See it:
• 1408 [buy it]. From my review:
Sure, this is pretty much an episode of The Twilight Zone, but it’s a really, really good episode of The Twilight Zone, largely because of the magic of Cusack, who shucks his usual irresistible gosh-darn charm for a mellow but muscular intensity that his fans may find surprisingly profound but equally watchable.
See it:
• Jericho: Season 1 [buy it]. It’s the anti 24, blatantly rejecting torture, paranoia, suspicion, and bigotry… and it didn’t need to create some imaginary liberal paradise in which to do it.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Complete Series [buy it]. It’s 49 discs of boldly-going genius. Well, okay, maybe 10 discs’ worth of stuff are really genius, but the rest is pretty damn good too. At least after the first season… or maybe the second. But it’s all good, honestly.
Skip it:
• Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer [buy it]. From my review:
The audience for this new Fantastic Four, perhaps even more so than the first one, is long asleep at midnight, or should be, if they’re going to be peppy for third grade on Friday morning. Seriously, the only person excited about this movie at the promo screening I attended on Thursday night — mere hours before public screenings would begin, which is never a sign of confidence from a Hollywood studio — was the four-year-old sitting behind me, who kept asking his daddy for confirmation that he was grasping the vast intricacies of the plot.
Here’s a hint to the intellectual level of this flick: He was. Because this pre-K kiddie was precisely in the target demographic.
