Cinefantastique Online

Sean Malin is a cinephile and film student currently studying at San Francisco State University. He recently began writing film reviews for Cinefantastique Online, after appearing on The Rotten Tomatoes Show on CurrentTV from 2009-2010 and writing for San Francisco Splash! Magazine in early 2010. He enjoys using multimedia platforms for his reviews, and can be found doing video reviews on his Youtube channel every week.

Come, my friends, gather ye ‘round as I share my story. It is a sad tale, of a film with so much lost potential, of powerful actors and directors sacrificing themselves for the sake of a few cheap laughs, of an audience that might have cared once… But do not fear, for the ending is [...]

To champion a film as a work of art is an increasingly rare pleasure, but no other reaction seems appropriate in response to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s masterpiece UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES. Appropriately, the film won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year, yet this official Thai entry for the [...]

While there is no rule in Hollywood explicitly stating that screenwriters should avoid ripping off characters as legendary as Superman, the makers of Dreamworks’s I AM NUMBER FOUR should have at least been warned. Ironically coming from SMALLVILLE creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, I AM NUMBER FOUR employs all the usual tricks for developing [...]

In many ways, there’s no movie concept more juvenile, more basic, or more ridiculous than Cowboys Vs. Ninjas. They come from opposite sides of the globe, of course, and certainly the loose, devil-may-care murderin’ style of a cowboy’s gun is no match for the stealthy throat-slitting sword of a trained assassin. On top of all [...]

Originality of vision is not always necessary to make a film, and the lack of it does not necessarily make a film bad. Even in 3-D, a movie can sometimes find it’s place in the middle ground between typical trash and art. Case in point: the newest Dreamworks Animation release, MEGAMIND, a collage of recycled [...]

Clint Eastwood is one of the hardest working 80-year-old men on the planet, releasing a new film for nearly every year of the last decade, and collaborating on several others. Eastwood’s work ethic, multi-hyphenate status (director, actor, producer, composer), and choice of subject matter constantly raise the question, “What drove this man, this living legend, [...]

When PARANORMAL ACTIVITY from word-of-mouth sleeper to box office blockbuster  (earning nearly $195 million worldwide from a budget of, ahem, $11,000), it became one of the hottest horror properties in decades. Only a year later, and a week before Halloween, Paramount Pictures has released the long-awaited PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2, destined to make the people behind [...]

For anyone over the age of 5, Lionsgate’s newest animated feature ALPHA AND OMEGA is a test of patience at best and sanity at worst. Centered around the forbidden love between members of the highest and lowest castes of Canadian wolf packs – the Alphas and the Omegas, respectively – this poorly animated 3-D film [...]

NANNY MCPHEE RETURNS, known as NANNY MCPHEE AND THE BIG BANG in England
NANNY MCPHEE RETURNS is a bright and bouncy – albeit disappointing – sequel based on the Nurse Matilda series by Christianna Brand and starring Emma Thompson as the beloved nanny.
Isabel Green (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is struggling to hold onto her husband’s (Ewan McGregor) farm [...]