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The special effects look okay and Jackie Earle Haley performs well enough in an unenviable role, but the plot is vapid, the characters drab and the twists inexplicably straight. A Nightmare on Elm Street is just the latest victim of a movie industry so bereft of originality that it allows parasites to feast on the desiccated husk of its better days.
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Alan Wake doesn’t break new ground or, as its advertising claims, “raise the bar for storytelling in videogames;” but it does offer an exciting, tension-dripping ride through some dark and stormy nights.
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Tim Burton’s adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic novels is smart and it’s funny and quirky and weird… but it’s not really Alice in Wonderland.
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Alice: Madness Returns doesn’t try to scare you with stupid monsters or skulls or ghosts or silly videogame things, but instead uses those as allegorical expressions of less tangible sins, as a means of fighting something that can’t be stabbed.
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Batman Forever and Batman and Robin were each a mishmash of hokey aesthetics and bad jokes, covering a plot of lame B-movie sci-fi clichés.
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It was Tim Burton who originally changed the rules; he rewrote Batman, he did away with the camp and go-go dancing and gave us a Batman that we had never seen before, a Batman who was a little less approachable, a little more dangerous and a lot more engrossing than he ever was before or since; and he did this without losing that comicbook sense of whimsy that make characters like this so enduring in the first place.
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Batman: Arkham Asylum is a beautiful mosaic of gameplay types – part beat-‘em-up, part platformer, part stealth game, part puzzler and part adventure game — set in an environment that oozes an atmosphere so manic and creepy it gives Bioshock a run for its money.
Batman: Arkham City’s real advancement over its predecessor is in its premise: its brand new, never-before-seen premise that brims with dramatic weight and great personal trials. It’s everything Arkham Asylum wanted to be and more.
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Beyond Good and Evil is a platform brawling puzzling stealth space shooter racer set in an open world with levels and tacos; it’s a clever and witty child-friendly story about very timely evils and there really is nothing else quite like it.
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Captain America: The First Avenger is a perfect realization of the superhero movie formula, one that sticks to each and every step just like it’s supposed to, but one that also take its time on each step, moves us naturally and gradually through the transitions and gives us a fun, but still emotionally grounded little tale.
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Catherine is stylized and bizarre and while the levels have nothing to do with anything, at least they’re not stock beat-em-up or shooter fare.
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Child of Eden is a crazy, wacky, glorious little game that takes us on an electro technicolor dream tour of the wonders of life and the successes of society.
It’s hard to get past that its fundamental conceit is really just a modernist gimmick, but Chronicle still sidesteps a great deal of the superficiality of the superhero genre.
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Deadly Creatures is a great, straightforward action game with a unique premise, interesting levels and an oddly appropriate story with a good bit of star power to boot.
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Deus Ex is utterly witless, drab and uninteresting, but once you settle into a rhythm it does at least become fun to play.
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A disjointed and overly eclectic movie, District 9 offers just enough apartheid allegory to pretend it’s intelligent when it isn’t, a sci-fi plot governed by the genre’s worst cliches and enough action, gore and ray guns to fluff it all out to an appropriate cinematic length.
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Doctor Who’s fifth season and first transition into a new era is very middle-of-the-road, very safe, very unassuming and – for a series about a time-traveling space explorer – sadly unadventurous.
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It may not have all the faces I remember and it may not do everything in the exact same way, but the essence of Donkey Kong Country is here and it is as it promises: an excellent return to form for one of platforming’s greats.
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The story is unfocused, the world is too small and the gameplay is too repetitive. Dragon Age II is just a decent game, a sequel just for the sake of having a sequel.
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Dragon Age: Origins is a ridiculously long game with replay value to boot, a satisfying and sufficiently complex RPG with a remarkably simple, but interesting, fantasy world to play it in.
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Skyrim blindsides you with scale from the moment you start the game. There are so many things to do and so many places to explore that you’ll be too busy to realize very few of them are any good.
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Take a movie with brilliant ideas, deep and engrossing characters and clever dialogue and then hand it to a director who doesn’t know which side of the camera is the “shooty end” and you’ll likely get a product that’s so substandard you won’t care about the thought that went into it. And sadly, that’s Epic Mickey.
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Fallout: New Vegas gives us a world recovering, slowly and surely putting itself back together while its people fight everyday to secure their place in it. And, like anybody, they succumb to insanity, they shut themselves away, they sink to the bottom of a bottle, they laugh it off, they try again and they strive to make themselves better.
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Green Lantern is adequate, but unremarkable and painfully derivative. But there is a framework in place, some clear forethought about the possibilities for the series.
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The Gunstringer is a crazy game that runs wild on wacky ideas and uses motion controls in a most bizarre context and does some truly trippy things with the notion of spectatorial position.
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While Heavy Rain employs some remarkable ideas in game design, its story is slightly inadequate. With plot holes, ridiculous characters and overly contrived events, it really drags down what could have been the evolution of narrative gaming.
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You never really get drawn into the war-torn America of Homefront; it never even tries to pull you in, it’s too busy trying to be a generic, paint-by-numbers, ho-hum, average, bog-standard, run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen, been-there-done-that traditional first-person shooter.
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The plot is convoluted and trying to follow any individual thread will lead one into a realm where darkness and madness intertwine, but Iron Man 2 is still an interesting and exciting exploration of what happens when a superhero has one of those days.
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L.A Noire is a bold move from a company that had no practical reason to bother and every practical reason not to. And for that alone, developers Rockstar and Team Bondi should be commended, no matter what missteps they may have taken along the way.
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While Let Me In is a beautiful and tragic movie with impeccable acting and a great deal of thought and intelligence behind it, it is still just a rehash of somebody else’s work.
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A fun and incredibly stylized beat-em-up, MadWorld is every bit as masterful as it is puerile; but the unique visuals and free rein afforded by the level design will offer an engrossing and captivating spectacle that will keep you coming back again and again
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Mafia II is a unique and nuanced return to a complicated time in American history, presented here in all its glory and all its grime, in all its splendor and all its filth. This is the Golden Age of America recreated with a frankness and honesty that is remarkably rare.
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Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 seems like at times that it is trying to advance on what was done before, but it ultimately feels less like an evolution of the format and more like a shaky second start.
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Mass Effect 2 is a whole different animal from its predecessor, brimming with new ideas and a whole mess of personality, that provides an interesting and lively galaxy to explore, where every time you land on a planet you wait with eager anticipation of what you will find.
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Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian the videogame has managed to defy the immutable laws of gaming and offer a movie-licensed product that is actually not bad. With a healthy selection of simple puzzles and a very forgiving level of difficulty, it provides a nice child-friendly companion piece to a very kid-centric movie.
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No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle is a testament to and reminder of the glories of videogame weirdness. It’s fun and it’s simplistic; it’s retro and it’s modern; it’s crass and it’s deep; it’s a mess of contradictions and it is as it wants to be: the most fucked-up game of all time.
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Neither sequel nor prequel, Paranormal Activity 2 sort of surrounds the original and so it doesn’t just expand, repeat or continue; rather it reframes Paranormal Activity in a new context.
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Paranormal Activity is simple and elegant, focuses on scares and not shocks, creates tension and not gore, wants you to scream and not gag and offers a refreshing alternative to the willful putrescence of modern horror.
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It’s pointless, it’s derivative, it’s cynical, it’s clumsy, it’s asinine, it’s patronizing, it’s anachronistic, it’s lazy, it’s just plain bad.
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Repo Men seems like it wanted to be an absurdist action/comedy with a heart; but the action is bland, the comedy too infrequent and that heart is as blatantly manufactured as the one in the protagonist’s chest.
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Scream 4 manipulates the motives of the studios and producers that enabled the remake craze in order to use their own money to shame them.
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Sonic Adventure took the gameplay of the 2D days and updated it and it took the pieces of mythos that shaped the Genesis era and combined them into something purely epic. It is the turning point that would see the series change forever.
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Sonic and the Black Knight is just a jumbled mess of bad ideas, good ideas done badly and a total misapprehension about what a good Sonic game – or, for that matter, a good videogame – is supposed to be.
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Sonic Generations is less about reliving its title character’s former successes and instead about fostering and celebrating his modern style.
In this latest adventure, the sun shines a fresh light on Sonic with fun, fast and exciting new levels; as night falls, enjoyment disappears and all that remains is stale, by-the-numbers platforming and combat that wear down an otherwise rejuvenated Sonic experience.
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Shattered Dimensions lacks the freedom of the open world, but it does have some surprisingly fantastic dialogue, downright glorious Spidey witticisms and a firm and mostly balanced indulgence of comic book goofiness, which keeps the overall experience entertaining in spite of some repetitive and ho-hum objectives.
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Spore is not really a videogame, definitely not a simulation for evolution, but rather an extremely effective and addictive virtual outlet for imagination that will have you adjusting and tweaking your self-made galaxy for hours on end.
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The Tempest is a great deal of fun – with drama and tension balanced nicely with great humor – but it’s a pale shadow of Titus. Its message is perhaps muddled and it lacks the visual dynamism of Julie Taymor’s previous films.
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The remake of the remake of The Thing is just a soulless, assembly line exercise in gaudy special effects, tension-free action and lots of excessively loud booming sounds.
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The Wolfman is competently handled, easily enjoyable and holds a few unique twists. It may not take the original movie’s premise in any shocking new directions, but it likewise avoids many of the other annoying trends of modern horror movies.
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Here we have a movie where the gods are gods, where the elements have form and faces and where the extended universe is shown up for the weird wild place that it is.
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While this is far from flawless, it is engaging, intense and an excellent realization of the “grown-up Doctor Who” ideal that Torchwood was always meant to embody.
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Transformers: Dark of the Moon is too disconnected to work as a conclusion, too grounded to be a memorable fantasy epic, too goofy to be drama, not goofy enough to be camp, too dull to hold interest and too loud to sleep through.
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Uncharted 3 feels a little less impressive than the games that came before, it feels in places desperate and in other places confused as to what it’s trying to do; but all the bedrock elements that set the series apart from other shooters are still very much intact and they’re still more than enough to sustain it through its lapses.
Valkyria Chronicles II is imperfect in such an obvious way that one wonders how it ever got past the planning stages, but it’s solid and thoroughly entertaining for most of its substantial length.
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This version of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is headlined by the director’s cut of the original movie with the Tales of the Black Freighter animated feature edited into the story, but it also includes the Under the Hood fictional documentary, the complete set of motion comics and a digital copy version of the theatrical cut. In essence, this is the quintessential cinematic Watchmen, the Grand Poobah adaptation of Alan Moore’s book. But is it any better than the original release?
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In 2009, Zack Snyder – riding along the popularity he gained from adapting 300 – unleashed his own Watchmen unto the world: a cinematic adaptation of the graphic novel with all the eloquence and depth one would expect from the director of 300.
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With poor writing, erratic pacing, the misuse and under-use of several characters and some questionable CGI, Wolverine’s very own movie is underwhelming to say the least and a cinematic lobotomy to say the most.
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First Class is the fifth X-Men movie and the series is still suffering from all the same weaknesses with the inclusion of timely and thrifty modernisms.
