Is a $170 million budget enough to buy an opening these days? Paramount certainly hoped so, given that they eschewed advance screenings for the paper press. However, on my way to the movie theater it started to become obvious what was going on here. Walking past McDonalds, I saw that the Happy Meals were bundled [...]

If you are a follower of Donnie Yen, this is a must see film showcasing his talents as a martial artist. Given the legions of ving tsun (Wing Chun) practitioners and fans around the world, it would have created a bit of controversy if the producers had decided to cast someone of limited martial arts [...]

My first venture into the New York Asian Film Festival was to see Dachimawa Lee, a Korean comedy spoof of spy movies. It was a good movie, don’t get me wrong, but it didn’t really fit the picture of what I think a traditional Asian film is. Now, I’m a big geek, so to me [...]

My track record with seeing live action adaptations of anime has not been the best. I went to see Death Note and that was seriously underwhelming. I went to see Dragonball: Evolution and I pretty much lost faith in the human race. Now, I’ve never been a big fan of the Blood and Blood+ series [...]

The UA Court Street theater in Downtown Brooklyn, it’s fair to say, is not the place to go if you want to watch a movie in quiet contemplation. Just ask the three people next to me who offered running commentary, in “outside” voices, throughout a midnight showing of Michael Mann’s new John Dillinger movie, Public [...]

I chose to see the Korean flick Dachimawa Lee at the New York Asian Film Festival for two reasons: It looked like a hilarious action-movie spoof that would have me rolling in the aisles, and in the movie they get all their supersecret spy gadgets from, of all places, my home state of New Jersey [...]

More Bang for Your Bucks “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” So says Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times war journalist Chris Hedges, in a quotation called upon to preface what may be the most emotionally involving film about Iraq yet. Wisely abstaining from the polemics [...]

The Longest Toy Commercial … Ever I didn’t play with Transformers as a kid. I didn’t watch the cartoons. I didn’t even watch the first Michael Bay Transformers film — although the brief snatches I saw at least attested to the fact that it was a visual spectacle. Consequently, while I wasn’t heavily invested in [...]

The ’70s, as any modern dedicated movie buff might tell you, were a boom time for the cinematic portrayal of New York in all its gritty glory, but I like to think the decade was also the golden era of the subway action movie. Everyone remembers Gene Hackman barreling through Bensonhurst chasing a psychotic killer [...]

At last, someone has figured out that Terminators might be more efficient at killing humans, or at least be exponentially more terrifying, if they had something deadlier than hands and feet as appendages. In the newest chapter of the story, cyborgs take the shape of horrible little eels with claw-mouths, Ducati motorcycles with guns, and [...]

OK, let me say up front that my expectations for Angels & Demons were not high, as I am no fan of author Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon book series. In my view, the books have generated huge worldwide sales by doing nothing more artistic than hokily twisting rudimentary theological knowledge into gigantic conspiracy theories. I [...]

Well, they have done it. They have finally done it. Hugh Jackman is both star and producer for this pic, and he and his fellow filmmakers have finally found the recipe for a great X-Men movie: show us more mutants! It really doesn’t even matter if the mutants have anything to do with Wolverine’s canonical [...]

I had high expectations for Wolverine, whose title character I’ve always considered my kind of mutant. I’d held off watching the pirated movie on the Web and reading any reviews and managed pretty well to minimize my exposure to the Wolverine prerelease hype. Here’s what I did not expect to think the minute the film [...]