The absurdly underrated Joshua (Fox) joins the ranks of "evil kid" movies like The Omen, Village Of The Damned, and The Exorcist, but those other movie play it relatively safe by couching their stories in the supernatural. By removing the supernatural element, Joshua directly confronts the real anxiety at the core of these movies: Namely, that adults can't entirely control how their kids develop, and sometimes the little buggers don't turn out as planned…
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.
