When The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift was released in 2006, it looked like a small finish for the franchise. Instead of Vin Diesel and Paul Walker as leads, Drift offered Lucas Black as a brand new character, with Bow Wow as his sidekick, and the film arrived dead last in box office receipts. Surprisingly, it turned out to be a new beginning, introducing director Justin Lin to the franchise. Lin took his eye for multiculturalism and combined it with a shift from street racing to a full range of car action, culminating with the infectiously entertaining Fast Five, an Ocean's-style heist movie with the original cast back in the driver's seats and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson riding shotgun as gigantic federal agent Hobbs.

Now, Lin is signing off with Furious 6 (the on-screen title), a massive blast of action delirium that indulges in all the series' goofie...Read the entire review

The big city's a sleazy place, but Billie (Karin Mani) is ready for it. When a couple of punks try to steal her car tires, she doesn't call the police; she goes outside and uses her martial arts training to literally kick them off her property. The two embarrassed would-be thieves run and tell their boss, Scarface (Michael Wayne), and the three of them brutally assault Billie's grandparents Charles and Kate (Jay Fisher and Rose Dreifus). Charles lives, but Kate doesn't. With the help of Johnny (Robert Torti), the only straight-arrow cop in town, Billie decides it's time to take matters into her own hands.

I've seen plenty of cult and exploitation movies in my time, but Alley Cat is the first one that practically seems like a parody of itself. The cadence of the line readings, the awkwardness of the action, the specific ways in which the movie is ludicrous -- it feels like it couldn't possibl...Read the entire review

Anna (Giovanni Ralli) and Peter (Gianni Garko) are having a nice night out. They return to Peter's place for a little nightcap, only to discover an intruder in the house (Julian Mateos), who holds them in the house. The intruder, Quill, keeps them there until his partner arrives, a mysterious man dressed as a police officer (Frank Wolff). It's clear to Peter almost instantly that the intrusion and hostage situation is related to his job at a law firm, working under his father Juez (Fernando Rey), but the big boss refuses to reveal the details of what it is he's looking for in Juez's files.

Helmed by by Enzo Castellari of the original Inglorious Bastards, Cold Eyes of Fear (also known as Desperate Moments in the United States) shows bursts of directorial creativity, but it feels as if the essence of the movie is lost in translation. Although I can't find any concrete informa...Read the entire review

As Safe Haven opens, Katie (Julianne Hough) is on the run. She hops on a bus, narrowly avoiding the police, and rides through Atlanta and into North Carolina, where the tiny coastal town of Southport becomes her hideout. She gets a job in a restaurant, buys a house far away from the general population, and initially rejects the awkward advances of local grocery owner Alex (Josh Duhamel), who introduces services his shop doesn't normally provide because they're the things Katie is asking for. As days turn into weeks, and weeks turn into months, Katie settles into a comfort level that allows her to let Alex in, and she gets close to him and his two kids, Lexie (Mimi Kirkland) and Josh (Noah Lomax). Even so, in the back of her mind, she knows that her troubled past could catch up with her at any minute.

Look, there's no sense in avoiding it: I am not the target audience for this, the latest in ...Read the entire review

It only takes three things to make a good movie: an interesting and engaging story, well-drawn characters, and skillful execution. The trick is not mistaking twist endings, mysterious pasts, and meticulous misdirection and obfuscation to be the same thing. On the surface, the new Chinese thriller Nightfall is about two men, playing an elaborate cat-and-mouse game around a family's buried secrets, but in truth, all the director and screenwriter have to offer here is the frustrating cat-and-mouse game they've laid out between the audience and the details.

The premise: When world-famous concert pianist Han Tsui (Michael Wong) turns up dead, Detective George Lam (Simon Yam) is called in to investigate. He interviews the family for clues as to who might have killed Han, but Mrs. Tsui (On-on Yu) is antsy and nervous, and Han's daughter, Zoe (Janice Man) hardly appears to react at all. Lam digs a ...Read the entire review

Based on the acclaimed graphic novels by Joann Sfar, The Rabbi's Cat is an animated adventure into the culture and climate of 1930s Algeria, as seen through the eyes of a sarcastic talking cat. Although the inclination might be to compare the film to Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and the film version directed by Satrapi and Vincent Parronaud, The Rabbi's Cat has its own distinctly different yet equally dazzling style of animation that really evokes an older comic book come to life. Although the film's episodic nature and lack of focus prevent it from soaring, Sfar and co-director Antoine Delesvaux have crafted a number of memorable characters and made a visually stunning picture.

Among residents of the city, The Cat (Fran ois Morel) is a familiar fixture on the shoulder of The Rabbi (Maurice B nichou). The Cat actually belongs to The Rabbi's daughter, Zlabya (Karina Testa)...Read the entire review

Charlie Rankin (Stephen Dorff) has just spent four years in prison. Without the help of his mentor, William "The Buddha" Pettigrew (Willem Dafoe), he wouldn't have survived, and now that he's free, he knows he owes The Buddha a favor. He finds himself a place to stay by dropping The Buddha's name, picks up the cash, a gun, and some instructions from a train station locker, and he's all ready to head across town and wipe his slate clean when he runs into a beautiful young woman named Florence Jane (Michelle Monaghan), who invites him to her house to make him some dinner and show him a video she made as her alter ego. Head filled with thoughts about his new lady friend, Charlie botches the job, sending him into a strange spiral of guilt and unexpected compassion, all while an inevitable visit from The Buddha asking what went wrong looms on the horizon.

Adapted from the novel Boot Tracks by the a...Read the entire review

Looking to decorate her empty bedroom, 21-year-old Jane (Dree Hemingway) spends a sunny day driving from yard sale to yard sale, on the hunt for some small, cheap decorations. She purchases a folding table, a cheap painting, a fan, and a thermos, among other things, then returns to the condo she shares with her temperamental best friend Melissa (Stella Maeve) and Melissa's dim stoner boyfriend Mikey (James Ransone). When she goes to turn the thermos into a vase, however, she discovers a shocking secret inside: $10,000 in rolled bills. Jane spends a little of the money pampering herself and her tiny dog Starlet, but guilt soon sets in, and she returns to the house where she bought it in hopes of returning it to the owner.

At first, Sadie (Besedka Johnson) wants nothing to do with Jane, shooing the girl and her dog off her front porch with a terse "No refunds." Undaunted, Jane moves onto other tactics,...Read the entire review

Reading a short online synopsis, "Ninja: The Mission Force" sounds like it could be decent. This Telly Award-winning series takes footage from public domain ninja flicks and splices it in with new footage shot by comedians, with new voice-over tracks to match the revised story. Done well, the show could find a funny medium between What's Up, Tiger Lily? and The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra; sadly, this second season doesn't do much for me as a newcomer to the series. Despite some chintzy charm, the jokes are pretty limp, and the integration of the film footage plays out more like a budget booster than a source of creative comedy.

Bruce (Brad Jones), villainous ninja from the first season of "Ninja: The Mission Force", is not as dead as he ought to be. Rising from the grave with a desire for vengeance, he once again sets out in his quest for take over the world. This time, his master sch...Read the entire review

Angie (Camilla Belle) doesn't like answering questions about her past. In fact, she doesn't like answering questions about herself, or even answering questions at all. During the day, she works in a diner, where her co-workers hardly know anything about her other than her name, and at night she retreats to a tent in the mountains, where she paints and relaxes in solitude. Her only guests are other drifters, like Chuck (Andy Garcia), who accepts dinner from her and poses for one of her paintings. Angie's in the middle of moving to a new town when her car breaks down, and she's rescued by a local cop named David (Colin Egglesfield). David lands her a job at another diner run by his cousin Jill (Juliette Lewis), and gives her a place to stay, and Angie begins to wonder if her life without attachments all it's cracked up to be.

Open Road is a small movie, shambling toward a valiant but unfulfill...Read the entire review

Boasting even more resilience than the underdog sports movie, the "man-child-into-adult" romantic dramedy may be the world's most enduring and unchangeable formula. Despite being a male drifting somewhat aimlessly toward thirty myself, there are few sub-genres I'd be happier to see retired from cinema forever than romantic dramedies about protagonists fitting that very description. Not Suitable For Children is a perfect subject for discussion, as it indicates how impossible it is to inject even an ounce of spontaneity or invention into one of these movies.

Today's manchild is Jonah (Ryan Kwanten), who lives with his friends Stevie (Sarah Snook) and Gus (Ryan Corr), in a house bequeathed to him by a relative. There, he and Gus throw massive house parties each weekend with popular DJs, earning money on door fees. Jonah's also trying to cover up his lingering feelings for Ava (Bojana Novakovic)...Read the entire review

In the wake of the attacks in Boston a couple of weeks ago, a movie that presents a man threatening to blow up several public places as an intriguing figure is probably not going to be well-received, but A Common Man is a poor thriller even aside from its case of bad timing. From logos to credits, the film is the definition of "by the book," with the only deviations from time-tested formula being the unnatural cadence that occasionally infects the performances or the dialogue.

Ben Kingsley plays the common man in the title, a normal-looking fellow who drops duffel bags on a bus, on a commuter train, in a shopping mall, and even in a police station. He then returns to a rooftop control center, where he sits in front of a tiny television and a series of cell phones, and politely informs the Deputy Inspector General (Ben Cross) that they have until six sharp to comply with his demand to release...Read the entire review

In the glimpse of his life at the beginning of Any Day Now, Rudy Donatello (Alan Cumming) appears to be in a holding pattern. He works at a gay nightclub where he dresses in drag and lip-synches to old pop songs, barely scraping together enough to pay his rent in a cruddy one-room apartment with walls that might as well be cardboard. His neighbor, Marianna (Jamie Anne Allman), is a junkie mother who spends most of her time getting laid or going out, and leaves the stereo on at full blast 24 hours a day. After a particularly hateful interaction with her, Rudy barges in one morning and turns the stereo off, only to discover that her child, Marco (Isaac Leyva), a 14-year-old kid with Down Syndrome, has been left alone after Marianna was picked up and jailed for drug possession.

The setup of Any Day Now was loosely inspired by a true story, fashioned into a screenplay by George August B...Read the entire review

When Raymond Saxx (Goran Visnjic) awakens in a Los Angeles County holding cell, he's disoriented, suffering from serious withdrawals, and nursing a massive hangover. In fact, Raymond is such a wreck that he doesn't even know why he's in prison, but before he can ask his cellmate Butterfly (Portia Doubleday) to help him get his bearings, Lt. Deputy Johnson (D.B. Sweeney) shows up and hauls him off to K-11, a unit in the prison system reserved for gay and transgender inmates. Raymond doesn't belong in K-11, both because he's not gay and because he didn't commit the murder he discovers he's been framed for, but his frustrated insistence that he's innocent fails to soften K-11 queen bee Mousey (Kate del Castillo), a feisty Latina trans woman who refuses to let anyone but herself stir up trouble.

It's hard reviewing a film like K-11: a film lacking in focus paves the road for a review lacking in ...Read the entire review

In 2009, UK author Graham Jones wrote Last Shop Standing: Whatever Happened to Record Shops?. Jones drew on his experience working in the industry as a label representative, recounting his experiences going from shop to shop trying to get them to pick up stock of the latest albums and witnessing the decline first-hand. By 2011, however, the outlook for some mom-and-pop record stores -- the ones that were left, anyway -- was starting to improve. The invention of Record Store Day and recognition by the industry that some people still buy physical albums have helped to lift stores out of the doldrums. In early 2012, Jones and director Pip Piper shot interviews with record store owners and vendors around the UK, turning the book into a 60-minute documentary with the more optimistic subtitle The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of the Independent Record Shop.

I'm not much of a record collector myse...Read the entire review

In the summer of 1994, two Miami bodybuilders whose lives were stalling hit on the perfect plan: kidnap a particularly unlikable member of their gym and torture him until he gives them everything he's got -- just over a million bucks -- then kill him before anyone finds out. They enlist the help of a third guy, a drug addict who found Jesus in jail, and set about their plan, which goes fairly wrong when the victim figures out who his kidnappers are and then they fail to kill him. The victim's intensely unlikable personality and the ludicrousness of his story prompts the cops to drop the case, but one "successful" kidnapping quickly turns into a crime spree that leaves several people dead.

The crimes of Daniel Lugo, Adrian Doorbal, and John Carl Mese are genuinely horrifying, the kind of material that one expects to see discussed discreetly in a TV documentary, and to an extent, it's a little disturbi...Read the entire review

Harry (Brian Petsos) is a minor criminal of some sort, describing himself in voice-over as "not a bad guy," without elaborating further. One day -- a "bad day for business," he informs the audience -- he returns home from dinner with his cousin Cecil (Oscar Isaac) and his girlfriend to discover his beloved dog, Jolly, has been brutally murdered, likely as thanks for a botched job that had Harry plotting to skip town. Emotionally devastated and brimming with rage, Harry returns to Cecil's house and enlists him on nothing less than a straight-up revenge mission to find the man who killed his beloved pet and return the favor.

Revenge For Jolly! is the newest entry in a growing trend: the low-key, low-budget, beneath-the-radar production populated with a cast of familiar face, the kind of movie people will see on the shelf at the local video store and wonder why they haven't heard of it. It's th...Read the entire review

Note: Although I treated Sader Ridge with the same objectivity as any film that I've reviewed for DVDTalk, in the interest of full disclosure, I will mention that I'm acquainted with co-writer / producer / assistant director John Portanova, who asked me personally if I would review his movie.

Samantha (Trin Miller) has never known her real family. Raised by foster guardians (referred to only as "the Harrises") who refuse to tell her about her biological parents, Sam doesn't even know where to start looking until she inherits a house from a late aunt. Eager to learn a little something about her heritage, she gathers up her friends Caitlin (Andi Norris), Roman (Josh Truax), and Mark (Brandon Anthony) for a road trip to the middle of nowhere. Upon arriving, they're greeted by a reclusive caretaker named Eric (D'Angelo Midil...Read the entire review

A young man is driving down the road in the middle of the night when he comes upon a beautiful woman (Brigitte Lahaie), clad only in a nightgown, wandering in the street, crying for help. She is disoriented, but identifies herself as Elizabeth (or Elysabeth, according to IMDb) and claims to be alone. The man, Robert (Vincent Gardere), drives her back to Paris, but when they arrive, Elizabeth cannot remember where she lives, and by the time they reach Robert's apartment, she no longer remembers anything earlier than the moment Robert picked her up, including her identity. In an excellent display of ingenuity, she insists on making love to Robert, hoping the memory will stick, but when he leaves for work afterward, that too disappears.

Jean Rollin's La Nuit des Traquees, or The Night of the Hunted, has a great hook in the horror of amnesia. Having seen so many goofy thrillers where am...Read the entire review

At the end of the 28th century, the people of Earth have moved to one of the moons of Jupiter. Advances in biological engineering allow scientists to give people special abilities, such as the ability to withstand alien gravitational forces and extra strength. As these genetic tweaks shift from modifications required to survive on other worlds to a form of government control, an underground radical movement forms. Parker C. Boyd (Claudia Black) is among the many workers resigned to a life of servitude when she catches a performance by rebel singer Naia (Tara Strong) and falls madly in love. Parker joins Naia's band as a sax player, and the pair look to live and love together on the road, but shady record executive Dorlan Mig (Tim Curry) has other plans for Naia, cutting Parker loose and turning the people's musician into a pop star. Teaming up with the pilots of a junk cruiser, Parker knows something's...Read the entire review

Anyone who saw Anywhere USA -- a list that's probably less than five hundred people long -- likely took notice of young actor Perla Haney-Jardine. Most people will have seen her in Kill Bill Vol. 2 as Beatrix Kiddo's daughter, but she steals Anywhere away from an eclectic cast with a performance that conveys deeper and more complicated emotions in 20 minutes than many adult actors express in a whole movie. Following more B.B.-sized parts in Hollywood productions (Spider-Man 3, Untraceable), it's exciting to see her take on a lead role in director / writer Jenny Deller's debut Future Weather, but the results are underwhelming, saddling Haney-Jardine with a tiresome character designed to push an agenda on the audience.

13-year-old Lauduree (Haney-Jardine)...Read the entire review

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of his biggest film, Enter the Dragon (and possibly as a tribute to his death the same year), Shout! Factory has picked up the rights to Bruce Lee's other four international hits: The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, The Way of the Dragon, and Game of Death, and has split them across two DVD double feature discs (Blu-Ray versions are apparently slated for later in 2013). Originally released in America with their titles flipped (Boss became Fists of Fury, when it should've been The Chinese Connection, and vice versa), it's easy to see, even between only two films, how quickly the movies recognized Bruce Lee's talents and capitalized on them.

In The Big Boss, Lee plays Cheng Chao-en, a young man who travels from China to Thailand to get a job with his Uncle and cousins in an ice factory. The job se...Read the entire review

Of all the films Bruce Lee made, the five that constitute his "star vehicles" (The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon, Enter the Dragon, and Game of Death) depict a wild sprint to perfect a formula for Lee. Looking at the first two films (paired by Shout! in the first Bruce Lee Double Feature), Fist more than makes up for Boss' limited number of Lee fights (the movie was actually trying to make co-star James Tien into the star), sending Lee on a brooding rampage to reclaim the dignity stolen from his school and mentor. Way of the Dragon finds Lee in the director's chair, where he freely experiments with the tone and his own image, but Game of ...Read the entire review