Editor’s note: With Sundance winner The Sessions (formerly titled The Surrogate) hitting limited release, here is a re-run of our festival review, originally published on January 25, 2012. Based on the article, Seeing A Sex Surrogate, The Sessions takes you into the life thirty-eight year old Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes) who has lived with polio since the age of six. Only able to be out of his iron lung for a few hours a day, Mark is otherwise stuck inside with just his thoughts, poetry, and faith. Most would resent a life like this, but Mark finds the humor in his situation, always putting those around him at ease and never letting the fact that he can barely move his head from side to side limit his ambition. Having graduated from the University of Berkeley, Mark now has even bigger aspirations in his life – he wants to lose his virginity. Mark takes a shine to one of his aids and while it seems she seems to return his affection, when he expresses it, she gets scared and runs away. Mark jokes to his priest (William H. Macy) that he tried to go about his sexual revolution the “proper” way, but now he has another option he is considering – a sex surrogate who specializes in helping the disabled not only have sex, but teach them the tools and skills to have their own sexual relationships.

American Pie and Fast Times at Ridgemont High would be the best examples of a film like The Sessions, if it were filled with more lust than honest sexual desire (and younger people). What sets it apart from the flurry of raunchy teen sex comedies is that, in those films, we laugh at the characters because we were all once like them, but this film allows us to empathize with the main character for a much different reason. This is not a case of a protagonist being a virgin by choice, but by design, and due to developments in his work life he finds himself poised to be in contact with a sexual therapist named Cheryl (played well by Helen Hunt) who handles disabled clients. It’s a sex comedy for grown-ups. The humor in this movie is sharp, lovely and always great enough that its cute flirting nature is never left looking like cheesiness. The dramatic and romantic moments are heartwarming enough to spread out between every Lifetime film for an entire decade and still not run out. John Hawkes’ – playing the man in an iron lung looking to have sex for the first time – has a great way of making the awkward moments not so awkward and the disparaging ones touching.

When you first hear that John Hawkes’ latest movie sees him playing a character whose spine has been left so curved due to a battle with polio that he’s completely immobile and even physically deformed, it sounds like it’s going to be a depressing affair. Is The Sessions one of those hand-wringing dramas that hammers home just how difficult and painful disability is, for two hours straight, and then ends on some sort of bittersweet but life-affirming moment? Not at all. Actually, from the looks of the first trailer, it seems like it’s a lot of fun:

Falling Skies…. Before the season started I said the Steven Spielberg-produced, alien invasion program was “a special kind of show,” and I still stand by that statement ten episodes later. This entire season has been spent with the Second Massachusetts trying to achieve one goal: survival. With every passing episode, we watched as Tom and his rag tag group of soldiers tried to keep everyone breathing, all in hopes that it was building up to something. And the best part? It did.

This past weekend, the first of many pieces of sci-fi media with one entity at their center was released. That one entity has a name. It’s Steven Spielberg. Yet while Super 8 was fun, the first television-based Spielberg project of the next six months can be summed up in one word: amazing. That project is the TNT drama Falling Skies. Encompassing everything that makes up the things we expect from the Spielberg brand, like a focus on characters as opposed to events, grand scale world building, and a pinch of awesome action, Falling Skies delivers on the hopes that its advertising has created. The show, which premieres this Sunday on TNT, is a refreshing spectacle to see arrive on the small screen.

You’d think that by 2009, putting a solid amount of money and known actors into movie might not result in a piece of crap. You’d be wrong.

In honor of just how big of a summer movie Terminator Salvation is, we doubled up our normal 10 and 5 column. Unfortunately, McG doubled up the bad so we’re all pretty disappointed.

Neil and Kevin wage war on the machines… and McG with some scathing analysis of Terminator: Salvation. Then they move onto the movies that Neil hasn’t seen.

Warner Bros. has released the final press kit for their upcoming actioner Terminator Salvation, which includes over 50 images — some old, but many of which are very new and very cool.

Damn you Zack Snyder and damn your Watchmen! The blame for this distressing piece of news falls squarely on your shoulders…

Kevin Carr looks at the movies the studios didn’t allow him to see early this week: Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li and Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience.

Our good friend Christopher M. sent us over a few new photos from the upcoming film Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, which hits theaters later this month, so we thought we’d be nice and share them with you.

Take a tipster and an Italian movie blog, put them together and what do you get? An opportunity to peek at four brand new photos from McG’s Terminator Salvation, including our first looks at both Common and Moon Bloodgood.

Another early photo has hit the web from the upcoming Street Fighter rehash. This time we get a look at hottie Moon Bloodgood, looking important.

Last week a rumor started on the ol’ internet about how Terminator 4 was being terminated itself. Looks like, surprise surprise, the internet was wrong. Also, Moon Bloodgood is hot.