I have to give "The Raven" credit for being ambitious. Sadly it is an ambitious failure but, hey, at least they tried. On paper this movie bubbles with potential. In 1840s Baltimore a serial killer begins dispatching his victims by using the macabre stories of Edgar Allan Poe as the inspiration for... [More]

George Bernard Shaw once famously said that England and America are two countries separated by a common language. The same could probably be said about our collective senses of humor. From the dry absurdity of Monty Python to the manic bawdiness of Benny Hill, British comedy (much like their food) ... [More]

There is a large potential for failure in an ensemble romantic comedy. It is a chain only as strong as its weakest link. A miscast actor or flimsy plot tangent can scuttle the entire movie. Fortunately, "Think Like a Man" plays the cinematic equivalent of the prevent defense and dodges any major di... [More]

Chimpanzees kind of creep me out. Oh, sure, they're cute and we've paraded them out for our entertainment for years in everything from the high-profile glories of "Tarzan" to the abject humiliation of "Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp." But behind all their adorable hijinks, these things are basically f... [More]

Childhood is marked with a fair amount of cruelty. We all have memories of some indignity or humiliation we suffered as kids at the hands of another child. Even today, your average middle-school playground is basically one conch shell away from turning into "Lord of the Flies." But there is a line... [More]

It's pretty clear from "The Cabin in the Woods" that co-writers Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard love horror movies almost as much as they are annoyed by them. It is this point of conflict that spawns one of the most inventive, entertaining, outrageous and funny horror films ever made. Horror is not t... [More]

Growing up is hard, even for a teen-sex-comedy franchise. When "American Pie" was released and became a box office smash in 1999 it helped revive the raunchy genre by slyly sneaking in a sweetness amongst all the big, outrageous jokes about sex, body fluids, nudity and general humiliation. Two the... [More]

  After Johnny Depp's brief, but very funny cameo in the recent comedy "21 Jump Street," I found myself wondering about his sense of humor and whether the guy even possessed one. Depp has cultivated a public persona that is weird at best and aloof at worst, but there is always a twinkle in hi... [More]