Not Another Teen Movie (2001)

★★★
Not Another Teen Movie is a total riot. It's vulgar, crass, smutty and thoroughly unrefined, but darn it all it's hilarious too often to dislike. Much like his lead character's gift for sloppily applying paint to a canvas and creating a simplistic yet comprehensible picture, director Joel Gallen hastily fills his frame with gags that run the gamut from tasteless to bizarre, yet it all comes together to form a coherent story that smuggles in every familiar teen archetype from over a dozen movies while stitching together the plots of She's All That and Varsity Blues. The result resembles a quilt of oddly mismatched colors and patterns that at least functions in its primary purpose of providing warmth. I suppose we can thank Keenan Ivory Wayans's Scary Movie for setting the stage for this kind of oversexualized parody.

Unfaithful (2002)

★★★
I've always viewed Adrian Lyne as a high-rent version of Zalman King. Whereas Lyne's films explore the darker side of human sexuality with tactful awareness, King's movies present shallow characters who get naughty with each other just for the sake of it (Delta of Venus). The two men collaborated on 9½ Weeks, but Lyne's direction overcame the premise's silliness. From that point on, Lyne has produced an interesting series of films about characters driven by lustful desires and their destructive effects on everyone involved. Fatal Attraction was a harrowing look at obsession, while Lolita examined the pedophilic tendencies of a middle-aged man. Unfaithful is about a housewife who cheats on her husband, her feelings about the affair and her husband's reaction to it.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016)

★★★★
13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is the kind of movie I want to see Michael Bay make more often. I don't mean he should make more war movies, but rather he should commit to showing respect for the subject matter and audience first, and then deploy the kind of dizzying action scenes on which he has built his reputation. He is certainly capable of it. He made the excellent The Rock early in his career, and the more recent (and grounded) Pain & Gain showed what he could accomplish if he just focused on the story and didn't succumb to his bad habits. He does that more often than not. Pearl Harbor was as bloated as it was overly sentimental, and his five entries of the Transformers franchise are mind-numbingly stupid. I walked into this movie—based on the true story of the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya—knowing full well how much Bay could botch this up, and I was stunned by how well he handles the story, the action and the characters. Just imagine how much better Pearl Harbor could have been if he had brought the same level of commitment to that story as he did here.

The Amityville Horror (1979)

★★★
I read the book The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson sometime in 1989, when I was in 7th grade. It wasn't an assignment. I picked it up off the shelf because I had seen the movie and wanted to compare it to the book. I don't remember the details of the novel anymore, but I do remember enjoying it as a good haunted house story. It purported to be based on the true story of the Lutz family, which fled its home twenty days after moving in. I'm not concerned with whether the book or film was based on fact or fiction.

The Belko Experiment (2017)

★★★
The Belko Experiment invites comparisons to Battle Royale, but rather than let the similarities be a crutch, it runs wild with its premise. The combatants, arena, weapons and powerful overseers are different from the Japanese classic, but with that we get new possibilities for where this story could go. It's really no different than finishing a great television series and then wanting to repeat the experience but not watch the same show all over again. Loved watching the Roddenberry/Berman universe of Star Trek? Check out Babylon 5 or the Battlestar Galactica reboot to get your fix. Liked Chuck Norris's The Delta Force? Then you have to see Executive Decision. Do you want the same kind of suspense that comes with a war of attrition featuring a large cast that will eventually be whittled down to a few? The Belko Experiment delivers.