OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006) was a very funny satire of spy movies not unlike a French Austin Powers. The main difference is that Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath (Jean Dujardin), better known as OSS 117, was actually a character in genuine spy movies in the 1960s and has only now been re-imagined as a spoof of his sexist, racist, and generally stupid personality. Imagine if the James Bond franchise had stopped in the 1960s and someone now made a 007 flick that was a comedy version of the world of spies and starlets. The first OSS 117 was a clever, witty romp with a great lead performance, beautiful locations, and a swinging rhythm, but sequelitis is apparently not purely an American phenomenon as the follow-up, OSS 117: Lost in Rio, isn’t nearly as effective, beating one joke into the ground and missing the near-perfect comic timing of the first movie. It’s far from a complete failure as Dujardin and director Michel Hazanavicius occasionally find the comic beat they maintained more consistently in Nest of Spies, but it’s definitely a less successful mission for France’s bumbling spy.

With The A-Team finally navigating the production gauntlet from hit TV show to feature film, it got us thinking about the best and worst movies that have gone from the small screen to the big one. The fact is that a large majority of them fail to replicate what you enjoyed week after week on TV in one film, but there have

The A-Team joins the list of TV properties that have made the leap to the big screen. Like its predecessors Starsky & Hutch (2004), The Dukes of Hazzard (2005), and even Speed Racer (2008), The A-Team features an iconic vehicle that is beloved by the fans of the original TV series and is as integral to the story as

Remarkably ambitious, stylishly made, and only slightly flawed in its thematic inconsistency, Vincenzo Natali’s Splice is as unique and daring a mainstream horror/sci-fi film as you’ll see all year. Part of the reason for that is that it’s not really a horror film. At least not in the way it’s being advertised. The trailers and TV commercials would have you believe

There is no way that Get Him to the Greek should work. Taking a supporting character whose main purpose as a plot point was to be incredibly annoying and turning him into the lead of his own spin-off feature sounds like a horrible, horrible idea. Characters like Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) in Forgetting Sarah Marshall work best in small doses.

I spent most of the time watching Marmaduke trying to figure out two things. One, who exactly is the target demographic for this supposed family comedy? Two, when did they start letting groups of eight-year-old boys write movies? It may not be complete torture, but Marmaduke continues the crapfest of Summer 2010 with another lazy, boring, forgettable slice of mass-market entertainment. Many

Can a film be too clever? Can it be too polished, refined, and downright beautiful to look at to be effective? Jean-Pierre Jeunet seems to be consciously pushing the boundaries of these questions with Micmacs, a comedy that redlines the whimsical meter to such an extreme that it could be considered disappointing to even Jeunet’s most hardcore fans. There are elements

There are very few people whom one would think less likely to be drug mules than Hasidic Jews. Yet that’s exactly what happened to a group of unassuming kids from Brooklyn in the late 1990s and is now chronicled in the dramatic Holy Rollers, an unusual film about a fish very, VERY far from water. The fish is a twenty-year-old Hasidic Jew named

It’s a sad truth that early filmmakers and film watchers underestimated the longevity of the medium. One hundred years ago, not only was the future of DVD and Blu-ray completely unforeseeable but the cultural importance of preserving film as a historical artifact wasn’t really in place. Consequently, films were often mistreated, forgotten, and abused, to the point that many historians estimate that a

Millions of movie fans shed a tear during their Memorial Day barbecue when they heard that the great Guillermo del Toro had left The Hobbit due to too many issues regarding the constant delays of filming. While a few film journalists correctly noted that it’s ridiculous that this film couldn’t get off the ground fast enough to satisfy del Toro (WTF is