By Brian Lafferty

August 24, 2012 (San Diego) -- "A wise man once said, 'If you see a fork in the road, take it,'" says young Anna (Gabriela Marcinkova) as 360 opens with her sister (Lucia Siposova) being photographed for a prostitution website. It set me in the mood for a clever and intriguing film. I was in for disappointment. You know your film is in trouble when quoting Yogi Berra is its only meaningful element.

By Brian Lafferty

August 16, 2012 (San Diego) – Tod Browning is a director whose career I lament as much as I admire. He began as a comedic actor who appeared in dozens of shorts (almost all of them directed by Edward Dillon) for Mutual Film Company. Then he turned his eye to directing, where he slowly established himself as a reliable helmsman of mostly crime and mystery films. He’s best known, however, for his work in the horror genre. In 1931 he directed the now-immortalized Dracula starring Bela Lugosi. After many years pounding the pavement, he seemed destined for even more greatness.

Then he directed Freaks.

By Brian Lafferty

Catching up on a few I missed.

August 16, 2012 (San Diego) – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs introduced the first Disney Princess. Later Disney Princesses included, among others, Cinderella, Aurora (Sleeping Beauty), Belle (Beauty and the Beast), and Rapunzel (Tangled). It took seventeen years after Toy Story in 1995, but Pixar finally decided to get in the game with Brave, their newest film and first to feature a female leading character.

By Brian Lafferty

July 13, 2012 (San Diego) – Moonrise Kingdom looks like it’s set in an alternate universe, more specifically Wes Anderson’s universe. In this world, there are no Boy Scouts, but Khaki Scouts, which are run like the military. The government has, of all things, a United States Department of Inclement Weather. The adults behave oddly while the kids are the only sane people.

By Brian Lafferty

July 9, 2012 (San Diego) – Leave it to Oliver Stone to take sleazy, salacious, and lurid material and transform it into art. Very few filmmakers can make graphic violence so lyrical without pretension the way Stone does in Savages. On the surface the film is trashy, but if you look deeper, this trash has class.

By Brian Lafferty

June 29, 2012 (San Diego) – The average person would likely perceive teddy bears as cute, innocent, and sentimental toys. What about someone with a devilishly twisted sense of humor like Seth MacFarlane?

By Brian Lafferty

June 11, 2012 (San Diego) – I attend every screening with a pen and small notebook in hand. I have a strong visual memory, but it never hurts to jot down certain things I may later overlook. For Prometheus, I wrote only three brief sentences before I put the notebook down. This film had the tractor beam effect on my eyes. I sat fully entranced, unable to look away.

By Brian Lafferty

May 4, 2012 (San Diego) – The Pirates! Band of Misfits opens with a feel-good opening sequence. The Pirate Captain (voiced by Hugh Grant) and his misfit crew pillages island after island in the Caribbean under the strains of Tenpole Tudor’s “Swords of a Thousand Men.” It’s a fitting song. The way the rah-rah and go-getting lyrics and music matched the action on-screen made me smile.

If only the film matched that energy and excitement for the film’s remaining 85 minutes.

By Brian Lafferty

May 4, 2012 (San Diego) – Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) is not your typical thief. In fact, he’s your typical man. You would never guess that this meek, average businessman is a master art thief so skilled at his craft that he leaves not a single trace of evidence behind. Hennie, at first, does too good a job; his character is undistinguished to the point where he is dangerously close to being too hard to buy.

By Brian Lafferty

May 4, 2012 (San Diego) – The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye – which opens today at the Reading Gaslamp – is not about the progressive rock band first fronted by Peter Gabriel, then later by Phil Collins. I would have rather seen a documentary, any documentary, about that instead of this one. Ballad is a bizarre, pretentious, and ultimately dull sixteen-millimeter home movie.

By Brian Lafferty

April 13, 2012 (San Diego) – The plot synopsis is the easiest part of writing film criticism. It’s also my least favorite. It puts a crimp on word counts; far too often I’ve had to jettison entire paragraphs of criticism to begrudgingly accommodate it.

By Brian Lafferty

March 23, 2012 (San Diego) – The Hunger Games is gripping, emotional, and gritty. It’s Hollywood’s second great survival film after Joe Carnahan’s The Grey. On top of that, it’s an indictment on the social disparities between the elite and lower class, and on American society’s obsession with reality television.

By Brian Lafferty

March 22, 2012 (San Diego) – My first exposure to Vietnamese director Anh Hung Tran was in my Language of Film class at California State University, Fullerton. In this class, we had to watch at least two to three movies per week to analyze such film grammar as movement, color, rhythm, lines, space, etc.

By Brian Lafferty

March 16, 2012 (San Diego) – There is a compelling story waiting to be told in The Forgiveness of Blood. Instead, what’s left is the cinematic equivalent of an uneaten banana. It gets riper and riper, until it eventually turns to inedible mush. A two-hour missed opportunity, it never blossoms, thanks to the most inept cinematography I’ve witnessed since last year’s Incendies.

By Brian Lafferty

March 13, 2011 (San Diego) – Everyone has the time of their lives in Project X, a comedy movie, party movie, found footage movie, and disaster film all rolled into one. I’m happy that they had fun because I didn’t. I felt like a teenager forced by his parents to attend a social gathering with people he doesn’t know and can’t relate to.

By Brian Lafferty

March 13, 2012 (San Diego) – This year I (quietly) introduced a rating system. In short, the highest rating a movie can get is an A, a D- is the lowest rating a movie can get on the basis of being bad, and an F given to films that are not only unbearably bad, but immoral, base, incompetently shot, and beneath contempt.

By Brian Lafferty

February 27, 2012 (San Diego) – Perfect Sense starts out innocently. After it creeps up on you, it snowballs with emotional intensity before hitting you with maximum impact. It subverts every Disease of the Week and End of the World cliché, resulting in a fresh script additionally laden with originality. It opened my mind to new possibilities.

By Brian Lafferty

February 13, 2012 (San Diego) – Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is populated with politicians more corrupt than Randy “Duke” Cunningham and a slew of dirty cops. With so many stock characters and potentially tiresome tropes like chases and shootouts, the film could have easily become a hotbed of clichés. Elite Squad, against all odds, transcends them all with a complex script. Nothing – not the characters, plot, themes, nothing – in this movie is as simple as black and white.

By Brian Lafferty

February 10, 2012 (San Diego) – Has Daniel Espinosa seen every single Tony Scott film? Based on what I saw in Safe House, I don’t doubt it. Safe House is so influenced by his films that it could very well have been directed by Scott.

By Brian Lafferty

February 10, 2012 (San Diego) – After watching Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, I wondered what Six Year Old Me would have thought. Six Year Old Me would have loved it. He would have laughed, he would have been thrilled, and he would have had fun.

By Brian Lafferty

February 3, 2012 (San Diego) – Grading horror movies is the same as grading comedies; whether the film works is dependent on a certain reaction from the audience. Just as a comedy’s success is based on laughter, a horror film’s success is based on scares. During the screening of The Woman in Black, the critic sitting next to me kept covering his eyes and looking away from the screen. I, on the other hand, sat through the film mostly ramrod and admittedly unemotional.

By Brian Lafferty

February 3, 2012 (San Diego) – In 1999, The Blair Witch Project popularized the “found footage” genre. Thirteen years later its influence has been felt in movies from as close to home as here (Cloverfield) to as far away as Norway (Trollhunters). Chronicle is a noble attempt at the genre, but the gimmick here is unnecessary. It severely undermines what could have been a good movie.

By Brian Lafferty

January 27, 2012 (San Diego) – Around this time last year, Sanctum hit theaters. Set in a series of frigid, but gorgeous underwater caves, it boasted beautiful cinematography. Unfortunately, it was a dopey survival movie whose sole purpose was to kill off its cardboard characters in gruesome ways.

By Brian Lafferty

January 20, 2012 (San Diego) – If you’re looking for a serious, authentic, and realistic portrayal of the Tuskegee Airmen, Red Tails isn’t it. Instead, you’ll get a fully romanticized, pure escapist account that isn’t flawless but is entertaining. I embraced the film’s adventurism, machismo, and old-fashioned approach. Given that Red Tails is George Lucas’ most recent pet project, it’s unreasonable to expect realism and grit.

By Brian Lafferty

January 13, 2011 (San Diego) – Contraband is a goofy mess. It inspires laughter at the wrong moments and reticent admiration for its actors, who display a work ethic not unlike the horse in Animal Farm, but are deserving of a better film. Part of me wants to tell you to see it for its awfulness, but I can’t. Time and money are precious. Maybe it when it comes out on home video.

By Brian Lafferty

December 21, 2011 (San Diego) – Many people I know would be hard-pressed to name their favorite TV show. For me, it’s easy. Mission: Impossible is my all-time favorite TV show. There’s something about the creativity in each mission’s execution. Even though everybody knows that the team will succeed, that doesn’t mean it lacks suspense.

By Brian Lafferty

November 11, 2011 (San Diego) – Apparently every generation brings a disaster movie in which an asteroid, meteor, or comet is about to strike the Earth. There was Meteor in 1979. My generation had not one but two such movies in 1998. They were Michael Bay’s Armageddon and Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact. I don’t think I need to tell you which was more popular among my classmates.

By Brian Lafferty

November 11, 2011 (San Diego) – As a critic it’s easy to look at a film and say something like, “It would have been better if they did this.” The flaw of such logic is that there’s no guarantee that the replacements or additions would be any better than what made it onto the screen. Nor would excising a scene or plot necessarily benefit the movie.

By Brian Lafferty

November 8, 2011 (San Diego) – Attack the Block is made in the same spirit as the early 1980s work of Steven Spielberg. Like E.T., it centers on a group of young boys who have a life-changing encounter with the uncanny. Like The Goonies (which was directed by Richard Donner, but everybody knows it was really Spielberg’s film) the boys in Attack the Block band together on a daring adventure to save their homes.

By Brian Lafferty

November 4, 2011 (San Diego) – I love surprises. I drove into the parking lot where the In Time screening too place thinking that it was going to be a dime a dozen action film with incoherent stunts and poor camerawork held together by a gimmick. Over two hours later, I went home with a smile on my face.