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Following a wild rampage through some sort of underground laboratory in which she leaves every single challenger dead, Sook-he (Kim Ok-vin) is taken into police custody -- or so it seems. Instead, she wakes up in an church that serves as a cover for an assassin training ground where Chief Kwon (Kim Seo-hyung) trains similarly violent female proteges in everything from combat to cooking (for their cover identities). With Sook-he's unborn daughter as a bargaining chip, Kwon convinces her to join the program, with the promise of retirement and complete freedom after a decade of service. Sook-he is a natural, and after her daughter Eun-hye (Kim Yeon-woo) is born, she'll do anything to protect her, but unfortunately for everyone, her past is about to come back to haunt her.

Directed by Jung Byung-gil, The Villainess is a familiar story executed with exhilarating panache. Although the film's gonz...Read the entire review

The Film:

In April, Well Go USA finally brought all five Phantasm movies to Blu-ray in a swanky six-disc package stuffed to the gills with bonus features. Now, five months later, Well Go has a second set on offer. This standard-def DVD set may not be a satisfying replacement for Blu-ray owners who wanted the new remastered presentations in their HD glory, but is an affordable alternative for casual fans, and features a reasonable chunk of the content produced by Well Go for the Blu-ray edition.

As a franchise, Phantasm is a unique and bizarre beast. Following the exploits of Mike (A. Michael Baldwin...mostly), Reggie (Reggie Bannister) and Jody (Bill Thornbury) in a battle with the evil Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) across the country, through various time periods, and even into other dimensions, the films are a unique blend of horror, science fiction, and fantasy that constantly reinvents its own ...Read the entire review

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Buster's Mal Heart, the second film from writer/director Sarah Adina Smith (The Midnight Swim), further develops her fascination with other worlds and the convergence of sci-fi and spirituality. Much like her previous film, Buster doesn't completely congeal, but the movie finds Smith developing her skills across the board, crafting a lightly Lynchian, consistently engaging, and occasionally moving story around a haunted performance by "Mr. Robot" star Rami Malek.

Malek plays Jonah, who works a job as a concierge at a cheap-looking chain motel, which would be adequate enough if he didn't have to work the night shift, which keeps him away from his wife Marty (Kate Lyn Sheil) and daughter Roxy (Sukha Belle Potter). Jonah dreams of buying a patch of land, reducing his work ho...Read the entire review

In general, the more films one watches, the more appreciative one becomes of the few that take bold risks. Sky on Fire, the newest film by Hong Kong director Ringo Lam, isn't exactly an innovative movie, but it is relatively ambitious, envisioning a large-scale action melodrama with a slight hint of science fiction. Unfortunately, it's also an interminable mess, bringing together a wide cast of uninteresting characters in an overwrought story filled with betrayals, solemn vows, crushing heartbreak, and dark secrets.

At the center of the story are brother and sister Jia and Jane (Chang Hsiao Chuan and Kuo Tsai Chieh), who are on the hunt for someone who can help with Jane's unexpected cancer diagnosis. That person may or may not be Ko Yu (Zhang Yingchu), who was working on futuristic stem cell research a few years ago when the lab she was working in caught fire and several people died, includ...Read the entire review

The Movie

What started as a search to fight the world's greatest swordsman ends up becoming a poignant journey of redemption and finding inner peace in Sword Master, making it a welcomed, unexpected surprise in what should have been a standard, straightforward martial arts flick. Loosely based on the wuxia novel by Gu Long, the film toys with a disjointed narrative for the first half without exactly being nonlinear, jumping between various events and locations. But as the audience follows two strangers on separate journeys, the pieces slowly come together, gradually revealing that their paths will soon cross. How exactly is not explained in detail. Rather, the plot steadily progresses forward, sprinkling just enough tidbits to maintain interest, such as a hired assassin, Yen Shisan (Peter Ho), wandering the countryside in search for whom he believes is a worthy opponent, ...Read the entire review

The Movie

The Monkey King 2 picks up 500 years after the events of the first installment where Sun Wukong (Aaron Kwok taking over for Donnie Yen and who previously played Bull Demon King in the last movie) remains imprisoned under Five Fingers Mountain. And immediately, for those familiar with part one or the Chinese mythology told in the classic novel Journey to the West on which this film series is based on, the sequel carries a darker, slightly more serious tone compared to its predecessor. Of course, there is a good deal of comic relief to be enjoyed, some of which comes from Wukong's mischievous mishaps as well as a trio of new characters. Nevertheless, soon after traveling monk Tang Sanzang (Feng Shaofeng) frees Monkey, he is coerced into joining the Buddhist monk on his spiritual pilgrimage by a golden ring attached on his head. Whereas the previous movie enjoyed a...Read the entire review

It's not often that a franchise horror film requires a great deal of effort to watch in terms of back story. When I first approached "Phantasm Ravager" for review, I was expecting another quirky horror film, similar to the previous four films I had vague memories of watching 15-odd years ago. The film starts off innocuously enough, with series hero Reggie (Reggie Bannister) wandering the desert we last saw him in, looking for his prized Barracuda. It's not long after an exciting highway chase involving the iconic Sentinels (those cool looking flying metal spheres with a host of terrible weapons of destruction); suddenly though, we find a very tired and haggard Reggie in a hospital, sitting bedside is Reggie's friend and second series hero Mike (A. Michael Baldwin). It's quite obvious Reggie is suffering from dementia and both Reggie's reality and the reality of the Phantasm series is put into qu...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Johnnie To's Three takes place pretty much entirely in a singular location: a hospital in Hong Kong. When the movie begins, a man named Shun (Wallace Chung) is wheeled into the emergency room, a bullet lodged in his brain. Accompanying him are a few cops, led by Chief Inspector Ken (Louis Koo). It seems he was one of a few culprits who just recently tried to pull off the armed robbery of a jewelry store and he was shot in the ensuing crossfire.

Put under the care of Dr. Tong Qian (Wei Zhao), Shun is surprisingly calm for a man with a bullet in his head. The doctors agree to operate in just a few hours, but Shun pushes back. We know early on that something isn't quite right here. The cops are acting suspicious, getting pushy with Qian and taking a very antagonistic stance with Shun, while the patient himself seems to be waiting for something. Ken knows that the other...Read the entire review

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If you don't mind asking yourself "What the hell is going on?" during a horror film, you just might enjoy Don Coscarelli's Phantasm, now remastered and as crazy as ever. The story is highly disjointed, but Phantasm actually works because it creates enough mood and suspense to support the stop-start narrative. Fans of the series, which now includes five films, are familiar with the Tall Man and the deadly, flying spheres, and this first film is probably the most bizarre. This was only C...Read the entire review

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This is a fun little slice of American Psycho-inspired debauchery. Nicholas Hoult is the leading man in Kill Your Friends, and plays artists and repertoire man Steven Stelfox in the late 1990s as British pop bands rise to stardom. He's crazy AF, and begins an unhealthy quest to find the next radio hit. Label owner Derek Sommers (Jim Piddock) does not exactly reward loyalty, just results, so Stelfox takes matters into his own, murdering hands. This surreal dark comedy offers some sweet tunes on the soundtrack and plenty of uncomfortable laughs. The narrative flames out just past the midsection, when the party becomes too much, but Kill Your Friends offers enough diversionary thrills to recommend.

Director Owen Harris shoots from a script by John Niven, which is based on hi...Read the entire review

I feel like I'm missing something here, and that's not a desirable reaction after watching a movie, nor after completing anything for that matter: a conversation, a book, a show, a thought. I want to understand the story I was just told, or at the very least to understand that I'm meant to ponder the meaning, meant to think through the moral without there being a definite answer to my burning questions. I'm fine with that, I don't mind being challenged, but I, minimally, need to feel like I have the tools to dig through what I've been given, something that could not be farther from the situation I now find myself in having watched The Midnight Af...Read the entire review

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I first saw Vincent Cassel in Sheitan, a 2006 horror film about a shepherd/Satanist. I didn't know anything about the French actor, I just happened to be into indie horror films at the time. I was probably attracted to the name in the title, which means devil and has a Wheel of Time connection, if you've ever read that fantasy series. Anyway, the second time I saw Cassel was in Black Swan, which may have been the first film I ever posted a review of. He was brilliant in that movie, of course, and since then I've always kept my eye on him, appreciated his talent wherever it happened to surface. It popped up ra...Read the entire review

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Police Story: Lockdown, like 2004's New Police Story, is an "in-name-only" entry into the series that made Jackie Chan a star. In the intervening eleven years, Chan has naturally moved away from bigger action movies with spectacular stunt sequences due to his advancing age, and toward movies that require more acting chops than kung fu chops. Lockdown certainly endeavors to be one of those films, a grimly dramatic entry that begins and ends with Chan putting a pistol to his temple and pulling the trigger. Unfortunately, it feels like a film on autopilot, hampered by a convoluted and ultimately boring plot, and, worse, a flat performance from Chan, who is certainly capable of doing strong dramatic work, but just looks defeated here.

Chan plays Commander Zhong, who is dropping into the trendy Wu Bar to talk to his daughter, Miao (Jing Tian), for the first time in several month...Read the entire review

Sword of Vengeance is advertised as being from the creator of Hammer of the Gods. To some of you, that might be an incentive, having watched & enjoyed that film. But this is not a sequel, it's more a film done in the same vein, another Saxon bloodbath written by Matthew Read, who also wrote material for Valhalla Rising, a surprisingly good film. So "from the creator of Hammer of the Gods" means nothing to me since I've never seen that movie, but I can understand the connection between the films, and even the style that Read enjoys. Only 6000 users on IMDb did see Hammer of the Gods, as opposed to t...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Your average teen-coming of age film is something that can be tough to pull off sometimes, and if you are confident enough in the material it can actually work. But when it doesn't, it can be a somewhat apathetic experience. And while the initial hook of Skating to New York might have been personally appealing to me, I am left wondering what exactly happened in all of this.

Monte Merrick (Mr. Baseball) adapted a novella into a screenplay that longtime cinematographer Charles Minsky (Pretty Woman) directed. Four teenaged friends are also teammates on a hockey team in Ontario. Rudy (Wesley Morgan, Kick-Ass 2) is the biggest of the bunch, and his little brother Art (Gage Munroe, Read the entire review

The Movie:

In much the same way that Akira Kurosawa cribbed some ideas for his samurai movies from shoot-'em-up westerns, which the westerns then cribbed right back, the new 19th Century-set Korean martial arts drama from director Yoon Jong-bin, Kundo: Age of the Rampant, plays like an example of Asian genre cinema absorbing the work of Quentin Tarantino, who himself has been repurposing and re-synthesizing aspects of Asian genre cinema his whole career. Granted, there are some other influences mixed up in there and, in the end, the film is forced to stand on its craftsmanship and entertainment value (which, in both cases, are remarkably solid), but it's hard not to trace back the nods to spaghetti westerns, the anachronistically vulgar dialogue, and...Read the entire review

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Supremacy is about a character with deep convictions -- a racist Neo-Nazi -- yet it has almost no convictions of its own. The film lazily refuses to commit to the deeper aspects of its protagonist's (or perhaps antagonist's) hatred in a futile attempt to deepen its one-dimensional characters, commit to telling its story in the present tense, commit to being a claustrophobic thriller, even commit to being a thriller at all. At times, this shambling, off-beat approach seems like a conscious attempt to make a different kind of movie, and some of the movie's stranger details may stem from the true story the film is supposedly based on, but most of the time it just seems like the work of a director and writer that don't really know what they want to accomplish.

Tully (Joe Anderson) is the Neo-Nazi, just released from prison. Upon his release, he is met by Doreen (Dawn Olivieri), another member o...Read the entire review