For the longest time, I felt like I was the only person watching Hell On Wheels. I don’t know why I would receive blank stares when I mentioned the show, which had quickly become my favorite on television after only the second or third episode, but I would try and convince anyone who would listen that there were other worthwhile shows on TV other than The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad. On the same network, even. A few listened, a few had their eyes glaze over at the lack of zombies, bald drug dealers or 50’s-era advertising executives making snide quips, however; the few who listened were mighty pleased they did.

What I loved about 1997’s Men in Black was it embraced its own corniness. The aliens were over-the-top and blew up like jello molds; the sets had a distinct comic book feel to them; and the story balanced workplace comedy with fantastical backdrops. The style worked, propelling the film to financial and critical greatness. But I lost all hope when a sequel dropped in 2002 and turned out to be just a cash grab. However, this summer's Men in Black III is a surprise return to form that, while flawed, breathes new life to a franchise none expected to make a comeback. 

There may be no official secret to success in the music industry, but if the ongoing stream of biopics is to be believed, there's a pretty sure pattern: develop a serious drug habit, have a testy relationship with your father, and have at least one popular song that reflects your life story that could be played over closing credits. Worried About The Boy doesn't do anything to break that trend, but it's not an especially poor example of it, at least for television.

When a movie’s packaging boldly advertises “From the Producer of Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance and The Director of The Thirteenth Floor,” a movie from 1999 that most people won’t even recognize, it should seem pretty clear that you’re embarking on a movie that will be down the middle of the road at best. Beyond is exactly that, despite a stellar cast that includes Academy Award-Winner Jon Voight, the endearing Dermot Mulroney, and Teri Polo in the only role she’s immediately recognizable in outside of the Meet the Parents trilogy.

John Koski (Voight) is a detective in Anchorage, Alaska who happens to specialize in missing children; a convenient fact when his boss, the Chief of Police’s (Mulroney) niece up and disappears. What begins as a routine investigation is quickly railroaded by the Chief’s overzealous wife (Polo), who enlists the help of a tabloid psychic (Julian Morris), who dubiously claims that he’s in touch with the child thanks to the involvement of a ghost.

Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) is a thirty-four-year-old recovering drug addict. Soon to complete his rehabilitation in the countryside, he’s allowed to go into the city for a job interview. Using the opportunity to explore Oslo, he’s confronted by the ghosts of his troubled past.

Directed by Joachim Trier (whose 2006 debut, Reprise, made a splash in European markets and amongst critics), Oslo, August 31st opens with a series of individuals sharing their memories of the Norwegian capital city. They recall pleasant experiences with friends and family—a huge leap from the loneliness that follows. We don't see them onscreen, but hear their stories through voice-overs. They're disembodied fixtures in Anders's journey to adapt back into everyday life. Loosely based on Pierre Drieu La Rochelle's novel "Le feau follet," the movie makes it a point that, despite his personal pains, August 31st is just another day for Oslo and its citizens.

It’s hard to say exactly when it happened, but the general level of analysis featured in The Universe has taken a considerable dip from its first season to its sixth. At the start, the explanations featured CG imagery to simulate the concepts the highly learned talking heads were discussing each episode, but now it comes closer to the Bill Nye the Science Guy or Beakman’s World level of explanation. Instead of catering to the audience that got them this far and which understood concepts like quasars and hadron colliders without a corny hands-on example, The Universe now cuts to “hands-on” demonstrations that dumb down concepts in comparisons to things like two remote controlled cars colliding head on or a cannon ball being fired at a model of Mercury.

In filmmaking today it seems that traditional two-dimensional and hand drawn animation has taken a back seat to the computer-generated work of Pixar and their peers. When Pixar left Disney to carry on elsewhere, Disney’s return to old-fashioned, hand-drawn princess tales, The Princess and the Frog, disappointed at the box office despite rave reviews, gorgeous animation, and a great story. The Mouse House’s next take on the fairy-tale genre, Tangled, jumped onto the CG bandwagon and benefited greatly from the change.

Dirty Dancing stands as one of the most iconic coming of age films of the 80s, courting generation after generation of new girls tantalized by the “forbidden love” and sexuality inherent in the story of a girl on the verge of becoming a woman finally breaking out her prim and proper shell in the arms of a muscular, charismatic dancer. No matter how silly it is, the abundant romance between Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze seems to drown out all of the silliness that would otherwise turn off audiences. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for its 17-year-after sequel Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, a comparatively clumsy tale, of an American girl in Cuban and the local boy who inspires her, that doesn’t manage any of the “forbidden” love of the original and only succeeds in poor dialogue and forced romantic tension just because “he’s not like us”.

Bobcat Goldthwait is known for being shocking. It isn’t necessarily the things he does, though setting a chair on fire at “The Tonight Show” and directing a film about a girl’s youthful experience with bestiality are pretty shocking themselves. It’s mostly the things he says. It’s also the way he says them, with his signature screechy yelp. Yet the thing about Goldthwait’s humor that sets him apart from your standard borderline-annoying shock jock is the fact that he’s actually clever. He’s not making rather tasteless jokes about Michael Jackson for the sheer pleasure of tearing the late pop star a new one; well, he might be, but he does a much better job doing it than most comedians have, and such a good job that one can’t really be offended. Rather, one laughs in that awkward, slightly disturbed way that signifies really good black comedy. You feel like you shouldn’t be laughing, but what is being said is so funny that you can’t help yourself.

For anyone who hasn’t lived through a tornado, it can be hard to full appreciate the power of the furious winds that take and destroy lives across the American Midwest. It doesn’t help that for most people outside of prime twister territory the most exposure they have to the cyclones is through films (like Twister, Wizard of Oz), television, or news reports of disasters that seem very distant. However, if you live in Oklahoma, North Carolina, Alabama, Nebraska, Missouri, or thereabouts, the fear of tornadoes is one that returns with a vengeance every spring.