Let Me In (2010)

With Let Me In, writer/director Matt Reeves has created a modern horror classic… or rather, he has taken a modern horror classic in the foreign market and domesticated it, with honor, respect and ingenuity. Working from the 2008 Let the Right One In foundation established by novelist John Ajvide Lindqvist and director Tomas Alfredson, Reeves’ film is on the forefront of what could be (with the Dragon Tattoo remakes hot on its heels) a discouraging new trend in Hollywood cinema – the appropriation of still breathing foreign films, recreated for American audiences. Except it is not discouraging. It is, in fact, refreshing, in its own bloody and unsettling way.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)

Love is the answer to everything Twilight, even if it’s only in the form of wistfully melodramatic teenage love, at once powerful, blinding and manipulative.  Why does Bella (Kristen Stewart) want to be a vampire?  Love.  Why does Jacob the werewolf (Taylor Lautner) want to change her mind?  Love.  Why would the vampire soul mate Edward (Robert Pattinson) let her go if she did?  Love.  Why does the bad vampire want to kill Bella?  Love.  Love love love.  Love talked about, yearned for and mourned over…love expressed but rarely ever actually seen.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)

New Moon was one of 2009’s biggest Box Office blockbusters, earning billions of dollars worldwide by wowing desperate teenage girls with chiseled men’s abs and coifed James Dean hair. To the Twi-hards (dedicated fans of the Twilight book series that’s managed to prove young people do indeed still sometimes read books) looking for their over-emoting romance fix, this sequel is exactly what the doctor ordered. But most anybody outside the Tigerbeat target audience - and undoubtedly even a few within - recognize this sloppy, unenthused piece of junk for exactly what it is.