Possibly one of the most intriguing and harsh viewing experiences of my life, Sunshine, as shown in the film, manages to bathe you in light. Not just in light, but in sound as well. The whole experiences engulfs the senses until your mind reels and you leave the film, jarred and unsure about your very existance.

The tale of a second international space mission to revitalize our dying son in some near future, the film plays out like a combination of The Core and Event Horizon, but avoids the abject and horrid stupidity of those two films.

Cillian Murphy (of 28 Days Later and Red Eye fame) and Chris Evans (of Fantastic Four fame) lead up a cast that includes Hong Kong star Michelle Yeoh and Rose Byrne as astronauts heading into the sun to deliver a Big Bang-creating payload to create a new star and bring Earth out of a constant winter. As they pass out of the range of communications, they receive a distress call from the first mission to restart the sun, lost years before.

After debate, the fateful decision is made to attempt to retrieve the second payload to help assure the success of the experimental payload, leading to the inevitable misfortune of such a film.

The conflicts set up, the bleak character drama in the isolation of enclosed spaces and depths of space becomes numbing and claustrophobic, the toll being taken on everyone as circumstances careen out of control.

The visuals that Danny Boyle manages are both frenetic, beautiful, and disturbing. There is an amazing clarity only broken by blasts of light that burn into your mind, coupled with the movie's amazing sound work and score by Underworld. The sound buries you as you watch the film, shocking emotional responses out your brain.

The tone, the isolation, the slow dread, and the mindbending conclusion are enough to recommend the movie on, but this film is more than all those parts, a beautiful and heartwrenching masterwork of slow and deliberate storytelling. We feel every moment of the film, every character's emotion, every death, and we, ourselves, are left feeling the intense doom of deep space.

This bit of theatrical genius is one of the great moments of cinema history and stupid is the man who doesn't pay fealty to Boyle's work.

Bridesmaids has gotten praise far and wide, largely comparing it to The Hangover (for women), the most common move in advertising today. Everything is compared to The Hangover because... I don't know. Why is it always The Hangover? It was a passable and amusing comedy, but the constant hype and overestimation of the importance of the film has led to me hating the movie's very existence. "The funniest movie since The Hangover" isn't an impressive statement, even less so when it was being used mere months after the movie's release. And, again, we have a case of a film being drastically overhyped, both in comparison to The Hangover and on its own.

What Bridesmaids actually is is fairly unoriginal; it follows the same beats and treads in the same steps of most friendship and romantic comedies that have come before it. The major difference in this case is that the protagonist and her friends and foes are all women.

A sad woman, played by Kristin Wiig, has a best friend, played by Maya Rudolph, who gets engaged. She, of course, will be her friend's maid-of-honor. But her friend has another friend, the rich wife of her future husband's boss, who seems perfect in every way. This woman, played by Rose Byrne, takes over more and more of the wedding and her friend's attention as everything Wiig's character does falls apart. It breaks into all-out war between the two and the friendship between bride and maid-of-honor is torn asunder until everyone ends up friends again at the end. It begs and borrows bits from every comedy, like Wedding Crashers, as well as a wealth of romantic comedies with cliched plot points throughout. There's a rare laugh, but the occurance seems to happen too rarely, much the movie being downbeat and depressing.

Not as relying as heavily on the comedy of awkwardness (something I loathe) as some of its movie bretheren, the film has a sad tone to it; somehow the flawed, schmucky protagonist doesn't seem quite so pathetic when it's a guy. Probably because, while dim-witted, the guys usually don't go out of their way to appear as sadsacks who let the world trample them. Wiig, having written the film, obviously knew what she wanted out of the character and it was apparently not to like her or find her funny as much as just pity her. Wiig is a cute woman. Maya Rudolph is generally likable, especially on her new TV series "Up All Night". These are women that are funny and, in some scenes, that shines through, but much of this movie owes silliness and hype for its success.

The cloying story plays out as it should, and Wiig even finds a man along the way. Her and the queen of all bitches, Rose Byrne, even become friends. Sometimes, it almost felt like "Light Comedy Mad Libs For Women".

I was kind of hoping Rose Byrne would show some comedy chops in this film, as I love her as a dramatic actress. Sadly, she was relegated to the role of straight woman, though I was glad to see Wendi McLendon-Covey, whose career has been far too quiet since "Reno 911!".

All in all, I feel like the components may have been there for a successful comedy, but the movie either played it too sad or too cliched or too similar to everything else to make an impression. A few laughs about women hitting each other in the tits with tennis balls hardly make up for what was, otherwise, a kind of depressing experience. Some will think the movie is great, but I can't imagine what they're seeing that I'm not.

Drive is that rare and mythical film that leaves you thinking about the movie for a long time after you walk out of the theater. And this is no Inception; there are no drastic twists or mindfuck plotlines to make you go back over the experience to better understand what you've witnessed. No, this is a straightforward movie paced and stylized in a way that's amazing in its simplicity.

Director Nicholas Winding Refn's earlier film Bronson was similar in the sense of awe elicited through direction and stylization. That was a reinvention of the tone of British cinema and Drive is a reinvention of the American crime drama. Inspirations, from Clint Eastwood's "The Man With No Name", Bullitt, and the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, have been listed endlessly, but the specific films that this movie calls to my mind are the works of Michael Mann and William Friedkin's To Live And Die In L.A. Much about the movie is a throwback to 80's crime cinema, from the upbeat electronic pop soundtrack to the moody lighting to the neon pink cursive title font. The amoral antihero at the center of the story is another callback to Mann's Thief or William Petersen's character in To Live And Die. You can feel the inspirations running through the film, fueling it, and giving it a texture you haven't seen in modern movies.

Ryan Gosling plays the Driver, a nameless stuntman who, by night, is a wheelman-for-hire. The plot revolves around his ties to a set of mobsters and their ensuing revenge after he decides to help the criminal husband of a woman he falls in love with. The Driver then inflicts his own bloody vengeance on everyone he comes across. You would think that this would, then, fall under the mileau of the typical "tough guy" role. Instead, Gosling's character is alternately emotionless and sweetly child-like; he is a sociopath with a heart of gold, helping a woman and child in a way that suggests some dark past that echoes their situation. He goes about his brutal attempts to set things right with what seems the best of intentions.

Gosling plays the role perfectly. I can't imagine what his process was to reach the decision on how to play the character, but he chose wisely. He is the sturdy center that the movie hangs on. The rest of the small cast also delivers excellent performances. Bryan Cranston plays a worn-down father figure with grimy aplomb, while the usually-comedic Albert Brooks plays a mobster with both a sadness and a vicious streak that has never existed in anything he's done before; as much as I love Defending Your Life, this is the role of his lifetime. Carey Mulligan beautifully plays the neighbor/love interest of the Driver with a quiet simplicity, her elfin face delivering much of her performance through glances and smiles. Chrstina Hendricks and Ron Perlman have surprisingly small roles, but their talents help give the moments they're on screen more import.

The pacing of the film is tight, to say the least. There's not a shot in the movie that doesn't belong, nor a minute that could be cut. It's not non-stop action, by any standard, and there are countless long, quiet moments in the film that play out slowly and deliberately. This is more art film than crime drama or action flick. But there are those bursts of beautiful driving choreography and snaps of violence that punctuate the long, silent moments where Refn builds atmosphere.

Existential and fatalistic, the film isn't for everyone. Those looking for action and excitement might leave disappointed; the squeamish may reel away from the film's gore. But those who do love film, who can appreciate an artistic touch and noir-ish gloom as much as they can a car chase will find endless things to love here. It is a movie that needs to be seen multiple times and thoroughly digested before you mine out all of its mysteries. I already can't wait to see it again.

Your Highness is a double-negative; whatever there is about the film that might be good or worthwhile is cancelled out by all the parts that aren't really worth the time and trouble. I'm sure everyone must have had a great time making the film, but that's hardly a reason to spend millions of dollars to make the thing. Ostensibly, it's about entertaining the audience with some vulgar, somewhat-lowbrow comedy. And, at that, it mainly fails.

Somehow a pretty good cast got roped into this. Danny McBride had worked quite a bit with the director, David Gordon Green, during Pineapple Express and "Eastbound & Down"; James Franco starred in Pineapple Express, so obviously there was already a bond there. For the life of me, I don't know what Natalie Portman and Zooey Deschanel are doing in this, much less Toby Jones and Damien Lewis. It's a very odd mix of actors that I wouldn't have quite imagined for a comedy like this. They all do an admirable job, though some are a bit underused. In fact, most of the movie feels like there should be more going on. And what's there should be funnier.

The script was written by McBride and Ben Best, McBride's co-writer on The Foot Fist Way and co-creator of "Eastboound & Down". They do what they always do and much of it was as-advertised: a fantasy movie filled with cursing and vulgar content. Unfortunately, aside from McBride's usual brash awkwardness, bravado, and irritably foul mouth, much of the movie's attempt at comedy is stagnant. The combination of silly vulgarity and scenes of awkward pauses don't quite mesh. What hilarity there is much too little and too far between.

The one area that the movie excels at is the fantasy atmosphere and effects. It pulls off the fantasy film better than most serious fantasy movies; as a comedy and ostensible parody, it really shouldn't be a head above most fantasy fare. And, yet, it does a better job with action, monsters, and effects than movies with higher budgets. That shows a real love for the source material and makes me wish that there was a bit more to the movie to make it more exciting. But a severed penis and some cursing can't quite make that 100 minutes into more than 45 minutes worth of content.

There was easily more room to play with the genre, more jokes to be had, more to be done with the actors and their characters, and generally more entertainment to be mined out of the concept, but the movie just missed it, settling for cute or occassionally amusing when it could have fought harder to be truly funny. A missed opportunity if I've ever seen one.

Priest wasn't really a movie I expected much from; it had a good cast and looked like the type of thing I could have found interesting, but I just didn't have any faith that it was going to work out. Then, of course, there were all the people who talked endlessly about how terrible it was.

I don't care whether or not it represented the comic well, as I've never read it and have no interest in doing so. The only metric that's going to matter to me is whether or not I'm intrigued, entertained, or enjoy the film. In that regard, it was better than expected, especially given how negative everything I'd heard was.

That's not to say it was a great film. The movie suffered from feeling a bit scattered and... well, small. My girlfriend went so far as to say that nothing happened during the movie; it wasn't so much that nothing happened as what did happen was very straightforward. Point A moved to point B which moved to point C and ended at point D. There was the requisite killing of vampires. There was some action. Paul Bettany looked like a badass. Maggie Q looked like a badass. Cam Gigandet was, surprisingly, non-douchey. Karl Urban was villanous in a two-dimensional but not scene-chew-y sort of way. Several good actors appear in minor roles. Somehow, director Scott Charles Stewart gets really decent actors to line up to work with him... Perhaps it's his connections from his visual effect days, but Legion was nothing to write home about (so I doubt his previous work is drawing them in). In large part Legion's problems had to do with the script and, again, that's the case here with Priest. Legion had a crap ending and not enough plot and Priest maintained a baseline throughout, never really moving outside of its comfort zone.

The technology and environment of the film with its desert vistas, Wild West ghost towns, and futuristic dystopian cities make for a very different sci-fi action movie experience. And the motorcycle and vampire designs were both pretty cool. It was a definitely different take on vampires, if nothing else.

It's a shame that a visually-appealing movie with good actors can't find enough story to actually become something worthwhile, but I don't regret watching it. It was an amusing trifle, but it's not something I'll come back to again.