Released contemporaneously with Neil Jordan's more reserved vigilante movie The Brave One, James Wan's Death Sentence (Fox) couldn't be further from Jordan's elegant, tasteful character piece, and in a way, it serves the genre better. The film is pure rotgut, an over-the-top '70s-style exploitation flick about a suburban father (Kevin Bacon) who avenges
his son's random death at the hands of gang members. Wan, who also directed the original Saw movie, cares little for respectability; instead, he goes straight for the stomach lining, and his film is simultaneously exhilarating and repulsive…
The 2007 remake of 1957's 3:10 To Yuma (Lions Gate) boasts an awkwardly unlikely ending, and it strains to cram extra characterization into what was once a lean Elmore Leonard story, but it's still a beautifully shot, textbook psychological Western, with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe facing off as equally grim scions of good and evil…
It's a pity Danny Boyle's Sunshine (Fox) devolves into a by-the-numbers space-horror film, with a physical antagonist stalking the crew of a ship trying to reignite the faltering sun. Until the action goes all Event Horizon, it's a breathtakingly stark, gorgeous man-vs.-nature movie, in which the near-inevitability of death-by-sun hangs oppressively over then atmospheric proceedings…
Sony's indescribably terrible Korean-funded, L.A.-shot CGI-monster movie Dragon Wars (a.k.a. D-War) would have been a shoo-in for our "Worst films of 2007" collection, except that it's awful enough to be hilarious. From the reams of†incoherent exposition about transforming giant spirit-snakes to the ludicrous Gap-model acting, it's a MST3K-style hoot from start to finish, with a pretty good dragons-on-military fight smack in the middle.
