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David Mumpower:

Fright Night was a pleasant surprise for me in that I had not expected the re-make to pay tribute to the original while exceeding it across the board. This is a silly film premise and yet there is some genuine fear provided throughout the proceedings. David Tennant and Colin Farrell are clearly having the time of their lives and that translates to me as the viewer. I was dragged to the film, but I found myself walking out of the theater thinking that I would buy it when Fright Night is released on Blu-Ray. And the cameo is a great touch.

Bobby Fischer Against the World is a captivating documentary that engrossed me due to its enigmatic subject. Bobby Fischer was one of the symbolic embodiments of the Cold War, someone whose showdown with a Russian champion superseded the Olympics in many ways. To this day, the idea of a chess tournament being a media sensation is laughable and yet that is exactly what occurred. The interviews with the people who trained Fischer for the competition particularly fascinated me in that Fischer was somewhat ahead of his time in terms of physical conditioning, a weird statement to make regarding a chess player. Of course, the crux of the story is that Fischer's self-loathing was singularly unique, an anti-Semitic Jew. I don't even understand how such a thing is possible, but I guess the lies his mother told about the identity of his father caused him to experience a psychotic break that in no way impacted his mastery of a chess board. Watching this documentary makes me appreciate all the more that Josh Waitzkin, the subject of Searching for Bobby Fischer, has grown into a well adjusted adult. Chess savants go crazy as often as not.

X-Men: First Class offers a star turn by Michael Fassbender, who gets everything right as Magneto. Similarly, James McAvoy's lively interpretation of Professor Xavier as something of a cad, at least when it comes to chasing skirts, also breathes fresh life into a character the comics industry as a whole seems to find boring these days. BOP's Pete Kilmer has sold me a lot of X-Men comics over the past few years and Xavier is in shockingly few of them. Save for January Jones, who wouldn't know inflection if it knocked her up on the set, the X-Men prequel is a triumph. I love the way that Nightcrawler was developed as an unstoppable badass in the second movie then the same skill set (that of his father) was used for the purposes of villainy in this one. That's a tremendous implementation of established assets.

Source Code is my favorite film of 2011 to date. This is a title for which I had few expectations in spite of its director, Duncan Jones (who helmed Moon). Jake Gyllenhaal is someone I haven't enjoyed since Bubble Boy and I found his most recent project, Price of Persia: The Sands of Time absolutely excruciating...and I LIKE those videogames. I struggled to envision a way that I would enjoy a project where he was onscreen almost the entire film and yet I was immediately captivated by a very clever science fiction story premise. Yes, I guessed the ending within 10 minutes but that in no way prevented me from thinking along with Jones every step of the way. This is exactly the sort of cerebral action flick that I wish Hollywood could release every other weekend. Instead, it will probably be another 18 months before I watch a sci-fi title that is anywhere near the level of this. Source Code is my sort of logic puzzle. It actually reminded me of Cube, which is high praise from me.

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