For over three decades, funny man Robin Williams has enjoyed a very lucrative career. His reputation as a wild and erratic comedian has pushed him into superstardom and his talents even occasionally transfer over to dramatic roles. His first shift into drama was a smooth and almost seamless one. It occurred in 1987 with director Barry Levinson’s bittersweet wartime dramedy Good Morning, Vietnam. In it, Williams earned his first Academy Award nomination playing real-life military disc jockey Adrian Cronauer. This terrific film is now out on Blu-ray for its 25th anniversary and if you are a fan of Robin Williams or just good movies in general, then I highly recommend checking this one out.

As a rule, it's a little cheap to quote other film critics, but when something has been said perfectly, it bears repetition. Roger Ebert once wrote, "We're instinctively afraid of natural things (snakes, barking dogs, the dark) but have to be taught to fear walking into traffic or touching an electrical wire. Horror films that tap into our hard-wired instinctive fears probe a deeper place than movies with more sophisticated threats." True when spoken about The Blair Witch Project, but no less apt a summation of Paranormal Activity's appeal. Three films in, the franchise is still grounded in this principle, but is still struggling (as it initially did) to integrate headier, more fantastic explanations for its phenomena.

Dorothy’s conventional wisdom of home, and there being no place like it, might be more true than Glenda the Good Witch ever imagined; especially had Dorothy been an beaver, prairie dog, or bat. Unlike humanity which has long since adopted a basic concept of the “home” consisting of four walls and various living rooms, the broader animal kingdom has a variety of homes as diverse as its population. Some animals burrow, some tunnel, others build, and still more nest. PBS’s Nature episode The Animal House explores the different homes of animals, ranging from insects to birds to reptiles. Though the narration can be tedious, peppering the audience with a barrage of animal facts and unnecessary explanation, the footage is vibrant and gives us a look into the private lives of animals that documentaries seldom capture.

Very few films manage to capture the audience’s sympathies so thoroughly that they can end with their protagonist duos dying heroically at the end, but every now and then we find one in the likes of a Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and Louise, or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The latter has long since become a film classic thanks to Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s fantastic performances under Director George Roy Hill, but what if the duo didn’t have to die at the end? What if Butch Cassidy managed to fake his death and escape to further adventures down the long dusty road? Blackthorn posits just such a story follows an aged Butch Cassidy working his way through a world with the hope of one day seeing his home again as his only motivation. Sadly, it seems that Cassidy is destined for adventure whether he likes or not, and he once again sets off in league with a young gunslinger in a brilliantly shot but poorly written and paced piece that will find fans in Western enthusiasts.

Adam Sandler’s own film career is spotty at best, but when you look at the films he produced under his company Happy Madison without starring in, there’s a strong argument to made that Happy Madison ought to stop producing films altogether. Whatever standard Sandler applies to how he chooses films seems to go out the window when he’s only the producer, and the list of cinematic abortions speaks to this: The House Bunny, Strange Wilderness, The Benchwarmers, Grandma’s Boy, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, and, most recently, Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star. Bucky Larson starts with an unfunny premise and then attempts to bleed it dry. The only joke this time around is on the poor sap who picks up the DVD expecting anything beyond profound disappointment and sophomoric jokes that never elicit so much as even a chuckle.

There comes a point where academic theorizing ceases to be productive and becomes little more than speculation, mental masturbation about a subject that can never have a definitive answer. The murder of Otzi the Iceman, whose body was found frozen in ice 20 years ago, will forever be a mystery because there simply isn’t enough information for people to do anything beyond make guesses. Normally, in academia, there’s a sort of “for now” attached to the end of statements like that, and in most murder cases that’s also true. With Otzi, there is no more evidence to be had. Now, anthropologists know he was murdered, they know what he was carrying, what he’d eaten, and where he was found. But that’s it, and so Iceman Murder Mystery spends 15 minutes explaining the facts and then goes off the deep end showing footage of exploratory hands-off autopsies and talking heads tossing up their own personal suspicions that may or may not have any real validity. We’ll never know.

I’ve never been one for horror movies, but I’ve always been adept at spotting a good story, and Cold Sweat (Sudor Frío) is not good. A weak plot and undeveloped characters do not make for an exciting or scary movie. On the rare occasion that I choose to watch a horror movie, I want to be terrified. I want to cover my eyes, jump and scream out loud. Spanish director Adrian Garcia Bogliano fails to provide this level of fear to his audience. His attempt to take an insightful look at the consequences of technology simply falls flat.

Many people decry how America has become overly litigious, with people hoping to sue large corporations for pay-offs over small offenses or lapses in their own common sense, but on some level the legal system is still functioning to defend what’s right. Or at least, it’s still trying to. In the case of Mike Weiss, an attorney by day and a heroin addict by night, the legal system was pushed to its limit to find justice in a field where medical monopolies brought all attempts to do so to a standstill. The complicated nature of Mike Weiss’s pursuit, as told in Puncture, definitely has an air of politics and capitalistic agenda attached to it, but more importantly it’s the story of a flawed human being attempting to do the right thing no matter the cost to himself. That he manages to tackle such an endeavor whilst in the grip of a heroin addiction, even using that environment to his advantage at times, makes the story of Puncture all the better.

Whereas the John Hughes era of teenage films had a distinctly innocent bent to its brand of teenage comedy, by the time the 90s got around to the genre, all of that was gone in favor of pandering to the concept of “cool” in its most commercialized fashion. Gone were the days of delinquents bonding over detention hardships or stealing cars for a day of fun in Chicago, and in its place were cynical films about teenage popularity based on house parties empty high school titles. In the midst of the many teen flicks of the late 90s like Can’t Hardly Wait and 10 Things I Hate About You, there came a film whose soundtrack might have received more attention than it ever did as a whole: She’s All That.

There are multiple ways one could be familiar with the team of heroic soldiers known as G.I. Joe. Originally introduced as action figures in 1964, they became popular enough to spawn multiple other forms of revenue for Hasbro, including a plethora of comic books and that ridiculous movie from 2009 starring Channing Tatum and Sienna Miller (which is actually getting a sequel soon). However, it seems as though the majority of people nowadays get their familiarity of G.I. Joe from the animated series, made infamous by video clips on YouTube that overdub scenes from the program with other, even more hilarious dialogue.