Orlando Jones

The Replacements is a hokey mistake of a football film, a mishmash collage of one-dimensional characters, rampant stereotypes of cultures and races, cliched emotional statements of purpose, and Keanu Reeves wishing for The Matrix sequel to start principal photography. The story is loosely based around the pro football players' strike in 1987 and a rag-tag team of replacement football players taking up the reins of professional play for a variety of teams with names like the Washington Sentinels. Keanu Reeves stars as Shane Falco, a has-been football college player looking for redemption. Gene Hackman dons a fedora like Tom Landry and speaks with gusto like a certain coach in Hoosiers.

Continue reading: The Replacements Review

This time out, we get American Pie alum Chris Klein and the saucy Heather Graham in what is undoubtedly the crudest film we will ever see. That is, at least until Tom Green takes center stage in Freddy Got Fingered later this year.

Continue reading: Say It Isn't So Review

It's nigh time we added another sparkling gem to the 30-picture oeuvre that is The Brendan Fraser Experience... and that gem is Bedazzled, a limp remake of a 1967 Dudley Moore vehicle -- a Dudley Moore vehicle which was also co-written by Dudley Moore. Just so you know we're working with some stellar raw material here.

Continue reading: Bedazzled (2000) Review

Then again, the original Time Machine wasn't really anything special - a bunch of bad makeup effects and a weak plot. This time out the makeup's better but the story's a total loss.

Continue reading: The Time Machine (2002) Review

In Evolution, you get David Duchovny, (former) star of TV's The X-Files who has failed miserably to cross over to any kind of success in film. Julianne Moore, former independent darling before she started making movies like The Lost World and Hannibal. Orlando Jones, 7-Up pitchman and easily typecast goofball. And Seann William Scott, whose most visible role was as a stoner in Dude, Where's My Car?

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It's a rare treat when a movie that looks, from its synopsis and previews, to be formulaic tripe turns out to be fresh, spirited and truly entertaining. "Drumline" is just such a movie.

Built on the chassis of a sports-underdog plot, this energetic, hip, feel-good flick stars wiry, charismatic newcomer Nick Cannon as Devon, a cocky freshman marching band drummer from Harlem who arrives at Atlanta A&T expecting to become the campus king of sticks and snares without having to pay his dues.

The kid is a spectacular drummer, as he proves during an early audition scene. He flawlessly, boldly rat-a-tat-tats his way through the robust piece the bandleader (Orlando Jones) expected him to play, then adds a little solo on the end just to show off. It isn't long before he's butting heads with the drill-sergeant-like upperclassman who leads the drumline, and that guy's not about to let some snot-nosed hot shot treat his section like a back-up band for showboating solos.

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A comical and retrospective memoir of segregation and discrimination in America's golden age of denial, "Liberty Heights" is director Barry Levinson's fourth movie built around his memories of Baltimore in the 1950s and '60s.

Told from the perspective of Ben Kurtzman (Ben Foster), the younger of two brothers living in an almost exclusively Jewish enclave of the city, the foundation for Levinson's story is the brothers' experimentation with the era's cultural polarization.

Ben's school has just been desegregated and he befriends a pretty new black student named Sylvia (Rebekah Johnson), something that doesn't sit well with either kid's folks.

Continue reading: Liberty Heights Review