All articles by Joe Lozito

Rather than supporting the cartoonish excesses of its predecessor, ‘Vol. 2’ stands as its own film. And a fine one at that.

Quentin Tarantino’s bloody, silly love letter to the grind house films of his youth is everything you would expect from a film-geek with endless filmmaking resources, proving once again that this is a writer-director of unique style and talent.

The surprises are all but extinct from this franchise, but a compact script and non-stop action keep this third installment moving. Unfortunately, the dinosaurs are too fun to be scary.

Director Takashi Shimizu’s old-fashioned camera trickery and non-linear narrative structure are both a blessing and (ironically) a curse for this glorified haunted house movie. While the style gives the film an extra creepiness, the plot makes less and less sense the more you try to figure it out.

Exuberant performances by Edie Falco and Madeline Kahn brighten up Eric Mendelsohn’s dark portrait of love and loss on Long Island.

John Carpenter and James Woods vigorously invest some life into the weary undead genre, whether it warrants it or not.

Writer-director Kevin Smith’s five-film New Jersey ‘trilogy’ culminates in a love letter to any fan who has paid attention to his films since 1994’s "Clerks."

As far as the title goes, this 80-minute version of the MTV phenomenon delivers an awful lot of the first word and precious little of the last in its presentation of assorted gross-out pranks and misguided stunts. Like the show, like the movie.

Stylemeister F. Gary Gray adds some zip to this remake of the 1969 Michael Caine caper flick, but despite two clever action sequences and some uncharacteristically tight performances from his cast (most notably Charlize Theron and Mark Wahlberg), the con remains the same.

Gaspar Noé’s chronologically reverse orgy of violence and misogyny wants nothing more than to shock and then pretend it was done in the name of art. It succeeds in the first part, for better or worse. Mostly worse.