Dinner for Schmucks, a remake of the 1998 French farce Le Diner de Cons (The Dinner Game), reunites the extremely lovable duo of Paul Rudd and Steve Carell. Readers of Cinerina know my feelings on Carell – an actor even before he is a comedian, Carell can swing his characters out in a wide outrageous [...]

After seeing Angelina Jolie and Liev Schrieber talk about Salt and its deep textual layers, complex character stories, and levels of deception at their Comic-Con panel, I got the impression that this movie was going to be a twisty thriller with surprises and depth. After seeing Salt, I’d have to amend that to “Salt is [...]

Please Remove Your Shoes is a tiny little documentary centered around the historical failures of the FAA and airlines in managing effective air travel security (Exhibits A & B, Pan Am 103 and 9/11) and the continued, even less-effective tenure of the TSA. Produced, directed, and edited by Rob De Gaudio, this film is clearly [...]

Please Remove Your Shoes is a tiny little documentary centered around the historical failures of the FAA and airlines in managing effective air travel security (Exhibits A & B, Pan Am 103 and 9/11) and the continued, even less-effective tenure of the TSA. Produced, directed, and edited by Rob De Gaudio, this film is clearly [...]

The premise of Inception is difficult to convey, but worth the effort to ken. A technology exists, called “shared dreaming,” that allows two or more people to enter the same dream, and therefore the subconscious of the source of that dream. From there, the guest(s) in the dreamer’s world can access info, plant idea, build [...]

If you haven’t seen Grease, somehow, but intend to break yourself in with this sing-along, be prepared to wonder what all the fuss is about. Grease is a girlhood rite of passage, a high school theatre staple, and a cheesy classic, but it is quite terrible. The film version of course being better known than [...]

You might think, looking at a poster featuring John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill, that Cyrus is going to be a broad and raunchy comedy. It is indeed a comedy, and there are a few amusingly inappropriate moments, but this is a bona-fide dark, mostly smart psychological art-house comedy. No, I’m serious. Reilly plays a [...]

Talk about a movie that needed never to be made. If they had made this movie exactly as it is, but never tried to tie it to the original franchise of the 1980’s, it might have slipped your notice, but it wouldn’t have had to live up to the idea of a remake. Leaving aside [...]

A key indicator as to whether or not you will be at all interested in this movie is whether or not you liked Russell Brand playing this character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. If you didn’t see that film, Brand plays Aldous Snow, extreme-id-surfing rock and roller party boy sex machine. There he played an abrasive [...]

If you have ever played/watched the video game Prince of Persia, you know that it is a lush-looking sandbox game with various devices for clambering around the medieval streets of Persia, picking up stuff, and getting into fights. A unique do-over aspect of the game manages to wend its way into the plot of this [...]