Daybreakers Dim, But It's No Twilight

Good acting, directing can't rescue ridiculous script

(NEWSER) - Brooklyn’s Finest, the latest from Training Day director Antoine Fuqua, is “a billy-club sandwich: three cop dramas piled one on top of the other, separated by layers of dramatic cheese," writes Ty Burr of the Boston Globe . About an hour in, “you hit gristle.” Sound appetizing? Critics agree that it’s not: More»

Vampire's Assistant has an identity crisis

(NEWSER) - Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant isn't particularly freaky, and it sure could use some assistance. Some critics' takes:

• Peter Travers doesn't deign to explain the film's loose ends. "All you need to know is that the movie is a setup for sequels that I hope never come," he writes in Rolling Stone. It also "commits the cardinal sin for a vampire movie: It’s bloodless."

Vampire romance grabs target audience, fails on effects

(NEWSER) - The teen-vampire drama Twilight will “mesmerize its target audience, 16-year-old girls and their grandmothers,” writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. “The movie is lush and beautiful, and the actors are well-chosen.” The story of a girl and her vegetarian-vampire lover focuses on the “fervent, sexually charged but doggedly chaste murmurings” of its stars, writes Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. More»

Crime drama could net legendary director first best directing Oscar

(NEWSER) - He may be 83, but in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Sidney Lumet musters the “wide-awake elegance of a virtuoso half his age,” EW's Owen Gleiberman says, producing a vivid crime melodrama critics unanimously place among the year’s best. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play brothers whose botched robbery of their parents’ store “approaches the scope of Greek tragedy,” Slate's Dana Stevens says. More»

Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones return for alien flick

(NEWSER) - Sure, no one was that desperate for a Men in Black 3—but it's actually a pretty good summer movie. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are back defending the planet from aliens, and this time, Josh Brolin's along for the ride as a young Jones.

• The movie "turns out to be so much fun," writes AO Scott in the New York Times . While it "carefully fulfills its blockbuster imperatives—with chases and explosions and elaborately contrived plot twists—it swerves into some marvelously silly, unexpectedly witty, and genuinely fresh territory."