Ever since the release of Step Up and Stomp the Yard, there have been no shortage of sequels or similar dance movies looking to capitalize on the same success, and when Frat Brothers came across my radar, I expected more of the same; that is not what I got. On the back cover of the disc, the tagline reads: “Sometimes you have to create your own destiny.” That is exactly what the film does, going beyond the expected parameters of a dance movie and forging its own play just as its lead character does.

“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy — understand him well enough to defeat him —then in that very moment, I also love him.”

It’s no accident that both soldiers and football players are fashioned to look indistinguishable from one another on their respective battlegrounds. We create a personal detachment between ourselves and our adversaries because we believe that will make it easier to annihilate them. That’s one of the many provocative ideas in Ender’s Game, the consistently dazzling and occasionally rushed adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s beloved science fiction book.

“I’m often asked, ‘What do I do for a living?’ And I answer: ‘I do what I want.”

For the better part of the last 20 years, CeeLo Green has ferociously defied musical expectations by zigging when you expect him to zag. (If you thought the former frontman of hip-hop collective Goodie Mob would eventually become one of the judges on TV’s #1 singing competition, then go buy a lotto ticket immediately because you have a gift.) I happened to be in Las Vegas earlier this year when I saw a poster for CeeLo’s Sin City Loberace show. And for the first time I can remember in regards to CeeLoo’s career, I thought, “Hey that actually makes sense.”

When Vikings Season 1 first arrived, I have to admit I was pretty excited. I was particularly eager to see footage from their very first game. Fran Tarkenton came off the bench, and the Vikings went on to become the first expansion team ever to win their very first game. OK, as Baby, our Shepherd/Chow mix dog film reviewer would say: I made that last part up. You'd have to have been living under a pretty isolated rock to have missed all of the buzz over The History Channel's epic new drama series Vikings.

It’s hard to believe that once if you said the word Google, there is a good chance no one would have known what you were blabbering about.  Now the internet search database is the largest search engine on the web and is a dominating company that is given the same reverence Steve Jobs and Apple receive.  Because of Google, the days of hitting the books to find information and the Dewey decimal system are all but things of the past.  But technology and growth are a part of life.

There are five clans of Vampires that are secretly living amongst humans. Said secret is maintained by a code of conduct called the “Masquerade” which states that vampires can never reveal themselves to a human; nor can they “embrace” (bite and convert) a human without approval from the highest council. Defying this means that your lengthy life is forfeit. A detective discovers the truth about the Masquerade when his girlfriend loses her life after defying these very rules, and he sets out to reveal the entire realm of vampires in San Francisco.

The world of Bounty Killer is a barren wasteland that has been decimated by the unchecked greed of nefarious corporations. In other words, I can’t believe this movie is only set 20 years in the future! I’m not the kind of guy who uses exclamation points very often, so the fact that I threw one at the end of the previous sentence wasn’t an accident. This silly, stylish, thoroughly enjoyable revenge fantasy/satiric action flick is basically one giant exclamation point in movie form.

The boys are back, and I only have one question. What the heck took so long? I have a lot of respect for Pixar and the groundbreaking films they've created over the last couple of decades, but I have to question someone's marketing good sense when they get a sequel to Cars out before anyone bothered to look towards what is arguably the studio’s best creation to date. For me it's all about Monsters, Inc. I hadn't fallen so hard for an animated film since The Lion King, and so I was thrilled when I got the invitation to graduate early from Monsters University.

Every once in a while a film comes along that looks like it could be interesting, but you don’t really expect to like it all that much. It’s simply meant to be filler, something to kill time until something better comes along, but somehow you get drawn in and become so engrossed in the story that you forget everything else. That is the most apt description of my experience with The Way, Way Back, a socially awkward dramedy with a ton of heart featuring Steve Carrell, Sam Rockwell, Toni Collette, Liam James, and many more.

Independent films can be about just about anything. Usually if it's about something you have never seen before, that can be a good thing. In this case, I'm not so sure. Free Samples is a movie that takes place almost entirely in and around a crappy little van giving away a cup of either chocolate or vanilla ice cream or at least something that resembles ice cream as far as we know. Free Samples is an existential comedy about the search for meaning when you step away from a future that looked very bright in search of who knows what.