote and directed), Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), Yin Yang (Jet Li), Gunnar Jensen (Dolph Lundgren), Hale Caesar (Terry Crews), and Toll Road (MMA star Randy Couture). They’re aided on the business side of things by Tool (Mickey Rourke), a former member turned tattoo artist. After dispatching a gang of pirates off the coast of Somalia in the film’s opening scene, our heroes tentatively accept an assignment to topple General Garza (David Zayas), a South American dictator. It’s a job that’s been passed over by everyone else, and a recon mission by Barney and Lee reveals why: the country is crawling with sinister-looking types, namely James Monroe (Eric Roberts) and his chief enforcer, Dan Paine (Steve Austin). When an American in a tailored suit is hanging out south of the equator, it always spells trouble. The decision is made to abort, but group leader Ro...

Eat Pray Love is a testament to the merits of genius casting. After all, only an actress as effortlessly graceful, effervescent, and disarming as Julia Roberts could make a chick-lit tome turned self-help chick-flick feel like the best vacation I’ve never taken.   Before this review turns into a never-ending ode to Julia Roberts, I should tell you that Eat Pray Love is a film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s wildly popular best-selling memoir of the same name. Liz (that’s what everyone calls her), a New York City based writer, realizes that things aren’t right in her eight-year marriage to affable but unfocused Stephen (Billy Crudup). No sooner does she file for divorce than she meets David, a good-looking young actor (James Franco), with whom she has a volatile rebound romance. That relationship proves to be a bad fit, too, and Liz finds herself in an existential crisis.   Liz has no idea who she is when she’s not someone’s daughter, wife, or girlfriend. So she embarks on a yearlong journey to Italy, India, and Indonesia–countries that start with “I”–to find out who she is when she’s alone. But friendly Liz is rarely alone no matter where she goes. In her world travels, she meets a whole new cadre of friends who bring with them life lessons. ...

I should have hated, or at least been bored to tears, by the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. It’s full of stuff I usually couldn’t care less about, including video games, anime, evildoers with superpowers, ridiculously overloaded visual effects, vegans, slacker musician wannabes in their twenties, girls with fluorescent-colored hair, and awkward romances between those last two. Instead, much to my surprise, I found myself laughing throughout and enjoying this insane, inventively stylized comedy. Michael Cera may be in danger of typecasting after numerous parts as the stumbling, romantically-challenged-yet-likable young dweeb, but it’s a role he seems born to play. As Scott Pilgrim, Cera starts in familiar territory as a 22-year-old unemployed Toronto native playing bass with three high school pals in a band named Sex Bob-omb. In fact, he used to date the drummer, Kim (Alison Pill), leaving her with a snarly, begrudging attitude, especially when he starts bringing his current girlfriend–a 17-year-old Catholic high school girl named Knives (Ellen Wong)–to band rehearsals. Everyone gossips and talks trash to try and steer them apart, including Scott’s sister Stacey (Up In The Air Oscar nominee Anna Kendrick) and his gay roommate Wallace (Kieran Culkin). Bu...

During his film career, Will Ferrell has poked fun at television anchors, NASCAR drivers, paleontologists, and male figure skaters. Now, thanks to The Other Guys, it’s the NYPD’s turn. I’m happy to report that the resulting comedy from frequent Ferrell collaborator Adam McKay (Step Brothers, Anchorman, Talladega Nights) manages to elicit laughs just as loud as any siren magnetically stuck to the top of an unmarked police car. Highsmith (Samuel L. Jackson) and Danson (Dwayne Johnson) are the top cops in New York City. They’ve got that 80’s action movie vibe, and nobody seems to care that they rack up millions in property damage to stop simple misdemeanors. That all comes to an end, however, when they inexplicably leap to their deaths while pursuing a gang of thieves (an event that mystifies even the narrator). This leaves a vacancy in the hero department, one that Detective Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg) hopes to fill. Terry drags around the moniker of “The Yankee Clipper,” earned by mistakenly shooting Derek Jeter in the leg and costing the city a World Series win. While he chafes at the scorn displayed by his fellow officers, he spends most of his time pacing like a caged beast, waiting for his chance to once again be released into the wild. His partner, Det. Alle...

This may be one of the trickiest reviews I’ve ever had to write, so let me get right to the point: The Disappearance of Alice Creed is a succinct, smartly crafted suspense thriller, and, the less you know about it going in, the better. Ideally, I prefer to watch a movie knowing as little as possible, but I had seen a trailer that informed me The Disappearance of Alice Creed was about two men kidnapping a woman. If you’re interested in seeing this movie in a similar “blank slate” mind-set, stop reading this NOW. Still here? Okay. The Disappearance Of Alice Creed begins with a chilling, wordless sequence showing two men methodically preparing for undoubtedly criminal deeds. The older and obvious leader of the two is Vic (Eddie Marsan, Inspector Lestrade in Sherlock Holmes and John Houseman in Me and Orson Welles); the younger is Danny (Martin Compston). Before two words are spoken (literally), they have their prey: a young woman named Alice Creed (Gemma Arterton), twenty-something daughter of a rich man. Vic and Danny kidnap, gag, and secure her to a bed while they demand a ransom from her father. I try my darnedest to avoid spoiling a film’s surprises when reviewing it, and, in the case of this film, it’s very difficult to say more without giving anything away. Suffice...

Nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the documentary Quest for Honor is a difficult film to watch. It immediately brought to mind the prolonged brutality in last summer’s Stoning of Soraya M., a similarly themed “based on a true story” drama about the honor killing of a woman, wrongly accused of adultery by her unscrupulous husband, in a rural Iranian village. But this chronicle of real people was somehow even more appalling. The film follows Runak Faraj and Kalthoum, a pair of activist journalists at The Women’s Media Center, publisher of the only women’s newspaper in Iraqi Kurdistan. The journalists have been called by police, who have discovered the body of a woman, dressed in blue jeans and high heels, shot twice at close range. Further investigation uncovers that the woman, a local widow named Nasrin, recently had her children taken from her by her late husband’s family. They now refuse to claim her body or pursue the investigation of her killing. Runal, Kalthoum, and the police suspect that the family is responsible for her death. Paradoxically, only the victim’s family members can press charges against her murderer. Photographer-turned-filmmaker Mary Ann Smothers Bruni takes her camera around to police, local political off...

Someone at the MPAA must have fallen asleep on the job when they allowed Dinner for Schmucks to go to market with that third word still in the title. For those of you who don’t speak Yiddish, the English translation starts like “Dumb” and ends like “schtICK,” an apt description for this film’s basic premise. Paul Rudd plays Tim, an ambitious private banker, whose only two goals are to move onto the executive floor and marry his beautiful girlfriend, Julie (Stephanie Szostak). After finally gaining the notice of his boss (Bruce Greenwood), Tim gets invited to one of his regular “dinners for winners,” where executive-office dwellers bring the most socially tone-deaf weirdos and idiots they can find over for a little prix fixe ridicule. Tim isn’t immediately comfortable with the idea–especially since sweet art-dealer Julie thinks it’s cruel–but then he meets Barry (Steve Carell). Bucktoothed Barry is a midlevel bureaucrat–at the IRS, no less–and an amateur taxidermist, passionate about finding dead mice, stuffing them, dressing them in handmade mouse attire, and placing them in dioramas and full-scale tableaux from history, art, and his own (pretty pathetic) personal life. Essentially, this idiot and his “mouseterpieces” are too go...

Who is Salt? For starters, she’s not Tom Cruise. Originally scripted as a vehicle for the man with the grin, the spy thriller Salt has been re-written for the woman with the lips, Angelina Jolie. Gender-wise, the conversion is seamless. Still, there’s something missing from this long-awaited big-budget actioner. The film starts with that famous pucker all bloodied and bruised. A blonde Evelyn Salt has been captured in North Korea and is thrown on the floor of a torture cell in her little white bra and panties (much to XY chromosome audience delight). She suffers for what is presumably months, insisting that she is not a spy. When she is released, thanks to campaigning from her sweet, German arachnologist hubby (August Diehl), she is picked up by her CIA supervisor Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber). It’s your first clue that the woman can lie. Fast-forward two years. A man claiming to be a Russian defector name Wassily Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski) saunters into the CIA facility where Salt works and announces that he was responsible for the training of Russian child spies during the height of the Cold War. Dozens of them are now living as sleeper operatives in the United States, waiting for the designated day to strike. One of them is Evelyn Salt, whose mission is to kill the Russ...

Private First Class Juan “Doc” Restrepo was killed in action soon after his platoon’s deployment to the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, considered one of the most lethal areas on Earth by the U.S. military. In death, this American soldier gave his name to both a critical outpost and an impressive documentary, Restrepo, which chronicles just over a year in the lives of brave men fighting what is no longer a forgotten war. Filmmakers Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger joined the men of Battle Company on their deployment, led by Captain Dan Kearney, a cool-headed officer determined to have better success within the Korengal than his predecessor did. Their landing post is isolated, and the road beyond its gate is very short–“Where the road ends, the Taliban begins,” Kearney explains. His solution is to extend the Army’s presence further into the valley by establishing an outpost, “O.P. Restrepo,” in an overnight maneuver. Its prominent location draws frequent enemy fire, but the men hold and secure the outpost as a second base of operations in the valley. This remarkable film is produced by National Geographic, and fans of their nature documentaries will find human behavior captured in the same exacting detail. There are some truly harrowing moments and deepl...

Christopher Nolan’s Inception is about perception, specifically the way we perceive our dreams as reality when we’re asleep. It’s about seeking out the innermost secrets of the mind while fighting off the defense mechanisms it creates to protect itself. It’s about two-and-a-half hours of trying to perceive this movie as a worthy mind-scrambling successor to Nolan’s masterpiece Memento, but, in my perception, it falls far short of that goal. Inception is actually about deception. Leonardo DiCaprio–current king of the dream world after this and Shutter Island–plays Cobb, leader of a literal dream team of technicians and “architects” (designers of the dream worlds) who arrange to render a subject unconscious, then connect to him in a shared dream state to perform an extraction by finding the secrets the subject has locked away in his mind’s innermost recesses. The team’s most recent target, a Japanese industrialist named Saito (Ken Watanabe), is impressed with their work and asks if they can perform an “inception” by entering the mind of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the privileged son of a dying rival (Pete Postlethwaite), and planting an idea instead of stealing secret thoughts. Cobb knows inception can be done, but it’s a very tricky and...

It’s hard to know what to make of Valhalla Rising. The title alone seems to promise relentless scenes of Viking axe swinging and sword fighting. When I saw the poster of a bare-chested, tribal-tattooed Mads Mikkelsen in chains, scenes of a pagan warrior on an epic mission practically edited themselves in my brain. I pictured a hybrid of Conan the Barbarian and Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. This was not that movie. It seems to start off that way, though, with our badly scarred hero (Mikkelsen) crushing the skull of one foe and snapping the neck of another in vividly filmed bloody detail. As the camera pans his face and the empty eye socket on one side of it, we come to learn that he is a slave, a mute foreigner made to fight for the amusement of his Scottish captor. But, it’s ominously pointed out, he’s never been owned by any one person for more than five years and Scottie is dangerously close to the end of his lease. One disembowelment and a decapitated head on a pike later and our hero is free. Only a young boy (Maarten Stevenson) survives the uprising, begins to trail behind him, and nicknames him One Eye for the obvious reason. Eventually the pair joins with a group of Viking Christians on their way to the first crusade in Jerusalem. The boy acts as One Eye’s voice, asc...

Nicolas Cage had an idea: take the beloved Fantasia episode known as “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” set it in modern times, and replace Yen Sid and Mickey Mouse with a stammering Canadian and Cage in a rawhide overcoat. While Disney purists (are there any left?) might consider this akin to heresy, the film does manage to generate a little of the ‘ol magic amidst a series of fizzles and misfires. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice begins in 740 AD with an all-out battle between the wizard Merlin (James A. Stephens) and his nemesis, the evil Morgana le Fay (Alice Krige). Just when Merlin looks to have the upper hand, he’s betrayed by his apprentice, Maxim Horvath (Alfred Molina), and mortally wounded by Morgana. Luckily, Merlin has two other apprentices, Veronica (Monica Bellucci) and Balthazar Blake (Cage). Veronica sacrifices herself to trap Morgana, but not before Horvath escapes with a powerful spell that may one day allow his mistress to conquer the world. Left all alone, Balthazar is tasked by a dying Merlin to take his ring and search for his future successor, the Prime Merlinian, the only person capable of stopping Morgana for good. 1,260 years later… Dave Stutler (Jake Cherry), a nine-year-old Manhattan student on a field trip, stumbles into Blake’s magic/antique shop...

When I read that Predators was going to be released in the summer of 2010, my mind swirled with nostalgia and returned to the year 1987, the release date for the first film in the franchise. I was completing my final driver’s ed course, and the last-minute bailout of another student left us with a gap in our schedule. After taking my turn learning the finer points of parallel parking and right-of-ways, I soon found myself in the darkened confines of a local theatre with a fellow classmate and my driving instructor. That would be my first exposure to the massive alien manhunters known as the Predators, as well as Dutch, Mac, Dillon, and even ‘Ol Painless. My driving skills have improved since then. The franchise has not. Predator 2 (1990) was a disappointing look at an alien loose in the middle of L.A., with a post-Lethal Weapon Danny Glover in hot pursuit. Then, after 14 years of dormancy, the series returned with a pair of films focusing on the lethal struggle between Predators and their acid-bleeding counterparts from the Alien franchise. All of these films made money, but none managed to surpass the suspense and well-muscled action laid out in the original. Now comes Predators, a film directed by Nimrod Antal (Kontroll, Armored, and Vacancy) and co-produced by Robert Rodri...

If you’re like me, the overabundance of recently released 3D movies probably has you feeling as grumpy as Gru, the main character in the spectacle-required spectacle Despicable Me. I get it, Hollywood: a certain James Cameron movie set on an alien planet was shot in 3D and went on to make record-breaking profits. But here’s the thing: if you’re a four-eyes, forced to be six-eyes for two hours, 3D sucks. If you’re prone to motion sickness or migraine headaches, 3D sucks. If you would rather not spend an extra $4 on a movie ticket for no good reason, 3D sucks. There’s an obvious pattern developing here which did not bode well for Universal’s latest animated feature, which I saw in (you guessed it) 3D. Amazingly, Despicable Me didn’t suck. Steve Carrell voices Gru, a middle-aged super villain whose exploits just aren’t getting the kind of attention they used to. A younger, tracksuit-wearing bad guy named Vector (Jason Segel) has upstaged him by stealing the pyramids from Egypt. To regain his reputation, Gru devises a plot to steal the moon from the heavens with the help of his scientist sidekick, Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand), and his legion of Nuprin-capsule-shaped minions (They’re little, yellow, different). But first, he’s got to get his hands on a shrink-ray gu...

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