All articles by Joe Lozito

A surprisingly well done ‘Alien’ rip-off, with one too many plot contrivances to make it stand out.

The true story of the Andrea Gail, a Gloucester fishing boat caught in the belly of a massive hurricane, is brought to the screen ably by Wolfgang Petersen and some thrilling special effects.

An effective, old-fashioned revolutionary epic with the standard, ham-fisted Hollywood cliches thrown in. Mel Gibson holds the film together with a sturdy performance as the title.

Mel Gibson’s misguided attempt to illustrate the graphic torture and death of Jesus without any of the redemption is a beautifully shot film with an insulting ‘I Told You So’ attitude.

Visual virtuoso David Fincher creates a Hitchcockian suspense thriller which, despite some obvious plot contrivances, maintains its claustrophobic intensity until the typically bombastic finale. Jodie Foster flexes her action heroine muscles to good effect along the way.

It’s possible that Alec Baldwin is tired of his wife being the only Oscar-winner in the family.

Robert Greenwald’s scathing demonization of Rupert Murdoch and, specifically, his Fox News Channel, is frighteningly one-sided, frighteningly frustrating and just plain frightening.

Director Alejandro Amenábar’s first American film takes the haunted house genre for a unique spin and almost sustains it thanks to Nicole Kidman’s stunningly layered performance.

Writer-director Don Roos’ new film asks the burning question: how long can an audience watch a group of people it doesn’t care about?

Ultimately pointless exercise in guerilla filmmaking finds two vacationing divers stranded at sea after a miscount by a criminally lax scuba crew. The grainy, at times pixilated, digital footage adds to the realism (the actors really were at sea with sharks) but filmmaker Chris Kentis lacks the experience to sustain the suspense for the full running time.