Going in to my screening of “Shutter Island,” I tried to steer clear of any particular expectations of what it would be like, although to say I was expecting it to be “good” would be a considerable understatement. A lack of expectations will only benefit the audience, because the mind exploration journey contained within “Shutter Island” can be difficult to put into words. Or thoughts.

Hollywood depictions of war are too often dripping with the political leanings of people at the top of the movie’s food chain. Don’t get me wrong: I’m as liberal as the next liberal media type, but I don’t need film producers, directors and actors force-feeding their liberal attitude on the Middle East situation to me after I’ve forked over $10.25 for the privilege. I like to let my war movies let me think for myself.

I fought it off as long as I could. Honestly, I did.

Although I’ve been hearing about “Avatar” seemingly since the day I learned to eat solid food, I really had no desire to watch the movie about blue people on a distant moon named after an online radio service (Pandora).

With the movie award season upon us, Sensenig at the Cinema will be taking a look at some of the movies garnering the most attention in an attempt to see whether they are worthy of the hype surrounding them.

 Confession: I've never watched an episode of "Star Trek." Another confession: I've never watched so much as two minutes of any episode of "Star Trek."

At no time in my life did I feel I was doing myself a disservice by avoiding this show like the plague. In my obviously limited perception and exposure to the show, "Star Trek" was a boring, emotionless, geeky show about a guy with pointy ears on a spacecraft with creatures with monstrous faces. Not really my cup of tea. Not until it came time to review a movie based on the show did I ever think, "It might have been nice to know the difference between Vulcan and Klingon."

"Rachel Getting Married" (released Tuesday on DVD) is the anti-"Watchmen" in this week of new-release films. Whereas the one is shot in a highly stylized, big-budget format featuring tales of superheroes in hiding investigating the murder of one of their own, the other is a simple tale, shot in a do-it-yourself manner, of a young woman in rehab home for the weekend to attend the wedding of her big sister.

If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: When it comes to horror, less is more. Write this little nugget of information down, aspiring horror movie writers, and refer to it often. When you're trying to scare an audience, the less we see, the more scared we are.

Think about it. Are three-year-olds more scared of the monster in their room's shadows when they only see its dark outline in the corner, or when they turn the lights on and realize it's actually their life-sized, inflatable Spongebob Squarepants doll?

On the surface, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" did little to interest me. A story of two women falling in love with the same man while spending the summer in an exotic locale (Barcelona, Spain in this case) sounds like it's treading pretty typical romantic comedy territory. The nondescript name — I wouldn't name a movie "Joel David Boise," for example — probably won't draw a lot of people in, either.

One would think a movie in which a father is frantically trying to prevent his kidnapped teenage daughter from being sold into an underground sex worker network in Eastern Europe would be willing to take some chances. If one made this assumption about "Taken," the fast-paced, justice-seeking thriller starring Liam Neeson, one would be wrong. "Taken" somehow manages the difficult task of being both completely exciting and utterly boring. It's exciting because of the drastic and desperate measures a father is willing to take to get his daughter back from a group of rotten human beings, and boring because it plays out exactly like you'd expect it to. The story doesn't take any chances in becoming any better than it already is, although there would have been plenty of opportunity for "Taken" to become more than a cat-and-mouse game.

This is one of those movies that I really didn't care about seeing.  Fortunately for me - others in our group out-voted me.  It is simply one of the best movies I have ever seen.  It contains humor, adventure, drama, a love interest, exotic locations, human interest, and suspense - all packed into a couple hours. 

Walt Kowalski sure is a gruff, old sonuvagun. The Korean War veteran and former Ford assembly line worker is a chain-smoking, Pabst-drinking, old guy that grunts whenever witnessing things that ain't like they used to be. Which, for a racist, old-school coot like Walt, is pretty much everything: grandkids wearing football jerseys to funerals (his beloved wife just passed away), navel rings, Asian immigrants populating his old, formerly blue-collar, white-as-snow Detroit neighborhood.

Ah, Valentine's Day. Nothing like a day demanding couples buy each other flowers, chocolates in heart-shaped boxes and cute, cuddly teddy bears to let everyone know how much they're loved.

Or, as is the case in the new lovesick horror film "My Bloody Valentine 3-D," how badly we want to stick a pickaxe into their skull.

It was billed as an entertainment nirvana of sorts, somewhere on par with Page and Plant getting Led Zeppelin back together for a full-on tour, or Mr. Rogers returning to the neighborhood, beloved sweater vest in tow. In all their years of starring in a slew of legendary films, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino have appeared onscreen together exactly one time — in an all-too-fleeting diner scene in 1995's "Heat."

In that crime drama, the Hollywood Hall of Famers were on opposite sides of the law. In "Righteous Kill" (released this week on DVD), the senior citizen versions of De Niro and Pacino are wearing the same NYPD badges.

There's a list of movies that should never get the remake treatment, no matter how desperate Hollywood may be for story ideas. "Gone With the Wind" comes to mind. "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," "The Godfather," and "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" would be a few more.

I think we can now safely add "The Day the Earth Stood Still" to the list.

There's nothing particularly unique about the story of "Twilight" on the surface. Boy meets girl. Girl falls in love. Boy turns out to have a long pair of fangs destined for her luscious young neck."Twilight" is a Romeo-and-Juliet tale with a twist. Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is a sweet, clumsy high school student who moves to Forks, Wash. to stay with her police chief father, Charlie (Billy Burke), when her mother gets remarried. There she meets Edward (Robert Pattinson), the gorgeous, seductive young man who's impossibly fast and strong and his skin is ice cold.

One of the rules of being an American movie watcher is you have to watch a Christmas film sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas.This rule is largely responsible for me being able to recite a vast number of lines from Cousin Eddie, Clark and the rest of the Griswold gang in "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" at any time I deem them appropriate, the frequency of which increases the closer the calendar gets to Dec. 25.

I have a confession to make: I often have absolutely no idea what is going on in James Bond movies. I mean, I can physically see whichever actor playing Agent 007 at the time chases down bad guys in an Italian sports car, dodging bullets as he performs corkscrew maneuvers flying over a cliff in the Mediterranean before ejecting himself mid-air and continuing the pursuit on a high-powered Vespa — that he parachuted onto.

At some point in his life, a guy is going to wonder if he's a good role model for young people. Basketball bad boy Charles Barkley once defiantly stated, "I'm not a role model. Just because I can dunk a basketball doesn't mean I should raise your kids." Another time he got right to the chase: "I'm no role model," he said.

Earlier this year, Angelina Jolie lost the Oscar for Best Actress for her role as Mariane Pearl in "A Mighty Heart," the story of a woman who lost her husband in Iraq while the two were working as journalists there. Come February, it may be another tale of deep personal loss that earns Jolie the Academy Award that eluded her just a year before. If she's not a serious candidate for her role as a woman searching for her missing son in Clint Eastwood's "Changeling," something's more off than a corrupt police department.

Edward Norton should really consider making more movies. In fact, I wouldn't be all that opposed to him being in every movie ever made. If it prevents me from having to watch another lame Vin Diesel or Brendan Fraser action picture, why not? Norton does action and drama so much better than almost anyone.

As someone who considers himself a big sports fan, it never ceases to amaze me the number of stories out there that have somehow went unknown to me.The story of Ernie Davis would certainly qualify as one that I really should know.

In the latest sign the iPod generation is exerting its influence over the rest of us old fogies comes "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist," a new era of romantic comedy in which the main characters look nothing like Richard Gere and Jennifer Aniston. This is a good thing, since I'm still not convinced we need more sappy love stories involving either an aging male star who could do a romantic comedy in his sleep or a woman best known for her hairstyle on popular 1990s sitcom.

There are some times when being a movie reviewer isn't all that much fun.It's called September. Come to think of it, August wasn't all that impressive in its offering of films up for review, either. Traditionally, the end of the summer is a time when studios release the movies they don't really want to release at any other time of the year — it's too late for the blockbuster summer season, and too early to get the hype machines warming up for serious Oscar contenders.

"Lakeview Terrace" just might be the perfect guilty pleasure. It's got awkwardly presented social issues, barely established motives, beautiful homes in a ritzy southern California neighborhood, neighborly disputes on par with anything on "Desperate Housewives" and star presence supplied by Samuel L. Jackson.

Ethan and Joel Coen could very well be Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Or their careers could be described as such, at least. 
                                                        
For every brilliant, fully realized film such as last year's "No Country for Old Men" and "Fargo" they've released, there's been at least two significantly less watchable (i.e. slow and meandering) ones, such as their "The Ladykillers" remake and "The Man Who Wasn't There." Mainstream acceptance tends to directly follow this Coen tendency: "No Country" won a best picture Oscar and was one of my favorites from last year, while I don't know anyone who loves their "Ladykillers," for example.

Tina Fey wants to be a baby mama. She really, really wants to be a baby mama.

Or at least her character, Kate Holbrook, wants to be one in the just-released-on-DVD comedy, "Baby Mama." Only problem is, genetics are not on her side in the motherhood department. Sticky notes in her bathroom reminding her to be "Be fertile!"

When you think of "rockers," Rainn Wilson probably isn't the first person who comes to mind.That's largely due to the role he's most known for, Steve Carell's annoyingly clingy and anal-retentive sidekick Dwight Schrute on NBC's "The Office." On this show, the geeky man-child Dwight is quite possibly the anti-rocker.

I'm sure that a long time ago in a mind far, far away from the normal ones possessed by the rest of us, I'm sure "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" must have seemed like a good idea. This just in: It wasn't.

Offensiveness is a funny thing. Or a not funny thing, depending on which side of the offensive material your beliefs lie.

 Stoner movies, by definition, are lazy creatures. They feature, well, stoners smoking marijuana, getting paranoid, coming across countless unlikely scenarios in which their senses are dulled by the reefer and munchie sessions with the closest bag of cheese puffs they can grab. It's a tried and true formula, one meant to attract plenty of “huh, huh, huh” chuckles throughout its audience, many members of which can probably relate to a good share of what their anti-heroes onscreen are going though.

The plot of “The X-Files, I Want to Believe” revolves around the disappearance of an FBI agent.  In investigating the abduction, the only lead the FBI has is provided by a defrocked Catholic Priest who is a convicted pedophile. Father Joe (Billy Connolly) is a psychic who claims he has visions of the missing agent.  The agent in charge, Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet), doesn’t know whether to trust him or pistol whip him. 

To clear up any misconceptions that I'm sure no one has about "Stepbrothers," this is not a smart comedy film. In fact, it's downright stupid.The trailer's scene of grown men becoming giddy with excitement over the prospect of building bunk beds in their room and high-fiving over their favorite dinosaurs might have clued you into this assertion.

When I sit down to watch an episode of NBC's "The Office," I do so feeling very confident that I'll be treated to a strong comedic performance from Steve Carell. Through four seasons of watching the series, I'm pretty sure he's had me laughing out loud in each episode at his bumbling, awkward portrayal of a boss straddling the fine line between boss and buddy.

Imagine if everyone left the Earth and someone forgot to turn off the last robot. That's the premise of the engaging and visually stunning computer-animated flick, Wall-E, the latest from Pixar Animation, which brought us "Ratatouille," "The Incredibles" and "Toy Story."The year is 2700 and the titular Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth Class) is a robot built to clean up the Earth, which has become a stark wasteland, and has spent his time since humans fled making little cubes of trash, developing a quirky little personality. He spends his days following his programming along with his roach friend, Hal (get it, Hal Roach) and collecting little treasures — lighters, sporks, rubber toys — until a new robot arrives to scout planet Earth for signs of life, EVE (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator).