Iowa is full of random craziness. Slipknot, meth heads, guys named Ezekiel all live in Iowa. In The Crazies, that insanity is taken to a new level.

Sort of. It all seems so familiar. Wait a minute. It's a slick looking horror movie in 2010. Yup. It's a remake. Of a George Romero movie that nobody saw.

The town of Ogden Marsh is a typical farming town. It's the kind of place where everyone knows each other and they actually listen to the local police.

To gear up to watch The Crazies, I watched George A. Romero's 1973 version a few days beforehand. While more modernized for our time, you can still see and feel homage to the 70's style that made Romero known for.

While Romero serves as executive producer, Breck Eisner (Michael Eisner's son) takes the helm as director on this one. Eisner does well setting up the premise in a fast pace, but tails off at times to give us more of a b-movie tone.

Riding the coattails (albeit a few years later) of The Departed, Martin Scorsese once again unleashes questionable Boston accents and Leonardo DiCaprio on the unsuspecting public in Shutter Island. Shutter is a noir-styled tour through a sheltered mental asylum which harbors more than just unbalanced criminals. The head doctor (Kingsley) speaks in tangled euphemisms and the inmates warn visitors of its inescapability as DiCaprio (Teddy Daniels) searches for a missing patient. As soon as Daniels steps off the ferry onto the haunting island, dreamy visions of his deceased wife cloud his thoughts and caution him to not go prying too far into the past.

In Martin Scorsese's new flick, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner Chuck Aule arrive at Shutter Island, Massachusetts to investigate the disappearance of a patient at Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Seems pretty straightforward, doesn't it? Then you don't know Scorsese. Adapted very faithfully from the novel by Boston crime aficionado Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone), Shutter Island, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley and Michelle Williams, is one part neo-noir, one part psychodrama, with an extra helping of suspense. It's also chock-full of fantastic actors working very hard to up the creepiness factor in any way they can. All in all, I was very happy with Shutter Island and while it contains a flaw or two, it sustains the tension throughout the picture and keeps you guessing until the very end.

Sometimes gimmick movies pay off. In the case of Valentine's Day, it paid off 52.1 million times opening day weekend. That's a number surely to drop off dramatically going into week two. I should not need to mention what gimmick here is being a movie called Valentine's Day that was released on valentine's day weekend. Oops just did. The obvious target audience here is the romantic types to take their significant others to watch this film. Being that be the case is why Spencer and I are reviewing this film since my wife and his girlfriend desired to see this.

Many would say that the best stories are true stories. Therefore, some of the greatest films have been autobiographical in nature. 8 1/2 is one of these films, and is the brainchild of this month's Director Spotlight, Federico Fellini. It follows an Italian film director who must deal with his various romantic entanglements while trying to decide on his next picture. Fellini himself was having director's block before he developed this script; the title is because he had already directed six full-length films and three shorter ones (1/2 each), adding up to 7 1/2 before this one. It was clear from the get-go that this is a passion project unlike any of his others, and I dare anyone not to become thoroughly engrossed.

Young men will always in their innocence believe that they can make a difference; that they can make their own mark in this world. Youth in Revolt is a traditional coming of age film with a familiar twist; the nice guy trying not to finish last. Surprisingly funny at times, the film fails to maintain those moments for long periods of time.