This teen film takes the often used premise of a dead person coming back to help someone else out, which dates back to the birth of film itself.

Bobby Fantana (Lewis Smith, WYATT EARP) is a greaser from the ‘50s who dies in a car accident while playing chicken. He is assigned to come back to Earth to aid nerdy kid named Lenny Barnes (Jason Gedrick, BACKDRAFT), who is obsessed with his school’s popular slut Sharon (Anne Sawyer) while he doesn’t notice that cute Melissa (Nancy Valen, LOVERBOY) really likes him.

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For a time, films based on Marvel Comics characters were amazing pieces of entertainment. BLADE, X-MEN, SPIDER-MAN and HULK were all good to great. Then DAREDEVIL disappointed and ELEKTRA and THE PUNISHER were average genre crap. And let’s not even get started on the abomination that is BLADE TRINITY. So for the most part the real big name characters resulted in good movies. Therefore, if this scenario were to hold up, the first family of Marvel — The Fantastic Four — should be great as well. Didn’t happen.

As disappointing as ELEKTRA and PUNISHER were, they didn’t make me mad like F4. As silly as the seesaw scene in DAREDEVIL was, F4 was like watching that seesaw scene for two hours. What the successful Marvel superhero movies did right was that they weren’t written for 13 year olds. FANTASTIC FOUR is so juvenile it’s pathetic.

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Director John Dullaghan (feature debut) uses archival interviews with poet Charles Bukowski and new interviews with his friends and admirers to create this complex character study of arguably the most successful modern poet.

Bukowski has become a cult figure for his raw and direct style of writing. He was an angry alcoholic who for a good portion of his life worked at the post office at night, slept minimally then woke up to drink and write. No one would describe him as attractive with his long face, large nose and scarred face from awful acne during adolescence.

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Actor/comedian Paul Provenza and magician/comedian Penn Jillette created this film as a tribute to one classic joke. “The Aristocrats” joke starts with a man coming into an agent’s office telling him that he has just seen/or is part of the most original act ever. The man goes on to describe a performance filled with utter debauchery. When the appalled agent asks what the act is called the man says — The Aristocrats!

The description of act is where a comic has the freedom to embellish as they see fit. The joke has served as a kind of rite of passage for all comedians. The point is to see how far one will take the act. What new taboos can be stepped over with each telling.

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Director Paul Greengrass is not new to the topic of terrorism, having made the most compelling film I’ve seen regarding why people join terrorist groups with the film BLOODY SUNDAY. His raw documentary style is not used as a gimmick, but serves as a vital ingredient in transporting an audience into the action.

He puts us on Flight 93 as if we were one of the passengers. We never get too much background information on the other passengers, avoiding the cursory snippets into the main characters’ lives that serve as character development in popcorn disaster movies. The film allows us to view the characters via their actions on 9/11.

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Winner of the 2006 Oscar for best foreign language film, this crime drama looks at the results of the orphan crisis in Africa. Violence and AIDS often leave young children on the streets to fend for their own. It’s a brutal life and many are forced into violent crime.

Tsotsi (Presley Chweneyagae), which means thug, is one of those children. Along with his fellow gang members Aap (Kenneth Nkosi), Boston (Mothusi Magano, HOTEL RWANDA) and Butcher (Zenzo Ngqobe), Tsotsi spends his days stalking potential marks. One job turns deadly. Boston, who had previously been training to be a teacher, doesn’t have the stomach for violence. He challenges Tsotsi on whether the emotionless thug understands decency at all. This leads Tsotsi to nearly beat Boston to death.

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Here is a delightful British comedy about the making of a movie based on a classic novel that is deemed unfilmable. Laurence Sterne’s THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM SHANDY, GENTLEMAN was published originally as nine volumes starting in 1759. As actor Steve Coogan describes it in the film, it was “post-modern before there was modernism to be post about.”

In the novel, Tristram narrates his life’s tale, however he is so often sidetracked with tales about his family that the book ends shortly after his birth. Sterne attempted to show that the vast experiences of life are truly impossible to capture completely in art as well as commenting on the writing process itself. The film works in the same way, commenting on the filmmaking processes and how it goes about adapting material from another medium.

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The original POSEIDON ADVENTURE is campy and at times dated, but it knew how to build tension and make us care about its characters. The big budget remake has stripped everything that made the original work and filled the film with pointless action scene after pointless action scene.

Like all disaster films, the cast is filled with types, but other films at least try to develop the characters slightly. Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK) is a firefighter turned mayor of New York, who seems overly obsessed with his daughter Jennifer (Emily Rossum, MYSTIC RIVER) showing too much cleavage. Jennifer has secretly become engaged with Christian (HAVOC), who of course Robert does not like. Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss, JAWS) is a gay man whose lover has recently broken up with him, leaving him very depressed. Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas, THE HULK) is a former Navy officer who has become a professional gambler. He quickly sets his eyes on single mom Maggie James (Jacinda Barrett, LADDER 49), whose young son Conor (Jimmy Bennet, FIREWALL) has a knack for getting himself into trouble. Elena (Mia Maestro, FRIDA) is trying to get to New York to see her sister and has been smuggled onto the boat by waiter Valentin (Freddy Rodriguez, TV’s SIX FEET UNDER). Then there’s Lucky Louie (Kevin Dillon, TV’s ENTOURAGE), a ridiculously over-the-top cliché of the obnoxious drunk sexist pig.

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Spike Lee is a master filmmaker, however his first real attempt at making a commercial film is filled with contrivances that undermine the overall message.

Dalton Russell (Clive Owen, CLOSER) tells us straight out that he is going to rob a bank and then walk right out the front door. Det. Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington, MALCOLM X) is assigned the case. From the stalling tactics of the robbers, he begins to think that this is more than a simple robbery. Turns out that bank owner Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer, SYRIANA) has a dark secret and incriminating proof lies within the bank. So he calls on Madeline White (Jodie Foster, THE ACCUSED), a woman whose job seems to be fixing delicate matters for rich men, to make sure that his secret is kept safe. Other key characters include Capt. John Darius (Willem Dafoe, THE ENGLISH PATIENT) and Det. Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor, DIRTY PRETTY THINGS).

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Matt Buckner (Elijah Wood, LORD OF THE RINGS) has been recently kicked out of Harvard where he was studying journalism. He was charged with drug dealing, which was not true, but he was unable to stand up for himself against his powerful roommate, whose father is a senator. Lost at what to do next, Matt travels to England to visit his sister Shannon (Claire Forlani, MALLRATS), who has married a Brit named Steve (Marc Warren, TV’s BAND OF BROTHERS). Steve’s younger brother Pete (Charlie Hunnam, NICHOLAS NICKLEBY) is the leader of the local soccer gang… oh wait, I’d be beaten for that… football firm called the Green Street Elite.

These fans unite in support of their teams, getting drunk and usually getting in bloody fights with firms for opposing teams. At first, Pete wants nothing to do with the Yank Matt, but he decides to take him along to a match nonetheless. Pete’s right hand man Bovver (Leo Gregory, TRISTAN + ISOLDE) is greatly skeptical about allowing Matt to hang with them.

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