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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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First off, my apologies to all of the boyfriends and husbands who will inevitably be forced to sit through When in Rome, or as I like to call it, Love in the Time of Caller ID.  It’s a romantic comedy devoid of humor, and the only romance appears to be between a girl and her Blackberry. That girl is cute-as-a-button Beth (Kristen Bell), a workaholic junior curator at the Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York City. Oh yeah, Hollywood, we’re doing this again? Type-A big city career woman too screwed up to find love? Oh, well. Carry on. On the eve of her biggest exhibition to date–a gala centered on the art of pain (no comment)–Beth’s younger sister (Alexis Dziena) meets a gorgeous Italian fellow and decides to get married right away in Rome. Much to the displeasure of her slave-driver boss (Anjelica Huston), Beth must get out of town (read: Wi-fi range) to attend the nuptials. While there, she meets Nick, the good-looking best man (Josh Duhamel). You know it’s love at first sight because as he’s running down the aisle, late, his cell phone starts to ring. Someone as attached to his iPhone as Beth is to her Blackberry? It must be destiny. They make googly eyes at each from across the aisle until it’s time for a little close dancing at ...

My large music collection contains mostly classic rock and top-40 hits. I even collect what I call room clearers, cringe-inducing oldies like “Feelings” and “Seasons In The Sun” that are quite effective when the party’s ending and you wish your guests would just go home already. As I continually sort through my collection, there’s another musical subset that intrigues me (though not in a weird personal way, I assure you): jailbait songs, such as “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon” and “Only Sixteen,” tracks that may have a catchy melody, but also contain lyrics that, if enacted in real life, would likely lead to felony prosecution. Likewise, jailbait movies range from the cheesy low-budget depths of Ed Wood’s Jail Bait to highbrow cinema like Lolita and Pretty Baby; the Oscar-winning American Beauty mixed the jailbait element with a mid-life crisis story. To this list we can add An Education, an intelligent production from BBC Films that centers its coming-of-age tale around a romantic relationship between a British schoolgirl and an older man — a coupling that, if not necessarily illegal by 1961 UK standards, was certainly enough to raise questions, concerns, and eyebrows. Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a 16-year-old student at a girls’ school in Twickenham. He...

I love movies about or including archangels. I think it has something to do with that inevitable moment when they–Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, crazy-pants Tilda Swinton, crazier-pants Christopher Walken, and even bloated John Travolta–show off that impressive feathered wingspan. So, as tired as I am of the recent glut of apocalypse-themed movies out on the market (this one is the fourth in as many months), I have to admit to being pretty excited to see Legion. After factoring in good-looking and talented Paul Bettany and Dennis Quaid, it should have been a slam-dunk. It should have been. Legion begins on a promising, yet predictably, note: a Sarah Connor-esque opening voiceover (with accompanying views of barren desert landscapes) has a young woman telling the story of her mother who once regaled her with Bible-based end-of-days prophesies. That voice belongs to Charlie (Adrianne Palicki of TV’s Friday Night Lights), a curly-haired, cherub-faced pregnant waitress at a roadside diner–proleptically named Paradise Falls–at the intersection of Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and precisely nowhere. In addition to Charlie, there’s the usual ragtag bunch of strangers whom fate has brought together: Bob Hanson (Dennis Quaid), the divorced, cynical proprieto...

Remember when I unabashedly admitted to being biased in favor of James McAvoy? I wasn’t lying. What that means is that, for me, The Last Station was about a man (played by McAvoy, of course) with saucer-sized blue eyes, an intriguingly crooked nose, perfect teeth, and a Scottish accent. It may have also been about the last days of Leo Tolstoy. Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (played here by Christopher Plummer) was the writer of such literary masterpieces as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In his dotage, he was also a cult political figure who inspired a throng of followers headed up by Vladimir Chertkov. In this film, Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) hires a young Tolstoyan named Valentin Bulgakov (McAvoy) to serve double duty as Tolstoy’s personal secretary and to spy on the scribe’s wife, Countess Sofya (Helen Mirren). Over a lifetime, Tolstoy’s written and political work have come to support vegetarianism, passive resistance, celibacy, and the abolishment of personal property. Those last two especially rub the Countess the wrong way. She is convinced that the sycophantic Chertkov is plotting to get her husband to sign over the rights to his body of work to the people of Russia, leaving her and her children without an inheritance. To prevent this from happening, she tries ever...

How do you make a statue of an elephant? Easy–you take a big block of marble, and then carve away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. Similarly, if you wrote a screenplay and filmed it, edited out the meaningless material, and then assembled a movie using only that useless, extraneous footage, it would be much like 35 Shots Of Rum, which is perhaps the most pointless and boring film I have ever barely stayed awake through. This movie by French director Claire Denis features a story with the depth of a grade-school primer: Meet Lionel (Alex Descas). He drives a subway train. He has a daughter, Jo (Mati Diop). She is a college student. She has a boyfriend, Noe (Gregoire Colin). He is their landlord. He is sensitive because he has a goatee and a cat. A cab driver lives next door. Her name is Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue). She likes Lionel and Jo. They do not seem to like her very much. We never know why. Lionel has a friend named Rene (Julieth Mars). Rene is retired from driving a subway train. Rene is sad. So is everyone in this film. Except for Gabrielle, who is the only one who smiles. We never know why. This admittedly sarcastic summary is also sadly accurate, and is the best way I can illustrate that for nearly the entire length of 35 Shots of Rum, NOTHING HAPPEN...

It’s about time Denzel Washington took his turn as the leading man in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. Most of the better (and better-looking) actors of his age have already left their marks on the role. Mel Gibson started his career with one (Mad Max). Kevin Costner nearly ended his career with two (Waterworld and The Postman). And Viggo Mortensen is in one right now (The Road). In the sepia-toned futuristic Wild West world of The Book of Eli, Denzel finally has his chance to walk the scorched Earth. In fact, his character has been walking–dressed in sunglasses, a kaffiyeh, and backpack–for quite a while. The year is unspecified. What we do know is that it’s been so long since the heyday of mankind that there are very few alive who remember the way it was. One of those few is Eli (Denzel Washington). Eli has been on his walkabout for 30 years, ever since the war and ensuing cataclysm that folks describe as “the hole in the sky.” While the film never explains what happened (one if its major flaws, but I’ll get to that in a moment), the consequences are clear: the sun is the enemy. Water is a scarce commodity, literacy an even scarcer one, and basic human decency is the rarest of all. That makes Eli’s reading material–the last surviving Ki...

In 1994, several years before he dove head-first into J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth and created perhaps the greatest film trilogy of all time, director Peter Jackson impressed international critics and audiences with Heavenly Creatures, a visually stunning depiction of the most infamous murder in New Zealand’s history. After the epic scale of The Lord Of The Rings and the excesses of his King Kong remake, Jackson has returned to his roots to deliver another murder tale laden with fanciful imagery, The Lovely Bones. Unlike Heavenly Creatures, The Lovely Bones is based on a work of fiction, but it shares the former film’s strong attention to period details and its reality-based human drama. It’s 1973 in suburban Pennsylvania, and 14-year-old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan from Atonement) is a typically awkward teenage girl, moony-eyed over the cute English boy at her school, sweetly devoted to her loving father Jack (Mark Wahlberg), and a budding photographer thanks to the 110 Instamatic camera (complete with flashcubes and 24 rolls of film) she received for her birthday. Everything about her life is familiar and relatively typical — until the day she is murdered by George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), an older man living alone in a house right down the street. Susie’s body is n...

It’s January again, which means that between the holdovers from the holiday awards-bait movies, theaters wedge in a few new releases that aren’t good enough for accolades of any kind. Lionsgate continues this dubious tradition with the release of Daybreakers, another cliché-ridden attempt to cash in on the ridiculous vampire craze permeating nearly every avenue of pop culture these days. Honestly, it’s a tired pun to say that vampires suck, but with two current television series based on them, plus the Twilight books and movies, as well as weaker contributions like last year’s Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, I’m begging and pleading for a moratorium on the whole fanged, blood-swilling subject. Daybreakers is set in the year 2019, about ten years after a plague spread around the world and turned nearly everyone into vampires. This means that now cars have sun shields and are driven with the use of roof-mounted cameras, subways (inexplicably without subway trains) are used for subterranean walking during the daylight, and people —excuse me, vampires — have glowing eyes and fangs and like to mix a little cream in their evening AB-negative coffee. And because they only come out at night, everything’s lit with blue-white lights to make it all look f...

Youth in Revolt stars Michael Cera as a 16-year-old sweet but nerdy horn-dog, who has yet to have a girl unwrap his weener. Sound familiar? It’s the sort of character that Cera has played almost exclusively – and much more amusingly – in movies such as Juno, Superbad, and Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist.  This time around, Cera is Nick Twisp. It seems that everyone in Nick’s world is having sex but him. Nick’s dad (Steve Buscemi) is having his needs met by a woman half his age (Ari Graynor), while his mom is presently shacked up with a burping, slouching douchebag named Jerry (Zach Galifianakis, the dude from The Hangover). The only person whose sex life is worse off than Nick’s is his pal Lefty (Erik Knudsen), so named because of the direction his penis takes whenever it is erect.  When Jerry gets into hot water with a group of sailors (that’s right, I said sailors), the family has to leave Oakland for a hideout vacation to a trailer park in Ukiah, California. While there, Nick meets Sheeni Saunders, the girl of his wet dreams (Portia Doubleday). Like Nick, Sheeni is an outsider of sorts – too smart and pretty for her religious fanatic parents, bad-poetry-writing boyfriend, and the rest of the park dwellers. She is a Fran...

It’s been over 60 years since Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce delivered their final, iconic big-screen portrayals of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Since then, variations have included a bumbling, drunken Holmes (Michael Caine), a cocaine-addled Holmes (Nicol Williamson), and a delusional man who believed himself to be fiction’s greatest detective (George C. Scott). While many of these films would draw critical approval, none have generated the obscene level of box-office success needed for a follow-up. That’s about to change if director Guy Ritchie and star Robert Downey, Jr. have their way. Sherlock Holmes, the latest contribution to the growing mythos originally penned by Arthur Conan Doyle, is crafted with one eye firmly fixed on the almighty sequel. While not based on any of the previous novels or short stories, it does incorporate established characters and situations into a sort of cinematic stew. The results, while occasionally tasty, often leave the viewer with the feeling that the Hollywood cookbook was consulted on one too many occasions. As the film begins, Holmes (Downey) and his forthright partner, Dr. Watson (Jude Law), foil the Satanic designs of Lord Henry Blackwood (Mark Strong). The villain apprehended and sentenced to hang, Holmes lapses into a per...

Nine. Not only is it the title of the latest Rob Marshall-helmed film, it’s also the number of Golden Globe Awards earned to date by its seven top-billed performers (if you include Sophia Loren’s Lifetime Achievement Award). That’s enough gold to make a life-sized statue of a calf to worship, but not enough to save this mediocre movie-musical. Set in Rome in 1965, Nine tells the story of Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis), a famous Italian film director who was successful early in his career but whose last two films have been flops. Guido is suffering from a crippling case of writer’s block as he tries to pen his ninth film. Never mind that he’s due to start shooting in 10 days. Perhaps it’s all the women in his life that are mucking up the creative works. Guido’s brain is entirely occupied by thoughts of his half-French wife, Luisa (Marion Cotillard); his half-crazy mistress, Carla (Penelope Cruz); and his half-plastic leading lady, Claudia (Nicole Kidman, looking permanently surprised). If those weren’t plenty, he’s got four more women adding to the din in his head: his larger-than-life Mamma (Sophia Loren); his costume designer/therapist Lilli (Judi Dench); Stephanie, an American reporter desperate to get into his Positano pants (Kate Hudson); and Sar...

Beneath the icy exterior of every iron-willed dowager queen beats the heart of a princess in love, or so period biopic The Young Victoria would have us believe. Thanks to its stellar performances and true-to-history script, it successfully convinces. The film opens with a teenage girl sick in bed. The girl is attended by her nurse, her mother (who seems only marginally interested in the girl’s recovery), and a man trying to force her to sign a legal document. A somewhat clumsy flashback explains how this girl is Victoria (Emily Blunt), the sole heir apparent to the throne of England. Because of her one-of-a-kind status, she is essentially imprisoned throughout her childhood by her mother, the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson) with the influence of her personal secretary and bedfellow, Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong). Not only is Victoria kept away from court, she is not allowed to play with other children, sleep without her mother beside her, or walk up and down stairs without holding someone’s hand even when she’s 17 years old. It’s all because the Duchess and Sir John are trying to keep their meal ticket safe, while wishing and hoping that the sickly king kicks the bucket before Victoria comes of age. Then they, as Victoria’s regents, can rule England. Meanwhile...

It’s been 12 long years since James Cameron released a film amid rampant rumors and speculation.  Problems during production, epic length, groundbreaking visual effects, the most expensive movie ever made, doomed to failure — the buzz intensified until Titanic finally opened and shattered all expectations, becoming the worldwide box office champion and tying the records for Academy Awards and nominations.  Now the question is, can the self-proclaimed “king of the world” do it all again with Avatar, the most anticipated film of the season? It remains to be seen if Cameron can repeat history at the box office and the awards ceremonies, but if he doesn’t reach similar heights, it’s not for lack of trying.  He’s relying on past history with his screenplay, which borrows heavily from one of his previous films.  Fortunately, that film is Aliens, so at least he’s stealing from the best. (Let us not forget that Titanic received 14 Oscar nominations, but its screenplay was ignored.) Avatar begins with a paraplegic Marine named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) arriving, after a five-year journey in cryogenic sleep, on the planet Pandora.  A place that many on Earth have heard of but few will ever see, Pandora features spectacularly lush jungles and terrain, a toxic atmosph...

What happens when you play a country song backwards?  You get your car back, your wife back, and your dog back.  True as it may seem on the surface, that tired old joke fails to capture the essence of what it means to be a country music journeyman.  In Crazy Heart, Jeff Bridges hits the nail right on the head. Down on his luck, Bad Blake (think Waylon Jennings) is a 57-year-old broke and broken-hearted country crooner.  Despite a brief moment of fame in his younger days, he is now relegated to traveling across the country in a beat-up truck and playing small-town bowling alleys.  Meanwhile, his protégé, Tommy Sweet (an uncredited Colin Farrell), is a new-style country star (think Tim McGraw) who is riding a wave of fame, buffeted by his good looks and solid pedigree. When Bad rolls into a little honkey-tonk in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he meets Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a would-be journalist with a touch of hero worship. Divorced with only her four-year-old son to show for it, she has been burned by men before and should know better than to fall for the alcoholic, chain-smoking man who’s left four wives and an abandoned son in his wake.  Blame it on the intimate motel-room interviews Bad grants her, or his forward but non-lecherous come-ons about her being pret...

Seventeen days ago, the New York Senate struck down the state’s gay marriage bill.  Over the last few years, legislating bodies all over the country have been deciding whose love counts.  In A Single Man, the answer is everyone’s. Based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel of the same name, A Single Man tells the story of one day in the life of a middle-aged gay man.  On this particular day, George Falconer (Colin Firth), a British professor of English at a small California college, goes about the normal business of his life.  He reads on the toilet, while watching the vanilla nuclear family next door with their holy-terror kids through his window.  He chides his housekeeper for leaving the bread in the freezer.  And he agrees to pick up Tanqueray for dinner with his lush of a best friend, Charley (Julianne Moore). This day is unique in just one regard: it is the day that George has decided to end his life.  He has recently gotten the news that Jim (Matthew Goode), his partner of the last 16 years, has died in a car crash while visiting family.  Because the year is 1962 (the Stonewall riots are another seven years in the making), their love is “invisible” and George is not even allowed to attend the funeral. Through flashbacks of their long years together, the film ...

Perhaps it’s financially advantageous for broadcasting giant CBS to diversify its portfolio by creating a feature film division.  Or maybe their TV schedule is so filled with sitcoms, Survivor, and CSI that they’ve run out of room for anything else.  For whatever reason, CBS Films has brought its first production, Extraordinary Measures, to the big screen, and it fits within another of that network’s staple categories — the sappy, emotionally manipulative “disease of the week” movie.  The only differences between this film and a Sunday night “very special presentation” after the football game are the absence of commercial breaks and pricier casting. Brendan Fraser plays John Crowley, an executive at pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers.  He and wife Aileen (Keri Russell) have three young children, two of whom suffer from a genetic malady known as Pompe.  A form of muscular dystrophy, Pompe causes enlargement of internal organs and the deterioration of motor skills.  Most children with Pompe do not live past age 9.  The movie begins with wheelchair-bound Megan Crowley celebrating her eighth birthday.  For the doting dad, time is ticking away. Crowley’s personal research on the disease points him to Dr. Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford), a research scientist ...

It should come as no surprise that Clint Eastwood would direct a movie about Nelson Mandela. He’s addressed issues of racial tolerance and understanding before, in films such as Letters From Iwo Jima and Gran Torino. His Oscar-winning western, Unforgiven, is notable for the absence of racism directed at Morgan Freeman’s character Ned — even when being tortured by the sadistic sheriff — and without comments about a black man cohabitating with a Native American woman. All very progressive films in that regard. What’s surprising is how dull and uninspiring Invictus, Eastwood’s latest foray into the subject, turns out to be. Freeman is a natural fit for the role of Mandela, not just because of his obvious talents and resemblance to the man, but also because his two previous films with Eastwood both resulted in numerous accolades. He’ll certainly receive further nominations and awards for this high-profile performance, but his work is diminished by a pedantic script that ultimately tells us next to nothing about the man, or anything else. Invictus begins in February of 1991, when Nelson Mandela is released from prison after nearly 30 years. A montage of news footage, with Freeman skillfully edited in, brings us to the day Mandela takes office as President of Sout...

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