Bitter Balcony

There are movies that entertain with action, some that entertain with comedy, and there is the rare movie that makes you think. Yes, there are some of us who find the act of thinking entertaining. We’re the ones who find pop-culture movies about lame vampires in love with personality-less high school chicks unbearable. People who watch explosion after explosion while special effects cover every inch of the screen are a little boring. “Primer” is that rare movie that entertains while it makes you think – and does so without gimmicks or a multi-trillion dollar budget.

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To Live and Die in LA

After two legendary films, “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist,” William Friedkin exploded into the early ‘70s Hollywood scene as the hottest upstart not named Coppola. Two Oscar nominations, one of them a win for Best Director for “The French Connection,” not to mention the success and controversy “The Exorcist” gathered, Friedkin was what M. Night Shyamalan was in 1999 after “The Sixth Sense,” a new powerhouse filmmaker with everything going his way.

Vincenzo Natali made a name for himself in 1997 with his cult classic Cube, about a group of strangers trapped inside a gigantic Rubik's cube maze. The strangers are locked in without an answer to their incarceration, and every attempt to escape lands them into lethal, booby trapped rooms. In what starts as a bizarre coincidence, every stranger possesses an expertise that might aid them find a potential exit. Cube is a well-crafted, riddle-laden story that tips it's hat to The Twilight Zone. Nothing, released in 2003, is Natali's entry into comedy that continues his fascination with the groundbreaking t.v series. However, Nothing is perhaps the dorkiest sci-fi film not named The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai. It 's like if Harry and Lloyd had stumbled on Rod Sterling's Samsonite case on their way to Colorado.

You all know director D.J Caruso for making Shia LaBeouf into a star with his Goosebumps-like re-imagination of Rear Window, Disturbia. It was a steady, simple and fast paced little thriller that didn't insult the intelligence of its audience(the duo would leave that for last year's absurd Eagle Eye). For Caruso it was a modest improvement to a string of films that were awful(Taking Lives) and forgettable(Two For The Money). It is upsetting to see a commercial director with flashes of greatness in each of these films to put out such mediocrity, but I still think that he has a great movie in him somehow.