More Articles By Ed Hulse

• All Roads Lead Home
  ANCHOR BAY/STARZ Street: Jan. 13 Prebook: Dec. 11 > Bolstered by strong performances, this heartfelt family drama deals with love and loss. After losing her mother in a car accident, 12-year-old Belle Lawlor (Vivien Cardone) rebels against her grief-stricken father (Jason London) and goes to live with her maternal grandfather (Peter Coyote) on a small farm. More
  
• Traitor
  ANCHOR BAY Street: Dec. 19 Prebook: Nov. 16 > Superb Mideast-set thriller makes a great vehicle for talented Don Cheadle. In this suspenseful thriller, Don Cheadle plays a devout American Muslim and Special Forces explosives expert working deep undercover to penetrate an Islamic terrorist group planning a series of high-profile bombings. More
  
• Death Race
  UNIVERSAL Street: Dec. 23 Prebook: Now > Adrenaline-charged film boasts good cast and sequences. A reworking of the Roger Corman-produced 1975 schlocker Death Race 2000, pedal-to-the-metal popcorn movie Death Race establishes a new record for high-octane, pyrotechnic thrills. It’s 2012, and with the U. More
  
• Peter & the Wolf
  MAGNOLIA Street: Dec. 9 Prebook: Nov. 11 > Highly stylized, animated film of Sergei Prokofiev’s musical fairy tale. Sergei Prokofiev’s musical fable is strikingly re-imagined in a short film that combines traditional stop-motion animation with current CGI technology. The story will be familiar to adults: Peter is a lonely boy who comes to grips with his fears in order to defeat ... More
  
• Fly Me to the Moon
  SUMMIT/UNIVERSAL Street: Dec. 2 Prebook: Now > Eye-popping design and 3D effects trump thin plot and hackneyed jokes. The first-ever animated feature film in 3D boasts wonderful visual effects (two pairs of 3D glasses are included) but also a thin story line and lame gags. It stars three adolescent flies (voiced by Trevor Gagnon, Philip Daniel Bolden and David Gore) who foil an attempt by R... More
  
• Conjurer
  MONARCH Street: Nov. 25 Prebook: Nov. 3 > Moody but uninvolving horror film eschews cheap shock effects but lacks punch. Following the loss of their unborn child, photographer Shawn Burnett (Andrew Bowen) and his devastated wife Helen (Maxine Bahns) decide to leave the city behind and start fresh in rural surroundings. More
  
• Dog Gone
  SCREEN MEDIA/UNIVERSAL Available now > Lively family film is pleasantly old-fashioned. This innocuous throwback to Disney family films of decades ago stars Luke Benward as 12-year-old Owen, who rescues a mistreated golden retriever from three clueless criminals (French Stewart, Kevin Farley and Kelly Perrine) who have hidden stolen gems somewhere on the pooch. More
  
• Encounters at the End of the World
  IMAGE Street: Nov. 18 Prebook: Oct. 21 > Absorbing film looks at a little-seen corner of the world. German filmmaker Werner Herzog takes an absorbing but bleak look at life in Antarctica. He arrives at the U.S.-run McMurdo Station, which looks to him like “an ugly mining town filled with construction sites. More
  
• Horror Effects
  SUB ROSA STUDIOS Available now > Fascinating how-to guide for aspiring gory-movie makers. In this relatively short documentary, makeup and FX specialist Tom Savini—whose work dominated the early splatter-film era—gives step-by-step lessons in creating gory, realistic special effects. Savini, whose credits include Dawn of the Dead, Creepshow and Friday the 13th, is a living legen... More
  
• Flashbacks of a Fool
  ANCHOR BAY/STARZ Street: Nov. 4 Prebook: now > Conventional rites-of-passage yarn tinged with a little A Star Is Born. Faded movie star Joe Scott (Daniel Craig), dissipated by a life of excess, reflects on his early mistakes following the death of an old friend. Joe’s reverie takes him back to ’70s Britain, where, as an ambitious young man, one of his complex romantic relationsh... More
  
• Chill
  LIONSGATE Street: Nov. 4 Prebook: now > Slowly paced H.P. Lovecraft adaptation delivers just enough visceral thrills. Funereally paced but sufficiently creepy to attract shudder-film fans, Chill is loosely adapted from H.P. Lovecraft’s often-anthologized short storyCool Air. An aspiring writer (Thomas Calabro) goes to work for a former scientist (Shaun Kurtz) who suffers from a rare d... More
  
• Dear Me
  OCEAN PARK Street: Nov. 4 Prebook: now > Innocuous rom-com maintains brisk pace but delivers few laughs. This too-cute-by-half romantic comedy tries hard—very hard—to score but just misses the net. Gardener-cum-advertising copywriter Samantha Billows (Sarah Thompson) copes with anxiety by describing all her feelings in a supposedly anonymous blog. More
  
• The Other Half
  BFS Street: Oct. 28 Prebook: now > Bland British comedy has picturesque locations but low laugh quotient. This British rom-com probably won’t make a dent on American home viewers, who won’t recognize stars Danny Dyer and Gillian Kearney and don’t share the U.K.’s passion for soccer, which drives the plot. More
  
• The Polar Express Presented in 3D
  WARNER Street: Oct. 28 Prebook: now > 3D element adds another plus for this recent Christmas classic. First released as an Imax 3D attraction during 2004’s holiday season, this imaginative adaptation of Chris Van Allsburg’s children’s book has become a Christmas perennial, earning tens of millions with each successive reissue. More
  
• Meet Dave
  FOX Street: Nov. 25 Prebook: Oct. 29 > Thinly plotted Eddie Murphy vehicle relies heavily on physical comedy for laughs. Meet Dave finds Eddie Murphy playing the teeny-tiny captain of a crew of bite-sized aliens traveling to Earth in a human-sized spaceship that looks just like him. Dispatched to our planet in search of water for their parched world, the extraterrestrials think they know ho... More
  
• Still Life
  NEW YORKER Street: Oct. 14 Prebook: now > Brilliant, ethereal look at contemporary Chinese life. Glacially paced but hypnotically fascinating, this beautifully photographed Chinese drama sports a minimalist plot revolving around the submersion of an old village as part of a massive hydroelectric construction project. More
  
• The Edge of Heaven
  STRAND Street: Oct. 14 Prebook: now > Captivating foreign film about unlikely relationships and universal truths. During the Turkish holiday of Bayram, fate intertwines the lives of six people with divergent backgrounds, resulting in the forging of unlikely relationships in Turkey and Germany. Director Fatih Akin doesn’t overemphasize cultural differences and sociopolitical observatio... More
  
• Dance of the Dead
  LIONSGATE Street: Oct. 14 Prebook: now > Teen zombie comedy borrows liberally from other horror films but is infectious fun. This teen-populated zombie comedy, inspired by Shaun of the Dead, among others, contains just enough head-shattering, limb-severing and gut-munching to satisfy the 18 to 25 target audience, although in some places, it seems oddly restrained. More
  
• Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
  WARNER Street: Oct. 28 Prebook: Sept. 23 > Abigail Breslin is delightful as the plucky 'American Girl’ in this squeaky-clean dramedy. A nostalgic yarn that balances Nancy Drew-type melodrama with emotional authenticity, this disarming film makes good family entertainment. Its youthful protagonist—played by Abigail Breslin with the perfect combination of vulnerability and spunk&#... More
  
• The Last House in the Woods
  LIONSGATE Street: Oct. 14 Prebook: Sept. 17 > Derivative, old-fashioned Italian gorefest doesn’t stint on the blood and guts. With its nihilistic sociopathy, sadistic misogyny, uneven acting and cheesy gore effects, this Italian-made horror film recalls the ’80s chillers directed by that country’s Umberto Lenzi and Lucio Fulci. More