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Languages: English

Subtitles: English, Spanish

Sound: Dolby

Comments: Time waits for one man

Summary: Here's hoping James Mangold's big, raucous, and ultrabloody remake of 3:10 to Yuma leads some moviegoers to check out Delmer Daves's beautifully lean, half-century-old original. That classic Western spun a tale of captured outlaw Ben Wade (Glenn Ford)--deadly but disarmingly affable--and the small-time rancher and family man, Dan Evans (Van Heflin), desperate enough to accept the job of helping escort the badman to Yuma prison. Wade, knowing that his gang will be along at any moment to spring him, works at persuading the ultimately lone deputy to accept a bribe, turn his back on "duty," and go home safe and rich to his family. That the outlaw has come to admire his captor intriguingly complicates the suspense. All of the above applies in the new 3:10, but it takes a lot more huffing and puffing to get Wade (Russell Crowe this time) and Evans (Christian Bale) into position for the showdown. Mostly, more is less. To Mangold's credit, his movie doesn't traffic in facile irony or postmodern detachment; it aims to be a straight-up Western and deliver the excitement and charisma the genre's fans are starved for. But recognizing that contemporary viewers might be out of touch with the bedrock simplicity and strength of the genre--not to mention its code of honor--Mangold has supplied both Evans and Wade with a plethora of backstory and "motivations." At the overblown action climax, the crossfire of personal agendas is almost as frenetic as the copious gunplay. (By that point the movie has killed more people than the Lincoln County War.) Best thing about the remake is Russell Crowe's Ben Wade, a Scripture-quoting career villain with an artist's eye and a curiously principled sense of whom and when to murder. As his second-in-command, Ben Foster fairly pirouettes at every opportunity to commit mayhem, and Peter Fonda contributes a fierce portrait of an old Wade adversary turned bounty hunter for the Pinkerton detective agency. --Richard T. Jameson

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"3:10 to Yuma" Soundtrack
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Stills from "3:10 to Yuma"

Languages: English, French, Portuguese, Spanish

Subtitles: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish

Sound: AC-3

Comments: Are You Ready!

Summary: Director Roger Spottiswoode (Tomorrow Never Dies Noriega) creates a world of the very near future in which cattle fish and even the family pet can be cloned. But cloning humans is illegal - that is until family man Adam Gibson (Arnold Schwarzenegger) comes home from work one day to find a clone has replaced him. Taken from his family and plunged into a sinister world he doesn't understand Gibson must not only save himself from the assassins who must destroy him to protect their secret but uncover who and what is behind the horrible things happening to him. THE SIXTH DAY is the story of Gibson's struggle to reclaim his life and his family.System Requirements:Running Time: 123 minutesFormat: BLU-RAY DISC Genre: SCI-FI/FANTASY/FANTASY UPC: 043396253339 Manufacturer No: 25333

Languages: English, French, Spanish

Subtitles: English, French, Spanish

Sound: AC-3

Comments: It takes a hero to change the world.

Summary: To anyone who has ever yearned to see woolly mammoths in full stampede across the Alps, "10,000 BC" can be heartily recommended. There's also a flock of "terror birds"--lethal ostriches on steroids--in a steaming jungle only a splice away from the heroes' snow-dusted alpine habitat. And lo, somewhere in the vastness of the North African desert lies a city whose slave inhabitants alternately teem like the crowds in "Quo Vadis" during the burning of Rome and trudge in hieratically menacing formations like the workers in "Metropolis". That's pretty much it for the cool stuff. Setting movies in prehistoric times is dicey. Apart from the "Dawn of Man" sequence in "2001: A Space Odyssey", only "Quest for Fire" makes the grade, and its creators had the good sense to limit the dialogue to grunts and moans. "10,000 BC" boasts a quasi-biblical narrator (Omar Sharif) and characters who speak in formed, albeit uninteresting, sentences--including a New Age–y "I understand your pain." But let no one say the storytelling isn't primitive. The narrator speaks of "the legend of the child with the blue eyes" and bingo, here's the kid now. When, grown up to be Camilla Belle, she's carried off by "four-legged demons"--guys on horseback to you--the neighbor boy (Steven Strait) who hankers to make myth with her leads a rescue mission into the great unknown world beyond their mountaintop. His name is D'Leh, which is "Held", the German for "knight," spelled backward. So yes, there is some hidden meaning after all.
"10,000 BC" is the latest triumph of the ersatz from writer-director Roland Emmerich. Like "Stargate" (1994), "Independence Day" (1996), and "The Day After Tomorrow" (2004) before it, it's shamelessly cobbled together out of every movie Emmerich can remember to pilfer from (though to be fair, the section in pre-ancient Egypt harks back to his own "Stargate"). Emmerich's saving grace is that his films' cheesiness is so flagrant, his narratives so geared for instant gratification, he can seem like a kid simultaneously improvising and acting out a story in his backyard: "P'tend there's this alien ... p'tend maybe he came from Atlantis or something...." Just don't p'tend it has anything to do with real moviemaking. "--Richard T. Jameson"

Languages: English, French, Spanish

Subtitles: Chinese, English, French, Korean, Spanish

Sound: AC-3

Summary: An unconvincing exercise in moral complexity, "21" is based on Ben Mezrich's book "Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions". Jim Sturgess ("Across the Universe") plays brilliant, blue-collar scholar Ben Campbell, whose doubts that he'll win a scholarship to Harvard Medical School compel him to join a secret, M.I.T. gang of math whiz kids. Under the silky but chilling command of a math professor (Kevin Spacey), Jim and the others master card counting, i.e., the statistical analysis of cards dealt in blackjack games. The team lives a humdrum existence during the week, but on weekends in Sin City, the students are rolling in cash, going to exclusive clubs, and feeling on top of the world. (Ben even gets the girl: a comely, fellow counter played by Kate Bosworth.) Despite all that success, Ben feels ethically compromised, and indeed director Robert Luketic ("Legally Blonde"), in the old tradition of American movies, plays it both ways where fun vices are concerned. On the one hand, it feels so good; on the other, ahem, we know it's wrong. That studied ambivalence proves wearing after a while, making the most interesting character in the film a casino watchdog played by Laurence Fishburne. A master at reading the emotions of gamblers beating the house with a scam, he's admirable for being good at his job, but repellent for wrecking the faces of counters in casino dungeons. He's all about moral complexity in the tradition of anti-heroes, and a truly provocative element in an otherwise superficial movie. "--Tom Keogh"


Beyond "21"
Two-disc Special Edition DVD
Read the book 21 was based on
UMD for PSP
Stills from "21" (click for larger image)

Languages: English, Spanish, French

Subtitles: Cantonese, English, Korean, Spanish

Sound: Dolby

Summary: The director/producer team that created "Trainspotting" turn their dynamic cinematic imaginations to the classic science fiction scenario of the last people on Earth. Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from a coma to find London deserted--until he runs into a mob of crazed plague victims. He gradually finds other still-human survivors (including Naomie Harris), with whom he heads off across the abandoned countryside to find the source of a radio broadcast that promises salvation. "28 Days Later" is basically an updated version of "The Omega Man" and other post-apocalyptic visions; but while the movie may lack originality, it makes up for it in vivid details and creepy paranoid atmosphere. "28 Days Later's" portrait of how people behave in extreme circumstances--written by novelist Alex Garland ("The Beach")--will haunt you afterward. Also featuring Brendan Gleeson ("The General, Gangs of New York") and Christopher Eccleston ("Shallow Grave, The Others"). "--Bret Fetzer"

Languages: English, Spanish, French

Subtitles: English, Spanish

Sound: AC-3

Summary: As an exercise in pure, unadulterated terror, "28 Weeks Later" is a worthy follow-up to its acclaimed predecessor, "28 Days Later". In this ultraviolent sequel from Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (hired on the strength of his 2001 thriller "Intacto"), over six months have passed since the first film's apocalyptic vision of London overrun by infectious, plague-ridden zombies. Just when it seems the "rage virus" has been fully contained, and London is in the process of slowly recovering, an extremely unfortunate couple (Robert Carlyle, Catherine McCormack) is attacked by a small band of rampaging "ragers," and the cowardly husband escapes while his wife is attacked and presumably infected. Their surviving children (Imogen Poots, Mackintosh Muggleton) fall under the protection of a U.S. Army sharpshooter (Jeremy Renner), but nobody's safe for long as "28 Weeks Later" goes into action-packed overdrive, with scene after blood-gushing scene of carnage and decimation. The film's visuals follow the look established in "28 Days Later", this time with bigger and better scenes of a nearly abandoned London on the brink of utter destruction. The military subplot gets a bold assist from Harold Perrineau (as a daring helicopter pilot) and Idris Elba (in a too-brief role as the military commander), and their firepower--not to mention the efficient lethality of helicopter blades--turns "28 Weeks Later" into a nonstop bloodbath that's way too intense for younger viewers and guaranteed to leave hardcore horror fans gruesomely satisfied. That's all there is to it--this film is almost plotless and dialogue is minimal throughout--but as a truly terrifying vision of survival amidst chaos, "28 Weeks Later" honors its origins and qualifies as a solid double-feature with "Children of Men". Could there be another sequel? Thanks to the "chunnel," the answer in this case is definitely oui. --"Jeff Shannon"

Beyond "28 Weeks Later" "28 Weeks Later" on DVD
"28 Days Later"
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Stills from "28 Weeks Later"

Languages: English, French, Portuguese, Spanish

Subtitles: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Thai

Sound: DTS Surround Sound

Summary: David ("Hard Candy") Slade directs this nerve-jangling adaptation of the popular graphic novel series about a mob of vampires that overruns a remote Alaskan town in the grip of "30 Days of Night". Josh Hartnett and Melissa George are the film's de facto heroes (he's the stoic town sheriff and she's his estranged fire-marshal wife) but the picture's real MVP is Slade's camera (along with cinematographer Jo Willems), which careens across the town's snowy landscape to detail the vampires' horrific assault on its inhabitants, which are quickly pared down to a hardy few. The script, co-written by the source material's creator, Steve Niles, along with "Pirates of the Caribbean"'s Stuart Beattie and "Hard Candy"'s Brian Nelson), proudly wears its influences on its crimson-stained sleeve (Bram Stoker's "Dracula", natch, but also "Salem's Lot, Night of the Living Dead", and John Carpenter's version of "The Thing") and boils down the graphic novels to a series of tense and extremely bloody standoffs between Harnett and George's band of survivors and the vaguely Slavic and ferocious bloodsuckers led by Marlow (a feral and frightening Danny Huston). And if the characters seem stock and the finale begs suspension of disbelief, the set pieces leading up to it are sufficiently supercharged with suspense and violence to please most horror fans. Standouts in the supporting cast are Ben Foster as the film's Renfield figure and Mark Boone Junior; the disturbing score by Brian Reitzell also merits a mention. "--Paul Gaita"
Stills from "30 Days of Night" (click for larger image)












Beyond "30 Days of Night"
On Widescreen DVD
Audio CD
Hardcover Book

Languages: English, French

Subtitles: English, French

Sound: AC-3

Comments: He has 88 minutes to solve a murder. His own.

Summary: Al Pacino looks startled through much of "88 Minutes", as though taken by surprise at being cast in a thriller that must've first passed across the desks of Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford. Still, Pacino brings his usual oomph to the role of a Seattle forensic psychiatrist, whose testimony secured the death sentence for a crazy serial killer (Neal McDonough). Wouldn't you know it, the very day the killer is sentenced to die, a copycat "Seattle Slayer" is on the loose, and Pacino starts getting ominous phone calls telling him the exact time of his own death. Tick tock: it's 88 minutes away. The film then serves up more red herrings than a Stalingrad fish fry, as possible culprits pop up every five minutes or so (among them an attractive group of med-school students played by Alicia Witt, Leelee Sobieski, and Benjamin McKenzie). Lapses in logic abound, but if you hunker down and zone in on Pacino's weary-eyed, poufy-haired professionalism, you can enjoy the goings-on. (They even make him run up flights of stairs, which one would have thought beyond him now.) Seattle's frequent stunt double, Vancouver, B.C., stands in as a location, and Jon Avnet supplies the slick direction. The cast is talented (including Amy Brenneman), leading you to guess that a lot of people will do anything just to work with Al Pacino. And you've got to admire Pacino's chutzpah at sharing the screen with statuesque actresses such as Brenneman and Sobieski; they tower over him, but he still holds his own. --"Robert Horton"

Stills from "88 Minutes" (click for larger image)

Languages: English, French, Spanish

Sound: Dolby

Summary: Like "Sin City" before it, "300" brings Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's graphic novel vividly to life. Gerard Butler ("Beowulf and Grendel, The Phantom of the Opera") radiates pure power and charisma as Leonidas, the Grecian king who leads "300" of his fellow Spartans (including David Wenham of "The Lord of the Rings", Michael Fassbender, and Andrew Pleavin) into a battle against the overwhelming force of Persian invaders. Their only hope is to neutralize the numerical advantage by confronting the Persians, led by King Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), at the narrow strait of Thermopylae. More engaging than "Troy", the tepid and somewhat similar epic of ancient Greece, 300 is also comparable to "Sin City" in that the actors were shot on green screen, then added to digitally created backgrounds. The effort pays off in a strikingly stylized look and huge, sweeping battle scenes. However, it's not as to-the-letter faithful to Miller's source material as Sin City was. The plot is the same, and many of the book's images are represented just about perfectly. But some extra material has been added, including new villains (who would be considered "bosses" if this were a video game, and it often feels like one) and a political subplot involving new characters and a significantly expanded role for the Queen of Sparta (Lena Headey). While this subplot by director Zack Snyder ("Dawn of the Dead") and his fellow co-writers does break up the violence, most fans would probably dismiss it as filler if it didn't involve the sexy Headey. Other viewers, of course, will be turned off by the waves of spurting blood, flying body parts, and surging testosterone. (The six-pack abs are also relentless, and the movie has more and less nudity--more female, less male--than the graphic novel.) Still, as a representation of Miller's work and as an ancient-themed action flick with a modern edge, "300" delivers. "--David Horiuchi"

Languages: English, Spanish

Subtitles: English, Spanish, French

Sound: AC-3

Comments: Let the Awe and Mystery of a Journey Unlike Any Other Begin

Summary: When Stanley Kubrick recruited Arthur C. Clarke to collaborate on "the proverbial intelligent science fiction film," it's a safe bet neither the maverick auteur nor the great science fiction writer knew they would virtually redefine the parameters of the cinema experience. A daring experiment in unconventional narrative inspired by Clarke's short story "The Sentinel," "2001" is a visual tone poem (barely 40 minutes of dialogue in a 139-minute film) that charts a phenomenal history of human evolution. From the dawn-of-man discovery of crude but deadly tools in the film's opening sequence to the journey of the spaceship "Discovery" and metaphysical birth of the "star child" at film's end, Kubrick's vision is meticulous and precise. In keeping with the director's underlying theme of dehumanization by technology, the notorious, seemingly omniscient computer HAL 9000 has more warmth and personality than the human astronauts it supposedly is serving. (The director also leaves the meaning of the black, rectangular alien monoliths open for discussion.) This theme, in part, is what makes "2001" a film like no other, though dated now that its postmillennial space exploration has proven optimistic compared to reality. Still, the film is timelessly provocative in its pioneering exploration of inner- and outer-space consciousness. With spectacular, painstakingly authentic special effects that have stood the test of time, Kubrick's film is nothing less than a cinematic milestone--puzzling, provocative, and perfect. "--Jeff Shannon"