the @popcollin reviews

By now you’ve no doubt heard how Jim Carrey has disavowed his involvement in Kick-Ass 2, the sequel to 2010’s raucous and entertaining film about vigilante superheroes. He maintains it’s because of the level of violence. I think it’s also because he woke up and realized that it’s just a […]

Back in December of 1989, a movie arrived in theaters with so much potential it was almost unfair. Starring Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman, and Matthew Broderick, Family Business should have been a slam dunk. And it was even directed by none other than Sidney Lumet. How could this thing fail, […]

Hot on the heels of my semi-annual rundown of the best and worst in movies, we already have a leader in the clubhouse for the worst movie of the next six months. I can’t even begin to wrap my head around how terrible The Lone Ranger is. It’s a monumental […]

Say what you will about the Twilight saga, there were actually some decent moments in it. Sure, it was soap opera-ish, but the action was often pretty solid, and who can find fault with sweeping vistas of the Pacific Northwest? Mmmm, pine trees. Heck, Totalfilm even put Twilight on its […]

There are bad movies, and there are bad movies. And then, far down below all of them, where Adam Sandler even fears to tread, there is Playing for Keeps— perhaps the most painfully awful, pathetically illogical, and (get this!) downright offensive movie made in recent memory. It’s not inconceivable to […]

In the summer of 1984, America was smack-dab in the middle of the Cold War. Less than a year removed from the harrowing The Day After on TV, some of us were sure the commie Russians could, in fact, launch an attack against us at any time. So when Red […]

How ridiculously bad is Alex Cross? Counting the ways is too easy (and you’d run out of fingers, which would only be fitting considering how the first victim in this clichéd mess meets her end.) Based (very loosely) on the novel Cross by James Patterson, it features Tyler Perry (sans […]

When Eddie Murphy burst onto the scene in the early 80s, it was his mouth that led the charge. For a solid decade, he was one of the brightest (and filthiest) comedy minds out there, and the more he talked, the funnier he was. So why on Earth would he […]

I’m pretty sure director Rod Lurie (Resurrecting the Champ) didn’t set out to make a film where the lead characters are so completely unsympathetic that their ultra-violent redneck tormentors begin to look like heroes. But that’s what we get with Straw Dogs, Lurie’s silly remake of Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 near-classic. […]

The tagline for the ‘found-footage’ space thriller Apollo 18 is “There’s a reason we’ve never gone back to the moon.” Hopefully Hollywood will realize there’s a reason it should never make another found-footage thriller. Or at least one as silly as Apollo 18. After The Blair Witch Project scared the […]