The busiest man on the set of Evil Dead had to be the “blood wrangler.” Second busiest? “Prosthetic limb coordinator.” Third busiest? “Impaling consultant.”

I think you get the idea.

Like the 1981 cult film it’s based on, Evil Dead is an absolute gore-fest. If you don’t like to see human flesh sliced, dangling, stabbed, lopped off, and nail-gunned—this is probably not the film for you.

To be honest, it was kind of unnecessary to do a remake of Evil Dead to begin with (even more unnecessary than the average remake, that is), because the original Sam Raimi film was so influential, half the horror films out there already feel like Evil Dead remakes.

Comely young people in a secluded cabin? Check.

Basement with disconcertingly rickety stairs? Check.

Creepy ancient book that NEVER SHOULD HAVE BEEN OPENED! Check.

Evil spirit opening up a can of whoop-ass? Check.

Dog gets it first? Sniff.

That being said, this remake is nimble enough.  There’s a neat twist to their seclusion in the woods: The friends—including the fabulously-named Shiloh Fernandez and The Go Getter’s Lou Taylor Pucci—have come together to help...

Olympus Has Fallen has one of the higher body counts of a film that doesn’t take place on the beaches of Normandy that I’ve ever seen.

It starts right out of the gate: Secret Service Agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is in a motorcade taking President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) and his wife (Ashley Judd) to a fundraising event on Camp David. Ominously, it is snowing. (And because Olympus Has Fallen has all the subtlety of a WWE Pay-Per-View event, anything that appears ominous IS ominous.) Yup, the cars skid off the road and crash—the First Lady’s head is smashed (gorily) into the window and she’s trapped in her seat belt, as the car dangles over a cliff. When the car begins to fall, Banning can only save the president, who watches in horror as his wife (and the two agents in the front seat) plummet to their deaths. Because Banning assured the president he would save his wife, he is now a broken shell of a man in need of a redemption arc. Which leads to a few thoughts:

1. Is this officially an Ashley Judd cameo, or has her career really come to playing doting wives who die in the first five minutes of the film? (All of this will be a moot point of course, when she becomes the next...

Considering it’s in 3D, Oz: the Great and Powerful falls surprisingly flat. Obviously, it’s always risky to mess with a classic, but Wizard of Oz origin stories have worked before: Wicked re-imagined the relationship between the Good Witch Glenda and the Wicked Witch of the West as a feminist fairytale, Thelma and Louise in pointy hats—and, in doing so, became one of the most popular musicals of all time.

So why not explain how an ordinary man came to be the feared and awesome Oz, the man behind the curtain? Why not address the always intriguing dynamic between would-be messiahs and those who desperately want to believe them?

But if Wicked was a work of inspiration—built out of a righteous need to take back a destructive archetype and reinvent it for a new generation of young girls, the inspiration for Oz: The Great and Powerful seems to be this: Oz would sure look cool in 3D! (And it barely does that, by the way. Technically, the film is unimpeachable. As a work of imagination, it has all the visual flare of a cereal box.)

The film follows certain Wizard of Oz protocols, because, well, that’s what you do. So it starts, naturally, in black and white: Oscar “Oz” (James...

Last year, I wrote a column bemoaning the fact that, thanks to social media and blogs devoted exclusively to Academy Award prognostication, the Oscars have lost all their suspense.

Oh what a difference a year makes!

I’m not quite sure how it happened, but the Oscars are a veritable free-for-all this year. Oh sure, there are a couple of locks: Daniel Day Lewis for Best Actor and Anne Hathaway for Best Supporting Actress are “bet the ranch” type material. But everything else feels gloriously, uncharacteristically up in the air.

The weirdness of this year’s race started when the nominees came out and both Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow were shut out of the Best Director’s category. Since Argo and Zero Dark Thirty were at the time seen as legitimate Best Picture contenders, it sent the whole race into a tailspin: Wait, how can either of those films win Best Picture if their directors weren’t seen worthy of recognition? (Yes, films have won Best Picture without the director getting nominated before—Driving Miss Daisy was the most recent one—but it is a rare feat.)...