question: At times a tense and provocative thriller, Civic Duty struggles to move beyond its one-note premise.

numbered reviews: 1. laughable and immature
2. The film's anti-Islamic tone, intended to show Terry's frame of mind, detracts from whatever helpful message the filmmakers may have hoped to impart.
3. A sharp 9/11 twist on Rear Window paranoia, Civic Duty is all the more effective for its chilling plausibility.
4. An all-around disappointment.
5. Once the story's events reach a climactic pitch, the film stagnates in place for too long and loses momentum.
6. This little paranoid thriller...does a superb job exploring how middle class feelings of entitlement to the American Dream are reflected in post 9/11 racial stereotyping.
7. It's an ineptly put-together concoction that, despite its political musings, offers nothing new to the viewer.
8. Dig deep down into some bad movies and you occasionally find a good idea at the center. Civic Duty isn't one of those movies.
9. Canadian director Jeff Renfroe builds only off-the-shelf suspense as Terry's suspicions increase.
10. Echoes of Rear Window abound, but any audience sympathy for the self-appointed detective is thwarted by Krause's typically sulky performance.


question: While certainly not for the faint of heart, Wetlands transcends its shock value with sweetness, heart, and subversive wit.

numbered reviews: 1. John Waters said that only through laughter you can open your mind to new and different points of view. I think that's what Wetlands is all about.
2. Wetlands is provocative, a test for the audience, and just when you think you've seen it all, the movie will challenge you in a whole new level.
3. Carla Juri easy on the eyes, but I got tired of the dead end flashbacks and fantasy sequences. I did not care for most of the gross-out scenes and I got tired of Helen's incessant narcissism, naďveté and irresponsibility as well.
4. "Wetlands" tells a fairly conventional story in about the most unconventional ways imaginable.
5. Even if Wetlands were far less entertaining, it would still be a calling card for Juri's star-is-born performance. The beguiled viewer watches her and thinks, "Bingo!"
6. The right viewer will find it a singular, even somewhat moving experience. And no film will provide better motivation for you to clean the bathroom this weekend.
7. So joyfully perverse, its shocks sometimes seem almost playful, which is refreshing as Helen works out her kinks by celebrating them.
8. A big blast of filthy energy.
9. Sets new standards for the frank spotlighting of bodily functions.
10. An absurdly simplistic family drama; the movie's apparent audacity isn't even skin deep.


question: Better Off Dead is an anarchic mix of black humor and surreal comedy, anchored by John Cusack's winsome, charming performance.

numbered reviews: 1. A unique, kooky gem.
2. Unfortunately, only about half of the many jokes and gags in the film are actually funny.
3. Full of...goofy ironies, and while it ain't Moličre, it is a pretty great entry in the teen-comedy genre. [Blu-ray]
4. Hilarious and brilliantly deadpan.
5. perhaps the greatest movie of all time
6. Forget Citizen Kane. As a matter of history, this seminal film is unquestionably the finest work of cinema ever made. Required viewing for all students and fans of the art form.
7. I've rarely met anyone who didn't secretly love it passionately.
8. Classic '80s Cusack vehicle.
9. strives to be offbeat and sometimes works itself into a sweat doing so. The humor often hits the bullseye, however...
10. I love this movie, with its bizarre tangents and dream sequences.


question: Featuring Robert Mitchum's formidable performance as child-hunting preacher, The Night of the Hunter is a disturbing look at good and evil.

numbered reviews:
1. I can't think of another film that so deftly established that what you were watching inhabited the space between waking and dreaming.
2. A remarkably ambitious mix of realism and mysticism, terror and tenderness, stark tragedy and spiritual uplift.
3. In the pantheon of great screen villains, none is quite so despicable as Harry Powell, the heavy-lidded serial-killer-turned-preacher played by Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton's classic thriller.
4. Though purely homegrown, Hunter contains no social critique -- the issues are elemental, the morality biblical, the trials Homeric. In terms of cinematic texture, it's a hound from hell.
5. Any actor who wants to play a character with a touch of evil should study [Mitchum's] performance the way a rabbinical student studies the Torah.
6. As crude, direct, rattling, mystifying and exciting as American movies get.
7. Mitchum is magnetic.
8. This thriller is one of the great masterpieces of American cinema, a movie so strangely repellent, so poetic and so utterly hypnotic that it sadly never found an audience.
9. A stunning piece of work, with the shadows of German expressionism and a compositional sense comparable to the work of George Stevens: it trumps its own noir cynicism with a thrilling and plausible idealism in the final moments.
10. This southern American Gothic chiller remains both gloriously cinematic and utterly terrifying almost 60 years after it was made.