Personally, I thought one of the best things about all nine parts of Baseball was that the Red Sox didn’t win anything after 1918. “Come on,” says Burns. “The history of the Red Sox has much to offer any baseball fan. They say the greatest teacher in baseball is loss.

Blackmail Boys, a genre-busting, sexually explicit, black-comedy noir photographed by Birmingham filmmaker Adam Wingard, won a Special Jury Award at the Indie Memphis film festival in Memphis, Tenn., last weekend.

There seems to be a cultural obsession these days with nostalgia and things from the past. There are films such as The Expendables, which celebrates action films of the 1980s and uses actors who were in their prime back then as cast members. There are also the endless remakes of, and sequels to, every movie, TV show and children’s toy that were popular 20 years ago. Why this fetishizing of our past? Do we just have no new ideas today?

Wes Craven has made some terrific horror films over the years, but he’s never been particularly consistent. For every Last House on the Left or A Nightmare on Elm Street on his resume, there is also a Shocker or Deadly Friend. His new thriller My Soul to Take belongs in the latter category, but it doesn’t even feel like it was made by the same man who made Scream or tense, nasty films like The Hills Have Eyes.

Nobody really looks forward to remakes. They’re tolerated, because every once in a while one of them is good, and if you avoided all remakes you would never get to go to the movies, but I doubt that people get very excited about them. This is doubly true when the film being remade is Let the Right One In,.

I’m one of the 500 million people who have a Facebook page, and while the site is certainly ubiquitous in a lot of people’s lives, before I saw The Social Network I found myself wondering whether I really cared about its founding. But the filmmakers have moved past the drier aspects of the story and discovered that this is a classic tale of friendship, loyalty, jealousy and power, and have crafted an exciting and entertaining movie that brings out the humanity in the story of one of the greatest innovations in technology and communication in recent years.

Film-making is not an easy enterprise, and independent film-making harder still. Of all the artistic forms, movies are arguably the most difficult to bring into being. Any independent film of real merit takes teams of people, working unreasonable hours in all manner of environments, often for little or no pay.

Birmingham has never been thought of as a particularly hospitable place for people with alternative lifestyles, especially gay lifestyles, so it’s perhaps worthy of celebration that SHOUT Gay Lesbian Film Festival has now called the Magic City home for half a decade.

You know the story: A nameless, mysterious stranger shows up in a desolate town. Two corrupt factions are fighting each other for control without any law to restrain them. The stranger hires himself out to one side, kills members of one family, becomes disgusted with his employers, then makes a deal with the other faction and switches sides.

Still, considering the raging idiocy of the second film, and the thorough-going mediocrity of the third film, it would be rather surprising that the new fourth film even exists if you didn’t know that Jovovich is married to the film’s director, Paul W.