Josh Tate

I was never a huge fan of the Terminator movies, so I wasn't too upset about the mythology-raping that goes on in Terminator Salvation. For me it was just good, loud fun with cool robots and Moon Bloodgood's amazing cleavage. During a family visit over Christmas I was snookered into seeing the first Night at the Museum. That will not be the case with the dreary-looking Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. Yes,...

Guy tries to impress girl by dressing up as Leatherface and killing her. | Photo courtesy of Rudy Jahchan via Flickr Haven't been to the cemetery in forever? There's two prime opportunities this weekend, courtesy of Cinespia's latest season of "drive-in" (sit-in?) screenings at Hollywood Forever. Saturday brings super-dead superstars Cary Grant & Grace Kelly in Alfred Hitchcock's masterful heist mystery To Catch A Thief. Sunday hosts super-living unsuper-stars Ben Affleck & Matthew McConaughey...

Here's the damn shame of it all: Bryan Singer is a super filmmaker and the "Valkyrie" story is a fascinating piece of German history. That said, Tom Cruise should never have been the cornerstone of this film. A potentially great movie was rendered into something that was merely okay. Then again, "merely okay" would have been a triumph for the awful Paul Blart: Fat Guy Acting Stupid. I originally saw Made in America at Sundance...

While it didn't approach the monstrous financial heights of the poorly-conceived The Da Vinci Code, Thomas de Hanks' Angels & Demons ($48M) tricked enough Americans into theaters to hold off the sturdy Star Trek ($43M/$143.6M) to capture the weekend box-office crown. X-Men Origins: Wolverine had a reasonably good third weekend to place, uh, third ($14.8M/$151M) while Ghosts of Matthew McConaughey's Bangbus Girlfriends ($6.8M/$40M) and Obsessed with White Chicks ($4.5M/$40M) rounded out the top five. The...

The Brothers Bloom will most likely split audiences down the middle just as it has almost evenly divided critics. Simply put, you either delight in the often whimsical imagination of writer/director Rian Johnson or you dismiss it as precious eye candy. I fall firmly in the former camp. While it would be easy to peg Bloom as a Wes Anderson-ish fable about two con men who endure a Dickensian upbringing which leads them to a...

Dan Brown's quickly-paced novels seem tailor-made for the big screen, but The Da Vinci Code was a lumbering dud. Here's hoping that Angels & Demons is edited at a much brisker pace (with less exposition). At least they fixed Tom Hanks' weird hairdo from Da Vinci. If you want to see something that will just fill you with joy, try The Brothers Bloom. Rian Johnson's superb debut Brick was clearly not a fluke. In fact,...

How long can you rock? | Photo courtesy of Brent J. Craig | 42 West When the film Anvil!: The True Story of Anvil debuted at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, it was instantly acclaimed as the true-life version of This is Spinal Tap. Sacha Gervasi's documentary detailed the story of 50-something rockers from Canada who were still plugging away and trying to get their big break after all these years. The resonance that...

Gee, it's usually not like conservatives to get bent out of shape about gay people. | Photo courtesy of Courtesy qWaves The city is experiencing a golden age of naughty puppet films. Hot on the trail of Black Devil Doll is Let My Puppets Come, a fuzzy-felt skeleton pulled from the closet of the late Gerard Damiano (Deep Throat, The Devil In Miss Jones) for The Not-So-Silent Theatre's "Mondo Sexo" this Saturday. If the...

Do you have any girls for massage that look like my daughter? | Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox It's still hard to believe that a relatively generic film like Taken became such a huge box-office hit. There certainly aren't that many huge Liam Neeson fans and the luscious Maggie Grace didn't even take her kit off so that's not what drew crowds. Chalk it up to William Goldman's old aphorism: "Nobody knows anything."...

Captain Kirk and Harold prepare to go parasailing. | Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures J.J. Abrams' reboot of the Star Trek franchise soared past expectations to bring in a huge $76.5M this weekend at the box office. Early tracking had pegged a $50-60M haul, but the well-reviewed film blew past those estimates. Last week's champ, Wolverine, endured an expected, precipitous drop but still managed to bring in $27M ($129.6M). The awful Ghosts of Girls...