Mr. Brown Versus

There's only a few hours left in the year, and I've got just enough time to dish out the top five movies that deserves nothing by my one-finger salute in closing up shop for 2015. 5. The Boy Next Door  - Jennifer Lopez is a decent actress when given the right script and a juicy story to sink her teeth into (see: Selena  and The Cell ). Starring in an erotic thriller about a recently divorced high school teacher having a regretful one-night stand with the hunky boy next door, Noah  (Ryan Guzman), sounds like a good idea, but the execution from screenwriter Barbra Curry and director Rob Cohen ( xXx , Stealth , The Fast and the Furious ) was a huge miss: yes, Lopez and Guzman are both attractive leads and they do hold some chemistry on screen, but the acting is too melodramatic to the point where it begins to feel like self-parody, which begins to bleed over into the section where Noah begins to become obsessive and gradually humiliates her in order to reignite their sex...

Another year is almost in the books, and with that means the time-honored tradition of discussing what made us cheer and what made us pull out our hair being at the cinema for 2015. This year wasn't as bad as last year, where I had to endure shit like God's Not Dead , About Last Night  and last year's reining champion of suck in The Fault In Our Stars , but there's still movies that made me suffer through the 12 months, and for that, they're going to end up on this list of shame. 10. Spectre  - How do you follow up one the best entries in the continuing adventures of Agent 007 and the best performance in the current Bond era? By making one of the most boring and uninteresting entries in the franchises' 50+ year history. James Bond goes rouge to stop a sinister organization from becoming Big Brother on steroids and face its leader whom he shares a past with Her Majesty's most trusted servant, but the revelations dished out are stuff you could easily gues...

For good or bad, for better or for worse, director J.J. Abrams loves taking Sgt. Dignam's theory on federal agents and applying it to...well, everyone else in the film world: casual moviegoers, fans, critics, movie news sites; hell, probably even with family and friends who aren't involved in Abrams' group-knit circle for whatever movie he's making. In the case of Star Wars: The Force Awakens , I didn't think for a moment the filmmaker would have been able to keep such a tight lid on the project; I thought after the flack he took for his handling of the John Harrison character ( spoiler alert: it's really Khan) in Star Trek Into Darkness , the man would not play that game with the Star Wars sequel trilogy, and let leak some hints about what's in store for audiences. Up until the world premier in Los Angles tonight? Nothing. Nada. The big goose egg. Zilch. We haven't seen one review of The Force Awakens , despite the norm that a film like this would ...

I've made a grave mistake. Not doing Halloween Horror Week back in October; no, that's been really fun. I got myself better acquainted with the work of Wes Craven, re-discovered that Tim Burton is a great director when given the right material to work with, realized that I don't really need to go past Saw III to understand that the rest of the series is a seemingly lazy exercise in offering the audience nothing by more torture and grizzly, pointless violence, and that I'd love to see Jessica Chastain in more horror movies. But when it came to the last movie on this list that I chose to watch, I had much better options.  I could have reviewed Halloween: The Revenge of Michael Myers . Sure, it's probably same movie John Carpenter made back in 1978, but hey - an early Paul Rudd would have a few wisecracks thrown in there, right? I could have done Vampire in Brooklyn , but I had already covered New Nightmare , so covering two Craven movies didn't really sou...

I didn't care much for Paul Schrader's erotic drama The Canyons , but I did enjoy the performance of adult film star James Deen as Christian. He's this charismatic and charming guy who has it all - a career financing indie pictures, a lovely girlfriend (Lindsay Lohan, also doing good work in this movie), and a sex life that most men only dream of having. And yet, as we go further into he story, we discover that it's all a mask to hide his controlling, abusive and borderline sado-masochistic tendencies. It's a surprising and solid piece of acting as this seemingly suave guy slowly being unraveled until we encounter the real Christian. In a scary twist of irony, the performance by Deen now rings all too true with his character's unraveling, as the famed porn actor has now been accused of sexual assault and rape this past few weeks. James Deen held me down and fucked me while I said no, stop, used my safeword. I just can't nod and smile when people bring ...

And so, the Oscar race has officially begun, with the Nation Board of Review's annual best of list, applauding and honoring the creme de la creme in film for 2015. I definitely didn't expect to see films like Sicario  and Straight Outta Compton  to be on their list of the 10 best movies of the year, so big brownie points to them for their inclusion. Drew Goddard winning Best Adapted Screenplay was a shock, and well-deserved for taking the source material and creating a funny, exciting script where Matt Damon "has to science the shit" out of being stuck on an unforgiving planet like Mars after being marooned by mistake by his fellow astronauts. I think The Martian  is easily Ridley Scott's best and most enjoyable film in years (yes, I'm taking into account that I liked Prometheus ) , and it's fun to see the director this playful, though I think Damon winning Best Actor and Scott taking Best Director is a bit of a stretch. But then came the pick for Bes...