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Carrying the torch for Brazilian cinema and then running ten miles with it, lugging it into the new century, Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund’s epic masterpiece, City Of God, still stands as one of the best films of the 21st century so far. Picking up the torch from Hector Babenco’s 1981 film, Pixote, another film about children in Brazil’s crime-ridden ghettos, City Of God deserves ranking with the best of epic crime cinema. A shallow, but apt comparison may be a kiddie Godfellas with the razzmatazz style of Boogie Nights.

Based on a novel by Paulo Lins, spanning from the '60s through the early '80s, City Of God tells the story of the drug wars in the urban sprawl around Rio de Janeiro. Apparently based on the real life story of a Brazilian photographer named Wilson Rodriguez - here renamed Rocket (and acted well by Alexandre Rodrigues) - the story moves back and forth in time as we follow Rocket and the different young people he gets involved with over the years. Growing up in a more rural slum, Rocket’s brother Goose and his little crime posse get involved with a botched motel robbery that turns into a murder massacre when an 11-year old psycho named Li’l Dice gets his hand on a gun. Trying to escape with his girlfriend, Goose’s partner Shaggy is killed by the "shoot first" cops, while Goose is killed by Li’l Dice.

Though it appears to be the love child of Ronald McDonald and William Shakespeare, Scotland, PA is only the most innovative adaptation of Macbeth, which was forgotten about after it went to Sundance. Its satire, while crude and greasy, just like the worst fast food server, is so un-artsy and plain that it can honestly be called upon frequently when you have a craving for some simple, yet refreshing comedy. To add to its charm is an already off-beat cast that gives, perhaps, their funniest and most quirky performances. I must commend Maura Tierney for her role as the modern Lady Macbeth, which she played with excellent style, and her co-star, James LeGros, for his depiction of Macbeth. For the sake of being interesting, their last name is McBeth, and everyone calls her Pat and him Mac. Instead of being regal characters during the Renaissance, they are two ordinary folks in the '70s who work at Duncan's, a former donut shop owned by Norm Duncan. Notice the catchy play on an actual food chain. Duncan is trying to branch out and get new ideas for fast food, and under his employ are a ton of outrageous characters, including his sons, and many whom you'll recognize. Like most people in food service, the McBeths are extremely restless, causing the dynamic of their marriage to be bittersweet. Their sex life is at its peak (the two go at it like rabbits), but the romance turns sour when Pat constantly nags Mac about his inability to break away from Duncan, or at the very least, stop blurting out good ideas and letting him take the credit for them. While Mac is wandering around an empty carnival site, he is approached by two intoxicated hippies (the Greek chorus), who lead him to a fortune teller (the prophet, played by Amy Smart). She shakes her toy 8-ball and mentions a concept that has never been invented: drive-tru. Dismissing the entire ordeal, Mac returns to work the next day and hears of an employee being fired, which could mean a promotion for...

As if the spectacle of a top chef's attitude was not enough, this movie has excellent dialogue and absurd murders to please viewers even more. For that reason, and many others, it is my favorite screwball comedy and one which takes a step away from traditional screwball plots, yet still remains fresh and classic. Replacing the love-triangle between a feisty woman and two men is a dessert chef who is being fought over by two individuals, though one of those pursuits is not romantic. Natasha (Jacqueline Bisset) is a famous pastry chef who's been called upon by Maximillian Vandevver (Robert Morley), an obese food critic and good friend, to make a cake for the Queen of England. Her fumbling ex-husband, Robby (George Segal), is an overnight millionaire who owns various catchy fast food chains. This, of course, allows for Natasha and her co-workers to see him as the antichrist of cuisine. While harassing her in order to pitch an idea for a chain of omelets called H. Dumpty's, he discovers that she is being wooed by a famous Swiss chef. This particular chef is the one that orchestrated the dinner for the Queen, and the two met on silly terms in a kitchen. After spending the night with him, she wakes to find that he has been murdered in his own kitchen while attempting to make her breakfast. She finds him in an oven, which she and the authorities notice is a play on his specialty dish. Since she was the last one seen with him and her ex-husband was the last one to call his home, the two become suspects for the murder. The business deals that they have in other countries don’t leave them with much time to feel threatened, and Natasha finds herself shipped off to Venice by Max in order to meet a famous Italian chef and exchange ideas. Robby ends up following her there and becomes an even bigger nuisance. Soon after, his silly and semi-romantic cat-and-mouse game is overshadowed by another murder. The Italian chef, like the Swiss one, is killed in the fashion of h...

The impact that National Lampoon Magazine had on American comedy during the 1970s was enormous, eventually spawning the massively ripped-off comedy movie National Lampoon's Animal House (as well as the Vacation series and some crappy forgettable flicks). You could say that the long running sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live symbolically evolved from National Lampoon (as well as from the Second City comedy clubs in Chicago and Toronto). Following the success of SNL's first breakout star, Chevy Chase, John Belushi would earn a cult following from his performance in Animal House that would last past his untimely death four years later from a drug overdose, leading the way for SNL alumni to dominate comedy for decades.Animal House follows two freshmen, Pinto (Tom Hulce) and Kent (Stephen Furst), "a wimp and a blimp," at Faber College in 1962. After being turned away from the elite fraternities they end up joining "the worst house on campus," Delta House. These campus outlaws are in constant trouble with Dean Wormer (brilliantly played by the snaky John Vernon of Point Blank), as they are placed on “double secret probation.” Eschewing academics or athletics, Delta members are either out to get wasted or laid, lead by would-be playboy, Otter (Tim Matheson), and super slob, Bluto (Belushi). There are a number of memorable scenes including Pinto and fellow Delta, Boon (Peter Riegert), along with his girlfriend, Katy (Karen Allen), being introduced to pot by a professor (Donald Sutherland); Belushi's stroll through the cafeteria line hoarding food and then his zit imitation; the guys' trip to a Rhythm N Blues club where Otis Day and the Knights perform (a scene ripped off in Weird Science). After the fraternity is expelled their revenge on the s...

There was an attractiveness to having this be my first John Waters movie. As a growing cult fanatic, I found it odd that I'd never seen any of Waters' films, and, I'll admit, I assumed that he was too much of a staple in the cult-world; his fans seemed to be fond of him more than the movies. Moviegoers and Waters fans, from many different tastes, claimed that this was his worst movie. The steadfast remarks intrigued me, so I went and saw it at a revival theater thinking, "…well, it can only get better, apparently." The struggle to not judge the film too harshly was diminished as soon as the introduction credits came on. Mismatched red and black marquee letters (common for revival theaters) poked fun at mainstream cinema by having fake titles like Forest Gump 2 appear on the lineup and dissolve into a cast or crew members' name. From the beginning it was clear that Waters was a man who liked details, and I was allowed to then be rid of doubt.   The movie opens with a buzz over actress Honey Whitlock's (Melanie Griffith) premiere of her latest mainstream flop. The premiere is in Baltimore, and she turns just about every silent moment to herself into an occasion of bantering and disrespect of the town and its civilians. Meanwhile, a young group of misfits has infiltrated the theater's staff at the venue which is to house the event. Whispering mini-manifestos into walki-talkies for encouragement and prepping their alarming amount of explosives and ammunition, they eagerly await Honey's arrival. Their mission, headed by Cecil B. Demented (Stephen Dorff), is to kidnap the star and force her to act in their one and only underground film. Their message: take back the cinema, or more appropriately, death to bad cinema (as in blockbusters). The kidnapping is completed, but there is a casualty, so soon the group is wanted for murder. Still, they ...

Just scratching the surface of John Steinbeck's massive novel, the film version of East Of Eden is most important as a introduction to James Dean and as another notch in director Elia Kazan's impressive film belt. Though the story can be a little melodramatic, concentrating on two brothers - one good, Aron (Richard Davalos), and one bad, Cal (Dean) - and and their relationship to their father, Adam (Raymond Massey) during the WWI years in Salinas, California. Adam is an overly moral man while the boy's mother Kate (Jo Van Fleet) is a brothel owner. If the biblical good and evil imagery sounds heavy-handed, it is, but for James Dean's fascinating performance the film's soapy elements are well worth slogging through. With only three films before his death at the age of 24, Dean's impact on film and film acting cannot be understated. Early in the decade Dean worked as a film extra in Hollywood, before moving to New York, where he began studying with famed acting guru Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, like his idols Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando before him. He made some minor noise working on the stage and on live television, before he was plucked up by Kazan for the role that would make him an instant star and begin an iconic legend that still continues almost 60 years after his death. As the moody Cal, Dean uses every kind of slump and mumble known to man. In the first half of the film, as he seeks to reconnect with his long lost mother, he always looks like he is going to tumble over, as if he's walking on his tip-toes. His face always seems on the brink of tears. Later, his character gains some confidence and seems to have a stronger control of his body until, after one last grasp at connecting with his father, rejected, he flips out and goes into histrionics (as do the camera angles). Dean wear...

I watched The Social Network with a few expectations:

1) Knowing it was directed by David Fincher told me it would look stylishly dark (though, how and why for a movie about computer geeks remained a mystery).

Not to be confused with the awful swell of stunt man flicks that arose in the late '70s and early '80s (Hooper, Stunts, Stunt Rock, etc), nope, Richard Rush's The Stunt Man is a genre all itself. It's a playful film about the magic of movie making, but its depiction of a film set is closer to the episode of The Flintstones when Fred becomes Stony Curtis's stand-in, then, say, Francois Truffaut's on-set Day For Night. Like a Christopher Nolan film, it's a puzzle in a box, but unlike Inception the characters never stop to explain it to you. What's real and what's make believe is up to the viewer's imagination, like film itself.

Vietnam vet Cameron (Steve Railsback) is on the run from the cops, stumbles onto a film set, and may or may not be responsible for the death of the movie's top stunt man. The film's egomaniacal director, Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole), takes the fugitive under his wing, agreeing to hide him out but Cross will have to replace him as the film's stunt man. While shooting a ridiculous looking WWI flick at San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado (the location of Some Like It Hot as well) Cameron's view of reality becomes more blurred (as does the audience's). Cross puts him in more and more dangerous situations (just like that Flintstones episode). Is Cross trying to kill him? Did Cross have Burt, the former stunt man, killed? Besides stepping into Burt's stunt shoes, Cameron also takes up with his girlfriend, Nina (Barbara Hershey), the film's leading lady. And again, a sexual relationship with a self-centered actress can also blur the lines of reality, maybe even more powerfully.

There is no greater cinematic seduction than that of black and white film. Something about the absence of color helps you tune into so many other things and lose yourself in the screen; the images seem so much more complete and the messages come through clearly. While this film is fairly short, I feel even more excited about the filmmaker's ability to eliminate fluff and find that the choice to make your point quickly will never go out of fashion. In fact, the movie reminded me of a sci-fi picture without the excess and flash. The most charming part about The Committee is that it is a confident work that flaunts only that sense of assured storytelling.

The movie is from the '60s and known mainly for its groovy/intellectual soundtrack by Pink Floyd, and for the fact that it attacks conformism and politics within societies. It opens with a quote on free will and Britain's collective position on both revolt and passive submission. It then moves on to a young man (Paul Jones) hitchhiking across woodlands who is picked up by a talkative egoist (Tom Kempinski). When the men stop to check on the car, the young man beheads the driver, then puts his head back on and leaves the scene. He returns to the city and his dull job as an architect and receives a summons to attend a committee. Rumor has spread that committees are complex gatherings in the country. As little as eight and as many as300 people are gathered and separated into groups in order to be surveyed, tested, and probed. The idea behind it is to see how the majority of people approach issues as meaningless as fruit, to a game of chess. One might be isolated in the country for a week up to a month, and in the end, the data gathered will help those in power control and regulate society. You could then compare such a letter to the draft, only the war you wage is entirely in your head. For our protagonist, he is fighting the urge not to go along with the government's game by attending.

I don't know if Catfish is a documentary or not, but it doesn't really matter--the impression it leaves would be the same regardless. If all the action on screen is real, then it might be the most perfect set of natural circumstances to tell an emotional story with in history (which in itself should earn the directors some awards for capturing). If it isn't, then we have a cleverly written film containing some powerful acting performances that say something meaningful about how social networking can shape our love lives. Fiction or not, Catfish tells the truth.

Yaniv "Nev" Schulman is a photographer living in New York City. Shortly after one of his photos makes the cover of a major publication in 2007, he receives a painting of it from an eight-year-old girl in rural Michigan named Abby. He eventually receives e-mails from her, and within the opening minutes of the film becomes Facebook friends with her and the rest of her family and friends. But the online bonding gets a bit more intense with Abby's older sister, Megan. The two start sending each other flirty online messages, eventually even talking on the phone and casually addressing one another as "babe" in their text messages. Nev's brother Ariel, and his friend Henry, document the long-distance relationship. At some point, the filmmakers raise the question of online identity. From there, Nev finds himself in a mystery that's at once utterly realistic and too far out for real life--but who really knows what's going on in this film?