rated PG

There are some pills that make you bigger and some that make you small, but there are just as many that don’t do anything at all. You can include Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” among that last group.

a.k.a. ‘Savage Dawn’
HCI International, 1983

Of all the warriors wandering in search of water and other precious resources, none are stronger than Stryker (Sandor), a battle-tested veteran who escaped the clutches of Kardis (Lane), a cruel warlord who’ll stop at nothing to find a legendary spring.

area group encourages potential buyers of The Strand to keep it an independent theater

Dover resident Janine Auger created a Facebook page in support of The Strand in late February. Auger had no idea what kind of response she would receive. Much to her surprise, 500 people signed up as members in the first day and a half. In two weeks, that number swelled to 1,300.

rated R

First, the murderous drooling slobs in “The Crazies” are not zombies, OK? They’re crazies. There’s a difference.

MC Productions, 1984

The usual suspects are at play in ‘Satan’s Blade’: bad synth music, worse effects, and really terrible acting, all tied together with a vague plot about a gussied-up knife.

rated R

It’s apt that “Shutter Island,” a pulpy thriller directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, opens on a ferry, where DiCaprio is battling a raging bout of seasickness. He’s trembling, unsteady on his feet, and his Boston accent sounds as unsettled and tenuous as the contents of his stomach. That accent doesn’t get any better, but eventually Scorsese takes command and delivers a thriller that, though imperfect, is luridly fun.

Omega Cinema Productions, 1982

Elaine’s business venture as the new owner of "Honeymoon Island" goes awry as soon as the three couples venture onto the resort. In no time at all, bodies begin to pile up, but the county’s bumbling sheriff spends his days eating, smoking cigars and adamantly refusing to investigate the goings on.

rated R

Tales of civilized people struggling to reconcile themselves with their beastlier impulses have been prowling the tree-line of rational thought since, well, the dawn of rational thought. This week, the ritual carries on with “The Wolfman,” directed by Lucas/Spielberg protégé Joe Johnston.

Cohen, 1982

Even the afterlife must get dull for Japanese samurai ghosts after almost 150 years, but that’s no reason for three spirits to act like they’re stuck in some sort of unbearable committee meeting.

rated R

In “Crazy Heart,” Bad Blake, a former country music legend turned broken-down workhorse, carries the wounds that come from life on the road in his guitar case and on stooped shoulders. Those bruises surface whenever he picks up his guitar, but they bloom most brightly when he’s offstage, drunkenly stumbling through his house or puking behind a bowling alley.

Warner Bros., 1973

It’s been a year since producer Clinton Green’s wife, Sheila, was killed in a hit-and-run accident after a lavish party. Sheila always loved to play games, and so Clinton has devised a game of his own: he’s invited six friends aboard his yacht (named after his dead wife) for a week-long mystery game.

Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour takes viewers through remote landscapes and cultures, from Mongolia to Africa to Pakistan, and it's coming to Durham to benefit Avis Goodwin Health Center.

rated R

As directed by John Hillcoat (responsible previously for the grisly Outback western “The Proposition”), the screen adaptation of McCarthy’s novel cleaves mercilessly close to the original text. The brutally austere story of a man and his boy hardscrabbling their way to a distant sea on bag-wrapped foot across a blasted, collapsing (and decidedly American) landscape unfolds with a hushed, pensive deliberation.

a.k.a. ‘La venganza del sexo’
Productores Argentinos Asociados, 1967

This Valentine’s Day, why not treat your date to a showing of “The Curious Dr. Humpp?” Of course, make sure your date loves retro-sleaze and doesn’t mind bad dubbing and naked hippies.

MGM, 1984

Since we did end up with a sequel to “2001,” we should be grateful that it’s “2010,” a smart, engaging bit of sci-fi that focuses more on concrete human needs (namely, survival, but also the need for answers in the face of big questions, both moral and scientific) than questions about the evolution of the mind.

can Seacoast residents be like 'No Impact Man'? 

As captured in this documentary, Colin Beavan’s environmental experiment quickly becomes a test of how much his wife is willing to sacrifice for him. Seacoast residents are increasingly willing to attempt such lifestyle changes themselves, at least to some degree.

rated R

The good Brothers Hughes, having demonstrated some fairly sophisticated taste in comic booky diversions with their underrated adaptation of Alan Moore’s “From Hell,” pull out all the stops to illustrate their vision of a lone preacher in a desolate wasteland, defending the downtrodden and generally doing unto others, mostly for worse than for better, as they would do unto him.

Scorpio Film Releasing, 2009

After she punches and kicks her way through her sleepy convent, Sister Kelly is sent to another convent for punishment, but before she can get there, she’s gunned down in an alley—by some fellow nuns. Featuring saloons, sawed-off shotguns and heaven as a swank dance club, “Nun of That” is pretty much non-stop hilarious, so unless you’ve taken a vow against fun, it’s a must watch.

rated R

“Daybreakers” promises so much: visceral vampire action, clever world building, and a thoughtful tweak on the vampire mythos, all wrapped in an allegory about dwindling natural resources.

ARS Nova, 2009

Black Dynamite (White) is the baddest mutha around, and everyone—from the kids down at the orphanage and the pimps in the street to the pandering politicians and local militant groups—knows it.

Tales from the Video Vault

Dan O’Bannon worked with big-name directors like James Cameron and John Carpenter, but he dwelled in the shadows of genre filmmaking and is, in a way, responsible for a good chunk of the modern landscape of sci-fi and horror filmmaking. O’Bannon did it all, from aliens to zombies to space vampires.

Twelve years after the colossal crossover mega-hit “Titanic,” director James Cameron has returned to blockbuster moviemaking with a gorgeous 3D sci-fantasy super-adventure. Who doesn’t want to ride a dragon and date a blue girl? Sold!

Tales from the Video Vault

In the struggle against eldritch spirits that thirst for revenge, a big electric typewriter is essential.

movie review

It's been many years since the groundbreaking, Oscar-winning successes of “The Little Mermaid,” “The Lion King” and “Aladdin,” and Disney’s cookie cutter has gotten mighty dull. But if there’s anything 2009 has taught animation aficionados, it’s that even amid all the whiz-bang-kaboom all the new tools might afford, there’s still nothing wrong with a little oldfangled flash. There may be no better choice to control-alt-delete the medium than the classic fairy tale story of “The Princess and the Frog.”

movie review

Consider the armored truck: a civilan vehicle built like a tank, driven by armed men who aren’t police. It’s kind of neat, when you think about it—there are probably all sorts of cool secret things about armored trucks that would make great fodder for a movie, psychological insights to be made into the minds of their high-powered rent-a-cop crews, and possibly even fun new stunts that could be done with these hardcore vehicles.

Tales from the Video Vault

A priest's suicide has cracked the barrier between the world of the living and the dead—a crack that will become permanent within three days. A psychic medium and a journalist pair up in a mad race to destroy the priest’s re-animated corpse before the world is consumed by a host of supernatural fiends.

Tales from the Video Vault

“Equinox” started as a student film project by Dennis Muren, now known for his special effects work on most of the sci-fi blockbusters from the 1970s through the ’90s, including the “Star Wars” trilogy, “E.T.” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” In "Equinox," Muren’s miniatures include a collection of winged devils, flailing tentacles and angry ape-men.

movie review

The first thing you’ll notice in Wes Anderson’s (“Rushmore,” “The Royal Tenebaums”) latest romp through the woods of precocious morality and parental malfunction is the jarring, positively antiquated “on the twos” stop-motion animation. The second thing you’ll notice is that it really works.

Films Concorde, 1978
starring: Bo Svenson, Fred Williamson, Peter Hooten and Ian Bannen
directed by: Enzo Castellari

In Philip K. Dick’s novel “The Man in the High Castle,” a chronicle of an alternate history of World War II in which the Axis has won the war and Germany and Japan have conquered America, there’s a great moment when the characters glimpse, very briefly, another world (that is to say, our world) in which the Nazis actually lost. Director Quentin Tarantino has a similar scene in “Inglourious Basterds,” his own fractured fairy tale version of WWII. The coolly malevolent SS Col. Hans Landa (played with careful, manicured aplomb by Christoph Waltz) tells his longtime adversary, Lt. Aldo “The Apache” Raine (Brad Pitt) of how the hand of fate can reach out and change history. Landa knows history is about to change, but not in the way, he seems to sense, it’s meant to.

Dick Clark Productions, 1968
starring: Susan Strasberg, Jack Nicholson, Dean Stockwell and Bruce Dern
directed by: Richard Rush

the plot: In 1960s San Francisco, Jenny Davis (Strasberg), a young deaf girl, arrives in Haight-Ashbury looking for her brother, Steve (Dern). Jenny is immediately thrown into the thick of the city’s hippie enclave courtesy of Stoney (Nicholson), the front man for Mumblin’ Jim, a struggling psychedelic band. The only clue Jenny has to her brother’s whereabouts is a cryptic postcard that says, “JESS SAES,” and while Stoney and his bandmates help Jenny search for her brother, the fuzz is in hot pursuit of Jenny, who ran away from home. In order to help find Steve, Stoney turns to Dave (Stockwell), a former member of Mumblin’ Jim who now spends his days dropping acid, staring at a crystal and spouting wisdom. As Jenny’s search continues, she learns free love and easy drugs carry a hefty price.

Imagine if Franz Kafka had thought to give Gregor a splatter-blast ray-gun. Or if Speilberg had equipped Schindler with a mechanized bio-suit capable of hurling trucks across town. Picture the favela slums of Fernando Meirelles’ “City of God” populated with filthy eight-foot-tall bipedal lobsters. If Paul Verhoeven grew a conscience. If David Cronenberg bought a computer. If Michael Moore had directed “Starship Troopers.” We’re closing in on “District 9.”

Films 75, 1978
starring: Susana Kamini, Tina Romero, David Silva and Claudio Brook
directed by: Juan Lopez Moctezuma

In order to keep the 1980s animated incarnation of “G.I. Joe” from becoming a 30-minute toy commercial, TV producers tacked on a short moral message or useful life-skills tip (don’t take drugs, stay away from downed power lines, etc.) at the end of every episode. These clips made “G.I. Joe” into a 27-minute toy commercial and supplied the franchise with its memorable tag line, “Knowing is half the battle.” If knowing still is, in fact, half the battle—and it may be, despite former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s claims that it’s actually a third of the battle, along with things unknown and the ever-elusive “unknown unknowns”—then there are a few things you should know before settling in to watch the summertime explosion-fest that is “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.”

Arkham Northwest Productions, 2007
starring: Jason Cottle, Scott Patrick Green, Dennis Kleinsmith and Richard Garfield
directed by: Dan Gildark

U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Will James defuses bombs like some people smoke cigarettes. Replacing Bravo Company’s bomb disposal unit’s recently exploded commander in Baghdad in their last month before rotation back to the States, James’ cavalier, even reckless indifference to safety protocol, and indeed his own mortality, renders him possibly more dangerous than the IEDs he’s charged with disarming.

Strolling out each day to shake the reaper’s hand, he exhibits all the anxiety of a man fetching his morning paper. Seeing him work the twists of wires and switches and detonators, one gets the impression that back home he could probably install you a thumpin’ car stereo, though it might just be as aback-taking to discover your stereo tech has exactly no fear of death. Picture a man standing on the edge, looking into the abyss, and shrugging. His unit—by all indication, otherwise a tight, well-oiled component of the U.S. war machine—is justifiably terrified.

A nice whitebread Connecticut couple (Vera Farmiga, Peter Sarsgaard), grieved by the pre-term loss of their third baby and beset by the nagging alcoholism and abject failure of the mom in almost every mom-ish category, attempts to rebalance their lives by taking in a wayward ward.

Visiting the local orphanarium, they find themselves drawn to a dark little sheep, a 9-year-old Estonian prodigy (little cutiepie Isabelle Fuhrman) left parentless after a tragic (and not at all suspicious) fire consumed her previous home.

Almena Films, 1982
starring: Christopher George, Lynda Day George, Edmund Purdom and Ian Sera
directed by: Juan Piquer

rated R

Director Michael Mann (“Heat,” “Last of the Mohicans”)  has said that his driving goal with “Public Enemies” was not to tell a story about the 1930s, but to actually recreate the experience of living in them. It was an era of fantastic innovation. Automobiles were just learning to roar, commercial air travel was only in its fourth year, long distance phone lines were still being wired across the windblown dustbowl. As magazines and moving pictures presented the nation with its first real collective cultural understanding, America itself walked the wild lands of frontiers sociological, political and technological. As history (or at least the history of the movies) would arguably bear out, frontiers breed the best outlaws. And along comes Johnny: Last American Gunslinger.

A born-and-bred whiskey-fed troublemaker from the Wild Wild Mid-West, John Dillinger earned his first prison term at 21 for knocking over a corner grocery store in his Indiana hometown. The $50 haul won him eight and a half years in a cold cell with a bona fide criminal mastermind—Walter Deitrich. Deitrich had made it his life’s work to perfect the art of bank robbery as small unit military combat.

Sub Rosa brings back drive-in theater

Audience members may have felt much like the fugitive teenagers they were watching on the makeshift screen. More than a dozen vehicles congregated under the shroud of darkness at a secret location to view a guerilla screening of the classic 1984 action flick “Red Dawn.” As Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen and the rest of the “Wolverines” hid out in the hills of Colorado to resist a dreaded communist takeover, a covert group of moviegoers hid out behind the Bed, Bath and Beyond building to enjoy an old-fashioned drive-in movie.

Yes, it is now safe to reveal the secret location of the second installment of the Sub Rosa Drive-In. That’s because the guerilla theater group will not be returning to that spot for its next clandestine operation. The viewing of “Red Dawn” was cut short by a combination of technical difficulties and an unexpected visit from the Rollinsford Police Department. Still, the film zealots behind Sub Rosa plan to forge ahead with a screening of “The Warriors” at a new secret location on Friday, July 17.

108 Sound Studio, 1988
starring: Barbara Anne Constable, Christopher J. Hart and Claudia Angelique Rademaker
written and directed by: H. Tjut Djalil (Jalil Jackson)

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is the most American movie ever. To be more specific, it’s an expensively, maybe even carefully constructed meta-prank about America, pop culture and other topics best left unaddressed by giant talking robots. “Revenge” can only be a goof. That it would make a boatload of money was a given, and with that goal out of the way, director Michael Bay, stars Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox and the rest of the people responsible for this travesty must have had some other endgame in mind. Laughing with and at everything that is great and stupid about modern life in America seems as reasonable an explanation as anything presented in the movie, though that’s damning with faint praise indeed.

Just because a movie is stupid, doesn’t necessarily mean it has to suck. A good number of writer/director Harold Ramis’ previous jaunts, like “Caddyshack,” “Meatballs” and “Animal House,” stand as exceptional examples of how mightily low brow concepts can yield some surprisingly high test laughs. If, as they say, exceptions prove the rule, this may be the only angle from which to qualify Rami’s latest, “Year One,” as ruling in any way. ‘Cause wow, is it stupid, and damn, does it suck.

Plainly attempting to tap into the spirits of the far superior efforts of Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” and Mel Brooks’ “History of the World, Part 1,” this haphazard, disjointed blunder through prehistory would more aptly be associated with Dudley Moore’s “Wholly Moses” or maybe Ringo Star’s “Cave Man.” Truth be told, to even bother making the comparison is an insult to them both. Think about that.

The subway is the fastest way to get around New York City, a fact that’s noted more than a few times in Tony Scott’s “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3,” a bland retread of the 1974 heist flick of the same name. The subway system is the city’s circulatory system and so long as the trains keep running, the city remains alive. Messing with something so important by, say, hijacking a subway car full of people would typically invite a sense of urgency, but everyone in “Pelham,” from the city employees tasked with saving the day down to the hijackers themselves, move along as though it’s no big thing. It’s a fine attitude to have when dealing with a crisis, maybe, but it’s the kiss of death for what should be a taut summer thriller.

It’s a fitting project, then, for director Tony Scott, who most likely regards being described as “all flash and no substance” as a wicked compliment. “Pelham” tries to sex up the relatively un-sexy world of municipal transportation management, pitting train dispatcher Walter Garber (Denzel Washington) against a train hijacker known only as Ryder (John Travolta). Stuck behind a desk in a high-tech command center, Garber is the only city employee Ryder will talk to during the hostage situation, which Ryder hopes to parlay into a $10 million ransom within the hour.

Leave it to the vision masters at Pixar to take a fairly grim sounding story about a cantankerous old widower staring down his fading years and turn it into a charming, buoyant, life affirming piece of entertainment for all ages.

Carl Fredrickson is introduced in the opening credits as a blocky little post-depression-era ragamuffin, hopped up on Saturday morning serials and news reels depicting the exploits of his hero, the intrepid archeologist/pilot/explorer Charles Muntz. Skipping home from the picture house, balloon in hand, sidewalk cracks become Grand Canyons and tree stumps the peaks of the Himalayas. Happening upon a plucky young lady of like imagination in an abandoned old ramshackle house she’s turned into a rickety model of Muntz’s famously posh airship “The Spirit of Adventure,” Carl finds his first friend, his true love and, as an ensuing (and positively sublime) 10-minute montage illustrates, a partner with whom he shares a wonderful and joyful, if domesticated, life.

Remember Omar Sharif’s marathon entrance in “Lawrence of Arabia”? First appearing as a tiny black speck on the distant desert horizon, he slowly, relentlessly grows in the frame to come barreling gloriously up on horseback, practically crashing through the camera lens. On a TV, that speck is initially so miniscule that it’s virtually invisible for the first half of the scene, rendering the shot more than a little confusing, and completely wrecking what otherwise was one of cinema’s most audacious reveals.

Music Hall film programmer Bill Pence laughs. “That’s the first movie everyone brings up when we talk about this series,” he says, referring to The Music Hall’s summer-long “Scope!” program. The series features classic films that beg to be seen on a really big screen each Wednesday through the first week of September.

“Drag Me To Hell” may just be the movie Sam Raimi has been waiting his whole career to make. Raimi is one of those directors who has vision to spare, with an off-kilter visual aesthetic and an expert understanding of how terror and comedy so often overlap. But he’s always been forced to make concessions, whether due to budget limitations, studio pressure or both. That’s why, as awesome as “The Evil Dead” is, it still feels like a rough draft when compared to “Evil Dead II,” and why other Raimi classics like “Darkman” and “Army of Darkness” are almost-but-not-quite what the director had in mind. 

the plot: As a young girl, Lucie (Jampanoi) was kidnapped and abused. After making a daring escape, she found a home at a children’s orphanage, where she befriended Anna (Alaoui). Fifteen years later, Lucie identifies her tormentors in a newspaper photo. Her alleged captors turn out to be a nice suburban family, but that doesn’t stop Lucie from exacting bloody revenge. Anna becomes her unwilling accomplice and the two soon discover that Lucie’s ordeal was not a random act. While Lucie’s stroke of vengeance has allowed her to close a painful chapter of her life, Anna finds that her own ordeal is just beginning.

If ever a movie was optimized to force a “Mystery Science Theater 3000” reunion, this is it. Starting on page one with its pretentiously oxymoronic title, every single word of the fractured, overwrought screenplay simply begs to be ridiculed. Much more like a randomly drawn series of movie poster tag lines than actual discourse, it doesn’t help matters either that every line is delivered with distinct and often multiple exclamation points.

The writing team of John Brancato and Michael Ferris, whose dubious track record includes the underwhelming previous “Terminator” episode “Rise of the Machines” and the universally loathed “Catwoman,” do take a couple of courageous shots at furthering the temporally tangled mythos of the “Terminator” universe, in which the human race and the family of its eventual leader John Connor (once played by punky Edward Furlong, then weasely Nick Stahl, now by hotheaded Hollywood it-actor Christian Bale) persistently resist eradication at the hands of uppity time-skipping killborgs along an erratically variable series of timelines.

rated PG-13

After almost a decade of conservative Christianity dominating America’s social and political landscape, it feels like the never-ending debate between science and religion is finally entering a cooling-off period. But just like its protagonist, Harvard symbology professor Robert Langdon, “Angels & Demons” rushes in just as the party is wrapping up, ready to breathlessly opine on the tenacity of faith and the power of science. Except, of course, “Angels & Demons” is a summer thriller, and so these central ideas that ignite the plot have about the same weight as a crossword puzzle where all the across clues are about the pope and all the down clues are about particle physics. After that, all that’s left is for “Angels & Demons” to be thrilling, which it accomplishes just well enough to be entertaining.

Lucasfilm, 1986
starring: Lea Thompson, Tim Robbins, Jeffrey Jones, Ed Gale and Chip Zien
directed by: Willard Huyck

Identity rolls out local skateboarding film

An enthusiastic crowd of 250 people visited The Music Hall in Portsmouth this weekend for the premiere of “Slackers,” a local skateboarding film produced by Identity Footwear and Apparel on Congress Street.

The title pays tribute to the skateboard shop formerly on Market Street, where Identity’s co-owner Matt Jagman used to work, and to Slacker’s former owner Perry Silverstein, who has been supportive of the new shop. The lightning bolt, heavy metal-influenced font used on the video was designed by Jagman years ago, but he admits he had little to do with the film production.

Will Jackson, who celebrated his 20th birthday at the premiere on Saturday, directed the film, and Noel Gutierrez edited it. Both are local skateboarders and Jackson is more or less a manager at Identity, while Gutierrez is looking for more filming work.

Co-owner Chris Rice said the title of the film also reflects the lackadaisical nature of the kids involved, since they missed their original deadline. But the finished product gives an opposite impression. It is impressive.

a.k.a., ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Killer Kane’
Ninth Configuration, 1980
starring: Stacy Keach, Scott Wilson, Ed Flanders and Neville Brand
written and directed by: William Peter Blatty

rated PG-13

Since he joined the X-Men in the mid-1970s, the clawed Canadian mutant brawler Wolverine has always claimed to be “the best there is at what I do, but what I do isn’t very nice.” For most of Wolverine’s comic book escapades, it wasn’t really clear what he did, apart from kick ass, smoke cigars and grow epic facial hair. The character’s origins were kept shadowy, with vague hints that Wolverine (known only as “Logan” when not in costume) had done everything from fighting in World War II alongside Captain America to becoming a ninja in Japan. As new writers took on the character, Wolverine’s past got increasingly confusing, but his core elements—a life marked by tragedy, betrayal and rage, augmented with uncanny healing abilities and an unbreakable skeleton—remained the same.

potential buyer and two films aim to preserve Ioka Theater

There may be more movies in store for Ioka Theater after all. 

The theater with the “always a good show” slogan has not screened a film since Christmas Eve, 2008, when it closed for financial reasons after 93 years of operation. But the historic landmark in downtown Exeter has since inspired two films about it and one last opportunity to save it.

Producer Marc Murai has entered in an intent-to-purchase agreement with the Ioka’s owner in hopes of revitalizing the theater with community contributions. He plans to film his efforts as a resource for other cultural centers.

A former theater employee, Kyle Glowacky, from Brentwood, has been working on his own documentary film to help preserve the theater, called “Ioka,” for his senior thesis at Emerson College. 

rated PG-13

By all accounts, in real life, Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless, schizophrenic Julliard dropout, and Steve Lopez, the L.A. Times journalist who wrote about him and got him off the streets, developed a real friendship. It’s a little disconcerting that there’s so little evidence of this in the screen version of their journey.

Paragon Arts International, 1986
starring: Tawny Kitaen, Todd Allen, Stephen Nichols and J.P. Luebsen
written and directed by: Kevin Tenney

rated R

It took a little more than a decade, but someone finally did it: the Internet has been made into a movie. That movie is “Crank: High Voltage,” a hyper-kinetic mash-up of the all the sex, violence, casual racism, stupid humor, cameos by washed up celebrities, video games and sick videos that collect like artery-clogging sludge in the series of tubes that make up the Internet. It’s a cinematic endurance test and quite possibly a harbinger of the next generation of B movies. “High Voltage” is a movie meant to be consumed, not pondered, and thinking too much about it is about as useful as thinking about a can of Monster Energy Drink.

After all the workdone recently in comedy to deconstruct traditional male roles in movies and redefine the hairier gender as pasty ineffectual schlubs, It’s interesting how quickly the pendulum swinging back to reassert the baser, predatory and combative elements of masculinity (see “Tropic Thunder” and “Pineapple Express”). Seth Rogan, who’s ubiquity onscreen could lead one to believe he might be the only lead actor working in contemporary comedy, has quite effectively staked his claim as the contemporary king of Pasty Schlub Mountain. But lately, he seems to be aggressively attempting to trade the laconically wisecracking fuzzy bear image he’s made such bank on for a far more bitter, bloodier, brutish version.

Columbia Pictures, 1978

starring: Faye Dunaway, Tommy Lee Jones, Brad Dourif and Rene Auberjonois
directed by: Irvin Kershner 

rated R

There are few cinematic meet-cutes that involve dissecting the dynamics of a guy who tries to sneak out a fart in front of his new girlfriend, but that’s exactly how Peter Klaven and Sydney Fife meet in “I Love You, Man.” In this case, Sydney is not a cute, perky blonde but a shambling, scruffy guy sent by fate to instruct Peter on the ways of being a dude. It turns out that a budding bromance is a lot funnier than any romantic courtship, and while “I Love You, Man” is plenty funny, it’s always at odds with the romantic comedy tropes it tries to both adhere to and subvert.

Carolco Pictures, 1989
starring: Peter Berg, Michael Murphy, Camille Cooper and Mitch Pileggi
written and directed by: Wes Craven

The ninth annual New Hampshire Film Festival will take place from Oct. 15 to 18 in downtown Portsmouth. Festival organizers have opened a call to filmmakers from around the world to submit their work, and many entries have already arrived.  

Submissions are accepted in the categories of feature narrative, feature documentary, short comedy, short drama, short documentary, student, animation and screenplay. A panel of judges will select films for acceptance. The festival will announce prizes and juries during the coming months as other details are finalized. Past prizes have included cash, software and equipment.

Sigma Productions, 1968
starring: Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Alexandra Hay and Groucho Marx
directed by: Otto Preminger

When “Watchmen” was first published in 1985, it was a revelation, a striking piece of sequential art that pushed superhero comics out of the realm of cheap entertainment and into the realm of literature. There had always been comics for grownups, but “Watchmen” marked the first time members of the capes ’n’ tights crowd were treated with gravity and humanity. The reverberations from “Watchmen,” written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, continue to be felt, and almost every superhero comic since then owes some debt to “Watchmen.”

the never-ending heartbreak of scifi television

(warning: spoileriffic)

The rebirth of the “Battlestar Galactica” television series in 2003 was unexpectedly brilliant: where the original 1978 series was a hokey (if fondly remembered) Star Wars ripoff, the new series was a full-on reboot of the show, with tight writing, a gritty look and a wonderful long-term story arc. Starbuck had become a girl, the president was a schoolteacher, Adama had turned into Edward James Olmos and the Cylons looked like people and were kind of Christian.

Scifi fans embraced the show, and the promise that it would have a finite 5-season run with an actual planned end to the storyline only made them more ravenous—it turns out that people really love a story that actually makes sense, and doesn’t just wander from week to week and then end, as TV so often does.

Orion Pictures, 1987
starring: Martin Sheen, Helen Shaver, Harley Cross and Robert Loggia
directed by: John Schlesinger

rated R

Imagine the “The X-Files” if instead of aliens Mulder and Scully were tracking down bankers. Let’s face it, bankers tend to be pretty dull. A characteristically level headed and pragmatic lot, they skew to the mundane at their worst, however nefarious their transactions may be. What few thrills are offered in this account of an obsessive, embittered Interpol agent (Clive Owen) and his feisty N.Y. assistant DA sidekick (Naomi Watts) hot on the trail of a shadowy multinational financial conspiracy are relentlessly eclipsed by a preponderance of dudes in gray suits sitting around talking at each other.

Paramount Television, 1987
starring: Louise Robey, Chris Wiggins, John D. LeMay and R.G. Armstrong
directed by: William Fruet

When Sean S. Cunningham began work on the original “Friday the 13th” almost 30 years ago, he had nothing more than a title and a vague idea about making a horror film in the vein of John Carpenter’s ultra-successful “Halloween.” In the intervening three decades, “Friday” became one of the most profitable horror franchises ever, and Jason Voorhees, the machete-wielding killer who loves hockey masks and hates campers, became a movie icon, spawning 10 sequels, dozens of comic books and novels, and even a video game. Jason’s been everywhere from Manhattan and Camp Crystal Lake—his home turf and the site of his many crimes against morally-bankrupt summer visitors—to the reaches of outer space and, appropriately enough, Hell.

Banff Festival goes big

Back for its 13th year, the Banff Mountain Film Festival hosted by Avis Goodwin Community Health Center is going bigger this year on Wednesday, Feb. 18 from 7 to 10:30 p.m.      

The festival is an international film competition featuring some of the world’s best footage of mountain and extreme sports. It began in 1976 and is held annually on the first weekend in November in Banff, Alberta, Canada. Afterward, a selection of the top films goes on tour with about 500 screenings worldwide.

This year, the tour stops at the Whittemore Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, allowing for more parking and seating than the previous location of The Music Hall in Portsmouth. Carleen Nicholson, of Avis Goodwin, said the festival consistently sold out when held at The Music Hall. The event is the non-profit healthcare center’s largest fundraiser.

April Films, 1989
starring:  Jill Schoelen, Brad Pitt, Donovan Leitch and Martin Mull
directed by: Rospo Pallenberg

Celebrating vision, craft, resourcefulness and courage in story, theme and execution, Henry “Nightmare Before Christmas” Selick’s latest stop motion scary-tale—based on Newberry Award winner Neil Gaiman’s book—is the first hand-animated feature ever to be made specifically for 3D. And “Coraline” is nothing short of a storytelling victory.

As an only child recently transplanted to a dreary old manse in the foggy hills of Oregon, our young heroine (voiced by the ever plucky Dakota Fanning) has lost all her friends and finds herself looking for something, anything, to do. Her workaholic parents, employing a disheartening policy of benign neglect, leave her also searching for someone, anyone, who might listen to a thing she says.

Rattling around her family’s rambling apartment trying to entertain herself, she discovers a curious little door. Papered over and locked shut, it’s a clear invitation to mystery and adventure. Naturally, she finds the key, opens it up, and boldly crawls directly in.

concerned citizens turn amateur filmmakers

A true example of small town activism, the film “The Squamscott River: Exeter’s Connection to the Sea,” is the creative result of local collaboration to protect a natural resource. The film will be screened for the public at Exeter High School on Wednesday, Feb. 4. 

The idea for the film began about a year ago, when Michael Lambert of Exeter attended a town land-use meeting involving development options that posed harmful consequences to the Squamscott River. Only 15 rivers in New Hampshire are protected by the state’s department of environmental resources, a short list that does not include the Squamscott but does list three other Stafford and Rockingham county rivers: the Lamprey, the Isinglass and the Exeter. Lambert feared that unless community members begin to recognize the Squamscott’s value, the six-mile stretch of tidal water will remain unprotected. He decided it was time for lights, camera and action.

It’s hard not to imagine what might have been had “Taken” fully embraced its pulp fiction roots. Might shameless marketers, capitalizing on Liam Neeson’s role as a ruthless assassin turned vengeful father, have dubbed it “Schindler’s Revenge” in a fit of bad taste? Would the violence and spy games have been upped in order to appeal to fans of the Bourne and James Bond franchises and lovers of graphic violence? It’s hard to say, as “Taken” aims squarely for the middle, a slice of bitter pulp dressed up slightly to appeal to a wider audience. 

As it is, “Taken” is an enjoyable popcorn flick, mostly without pretense and only occasionally making stabs at being above average. It’s forgettable but fun, though most of that fun comes from watching Neeson shoot, stab and punch his way through various ethnic groups and social classes in Paris with amazing efficiency.

The good news about the “Underworld” series, in which a mangy army of werewolves presses a millennium-spanning blood feud against their heretofore vampire slave masters, is that there’s not a hell of a lot that could be done to ruin it. Len Wiseman, who puked out the first installments like two fat hunks of greasy blue cheese, now hands the saber for the third, a prequel, over to his creature designer.

If anyone deserves a “break” like this one, it’s Patrick Tatopoulos. He’s paid his dues in the credit roll’s third act for years, and his resume reads like the map of a movie geek’s heart.  He’s been working in and around the art and special effects departments of some of the most respected crappy movies made in the last 20 years. “Pitch Black,” “Resident Evil,” “I, Robot,” “I Am Legend,” even the recently buried, much sought after Halloween anthology “Trick ’R Treat” all bear the mark of his design and effects work. He’s done zombies, aliens, robots, serial killers, video game characters, serial killing video game characters ... he even designed Emerich’s “Godzilla” for cryin’ out loud. The man knows monsters.

Full Moon Entertainment, 2005
starring: Robin Sydney, Ryan Locke, Larry Cedar and Gary Busey
directed by: Charles Band

Levins-Henenlotter, 1990

rated R

There is a cardinal rule at play in “My Bloody Valentine 3-D” that movie studios should remember, and it is this: 3-D gore and explosions are always cool. “Valentine” is a gimmick movie where the gimmick is more fun, and better executed, than the movie itself, and it’s for this reason alone that “Valentine” is worth seeing. It’s a love letter to two bygone eras of movies. As a descendant of the novelty flicks of the 1950s and ’60s, it’s great fun; as a retread of the worst clichés of the slasher genre of the 1980s, it’s fairly awful. Luckily for “Valentine,” it’s the experience that matters most. 

“Valentine” is a remake of a 1981 Canadian slasher film of the same name, and, as far as remakes go, the added dimension, complete with popped-out eyeballs and giant bursts of flame, is what makes it so watchable. That “Valentine” is a complete throwback to early-’80s horror fare is not necessarily a good thing. After all, most of the “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th” clones that flooded theaters and video stores back then were atrocious.

If anyone was paying even the remotest attention to little Oskar, they might notice that he’s developing some troubling proclivities. Though more perceptive, well read and unassuming than your average 12-year-old, the closest he ever gets to social interaction is the daily torments he silently endures at the hands of schoolyard hooligans. At home, he steals newspapers from his single mom to populate a scrapbook of obituaries and clippings concerning dreadful murders. He secretly carries a hunting knife around with him wherever he goes, occasionally caressing it when he thinks no one is looking. If these weren’t Columbiney enough behaviors to entreat a little dialogue (or psychotherapy), he frequently also can be found prowling the frozen courtyard of his dismal Swedish tenement alone after dark, stabbing at trees with all his scrawny, miserable might.

Frank Miller was one of the handful of creators who helped revolutionize comics and graphic novels in the 1980s. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that two of Miller’s creations, “Sin City” and “300,” made the jump from page to screen and brought in big box office returns. On the strength of those two features (directed by Robert Rodriguez and Zach Snyder, respectively), Miller landed a directing gig of his own—an adaptation of “The Spirit,” a comic series created by pioneering writer/artist Will Eisner in the 1940s that’s still kicking around today. Eisner, who passed away in 2005, was one of Miller’s mentors, and pairing “The Spirit” with Miller seemed like a safe, logical choice.

author chronicles Hollywood’s rocky battle between advancement and the status quo

The rise of Pixar Animation is a story of monumental success or blown opportunities, depending on who you ask. For George Lucas, who hired Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull to work in the computer division of Lucasfilm back in 1979, Pixar clearly represents what could have been. For Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who bought the computer division of Lucasfilm in 1986 and turned it into Pixar, the company represents the value of foresight and innovation.

Jobs took Pixar off Lucas’ hands for $10 million—not a modest sum by most standards, but pocket change compared to the $7.4 billion the Walt Disney Co. spent to purchase Pixar 20 years later, making Jobs a Disney board member.