Comedy
Rod Lott
Ken Russell was either a genius or a madman, but more likely both. The iconoclastic filmmaker made movies that were loved by many — Tommy, Altered States, The Devils, Crimes of Passion — but despised by many, many more. Regardless of your opinion of them, one cannot deny they are different.

Comedy
Rod Lott
Don't call them "zombies" — call them "dissidents." That's one of a few well-aimed bits of political satire that populate the Spanish-language romp Juan of the Dead, but worry not: They're used sparingly and none come heavy-handed — a Castro polemic, this isn't.

Drama
Rod Lott
Judging by the 1962 portrayed by The Chapman Report, everybody smoked cigarettes, LPs of poetry readings were a hot commodity, and the female orgasm had yet to be invented. While this film from legendary old-Hollywood director George Cukor (My Fair Lady) was determined to be earnest and serious in its time, it's quite a hoot today.

Action
Rod Lott
Directed by Dante Lam (The Stool Pigeon), the action-thriller The Viral Factor revolves around the world’s last two surviving samples of the smallpox virus, one of which is an arm’s length away from being used to develop a biological weapon to unleash of five of the world’s seven continents.

Television series
Rod Lott
Sins and sons — those are the driving themes for the sixth season of Dexter, arguably the anchor of the Showtime cable network. Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall in his Golden Globe-winning role) is a Miami Metro PD forensics analyst who moonlights as a serial killer of serial killers.

Thriller
Rod Lott
Beer brewing can be a risky business. Consider Alfred Heineken: In 1983, the CEO of the Dutch corporation that bears his name was kidnapped and held for a sizable ransom, all of which is dramatized in the near-epic film The Heineken Kidnapping. It's more engrossing than its generic title lets on.

Thriller
Rod Lott
What do you get when a prosecutor, a police officer, a journalist, an accountant, a judge, a bodyguard, a paramedic and one unemployed junkie skank are drugged, shackled and forced to play a game of survival involving man-eating sharks? The Asylum Home Entertainment's Shark Week, not to be confused with the Discovery Channel programming people look forward to.

Horror
Rod Lott
Found-footage movies are no longer novel, but they're cheap to make, so expect to see many, many more shoot out Hollywood's pipeline. As long as concepts are tweaked, however, surprises like Chronicle can occur.

Comedy
Harrison Lott
Editor’s note: For Thunderstruck, the new family comedy starring the Thunder’s Kevin Durant, it struck us that, since the movie is really aimed at pre-teen and teenaged KD fans, who better to review it than an avowed Thunder fan of that age? Here with his review is guest critic Harrison Lott, a 15-year-old student at Edmond Memorial High School.

Drama
Rod Lott
When Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam film, Full Metal Jacket, hit theaters in the summer of 1987, I was all of 16 years old. Even I could tell it was far better than Oliver Stone’s Platoon, which by then had won four Academy Awards; by comparison, Jacket would be nominated for one, Best Adapted Screenplay, and lose it to The Last Emperor.