Jim Ridley

Want to know how a city works? Start by watching 1974's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, a primer in which subway hijackers test how long it'll take a million bucks to pass through Gotham's plumbing. Turns out an hour is just enough time to roust the hated mayor...

What Fletch was to plaid-checked water-cooler wits in the '80s, what National Lampoon's Van Wilder was to college-bound douches at the dawn of Dubya, that's what 2003's Old School is to Gen-X frat rats — a secret-handshake movie. A shaggy, intermittently hilarious wish-fulfillment nightmare about sorta dissatisfied, sorta middle-age dudesters...

A glue-huffing variant on the gimmick-noir D.O.A., 2006’s Crank was a riotous demonstration of the actionvore’s dilemma: The harsher the swill you consume — “swill” in this case meaning an AYCE strip-bar lunch buffet of mindless splatter, bone-jarring crashes, and beyond-gratuitous T&A — the harder it is to get high...

The original Underworld, released six years ago, introduced a high-concept/low-excitement war between vampires in fetish gear and videogame-caliber werewolves — and "in the spirit of equanimity," someone wrote at the time, "the movie both sucks and bites." No such draw here: This deadly prequel explaining the roots of the bloodsucker-fangface...

In theory, 3-D filmmaking should amplify the effect Roland Barthes foresaw in Cinemascope — that of the viewer becoming a "little god" free to float about at will in the frame's capacious space. In practice, it's typically like watching a shitty movie with the added sensation of getting poked in...