I've said it before and I'll say it again: there is nothing more disappointing than a film that throws away a perfectly good premise only to find itself subsequently wallowing in mediocrity. Take for evidence the last-gasp-of-summer thriller “Apollo 18,” which lurched into theaters recently. Its promotional clips and trailers all looked tantalizing; it billed itself as the unholy offspring of “Apollo 13” and “Alien"

Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs,” released forty years ago, is perhaps the most thematically confused thriller ever made. On the surface, it’s a standard fish-out-of-water/revenge story: a stuffy professor, David (Dustin Hoffman) and his lithe, blonde, British housewife Amy (Susan George) are tormented by hooligans—including Amy’s ex-boyfriend—when they move back to her rustic England hometown. At first, these roughnecks, who

The 68th Venice Film Festival was a pandemonium of pushy, autograph-hounding journalists, hapless stargazers and underage fashionistas talking their way into exclusive parties. Walking along the beach, as the late-summer sun beat down on the Lido, it was easy to forget that this festival was about movies of differing shapes and sizes, where big Hollywood productions vied with quirky indies and inaccessible foreign productions.