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...

Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the surly, computer-hacking punk girl with the dragon tattoo etched across her back, returns in the second installment of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy,” The Girl Who Played with Fire. Her return complicates matters, both for herself and for moviegoers. With a perfectly timed release coinciding with the home video availability of The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo, this second volume begins about a year after the events depicted in the first story. I don’t want to spoil it or reveal too much for those who haven’t yet experienced that superb thriller, but a certain fiery incident from Lisbeth’s past, referenced in the first installment, establishes the literal meaning of the second installment’s title. But it’s Lisbeth figurative “playing with fire” that really sets this story in motion. After spending time abroad, Lisbeth returns to Stockholm for a surprise follow-up meeting with her sadistic legal guardian, Nils Bjurman (Peter Andersson). Her bravado during this encounter quickly returns to haunt her when circumstances make her the suspect in three execution-style murders. Her hacking and survival skills keep her barely ahead of the police and others pursuing her, as she tries to right some old wrongs and clear her name. Of...

To be sucked in by a movie like Cyrus is a lot like being charmed by that nice young man next door, who you later discover liked to murder and eat hitchhikers. In either case, you’ll end up feeling violated and confused and wishing you’d never met. Oh, and wondering if that’s what happened to your cat. Cyrus (Jonah Hill) is just that kind of young man. Beneath his polite, if intense, exterior is a manipulative nutcase who has no interest in sharing his momma–with whom he wrestles in the public park, snuggles on the couch, and has impromptu dance parties to the trippy synth-pop he composes. So he is definitely not amused when John (John C. Reilly), a lumpy, frizzy-haired dude stumbles into his mother’s bed. John has been a shell of a man since his divorce from Jamie (Catherine Keener). While she’s moved on to a new love, he still dotes on her, even allowing her to have the key to his apartment, which she regrets using after she accidentally finds him masturbating. At Jamie’s insistence, John takes his messed-up show on the road to a party where he meets Molly (Marisa Tomei). Their impossible meet-cute (more like meet-ew) involves Molly interrupting a sloppy drunk John with the pick-up line “Nice penis” while he’s peeing in his host’s backyard. Reilly deli...

In the late 1990s, I was obsessed with a WB television show called Roswell. It was a lot like the Twilight Saga, except instead of sparkly vampires there was a family of aliens taking over the life and heart of a moody teenage girl. Stay with me. This train of thought does have a caboose. The show was brilliant but underappreciated in its first season of full-on teen melodrama. So the network decided to up the sci-fi action factor in a bid to engage a larger male viewing audience…or at least keep the guys entertained while their girlfriends swooned over a parade of gorgeous male leads and across-the-universe love stories. The results were mixed, at best, and the show sometimes seemed to forget that its main characters were still just teenagers or else took on a “creature of the week” vibe. A similar choice and similarly mixed results take shape with Twilight: Eclipse. If you’ve been living anywhere but under a rock for the past three years, you know that Twilight: Eclipse is the highly anticipated third installment of The Twilight Saga, based on Stephenie Meyers’ wildly popular teen vampire-romance novels. You also know that, despite its billion-dollar combined box office take, the series gets its fair share of teasing from both audiences and critics. Blame it on th...

Set in an oil-boom Texas town in the 1950s and based on Jim Thomson’s 58-year-old novel of the same name, The Killer Inside Me is a grotesque, uneven entry into the film noir genre. Its violence is stomach turning, but the film doesn’t seem to know why. Neither will you. In the film, Casey Affleck plays Lou Ford, a seemingly nice guy. He’s the surviving son of the once-small town’s doctor. He lives in his childhood home, among his father’s library of volumes that include both Freud and the Bible, listens to classical music on the Victrola, and wears clean white shirts and polished cowboy boots to his job as a deputy sheriff. When his boss (Tom Bower) sends Lou to evict a prostitute named Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba) from her cottage on the edge of town, a long-dormant violence inside of Lou is suddenly awakened. Joyce suggests a blackmail plot to dupe the son of Chester Conway (Ned Beatty), a wealthy local businessman so that she and Lou can run off together. But Lou has something more sinister in mind for both the Conways–who may or may not have caused the death of his stepbrother–and Joyce. Lou ends his sadomasochistic affair with the hooker, to whom he has previously doled out spankings and other punishments by consent, by brutally beating her face in, s...