The last of the snow around Potsdamer Platz has melted in time for the 63rd edition of the Berlin International Film Festival. This year’s opening film, from festival jury president Wong Kar-Wai (pictured at left), was the big-budget Kung Fu epic "The Grandmaster," shown here in its world premiere a month after opening in China. Expectations ran high for the arthouse auteur’s first martial arts outing, not to mention

In addition to being his supposedly last theatrical film director Steven Soderbergh, for a while, would have you believe “Side Effects” could be his best—a complex thriller about psychiatric drugs—only to lose its focus almost entirely and make you wish screenwriter Scott Z. Burns took a shot of Ritalin. Martin and Emily (Channing Tatum and Rooney Mara) are a New York couple with issues. He has just been released from prison for insider

The 63rd edition of the Berlinale will open tomorrow Thursday evening for ten days. And like every year, it’s the diversity of the films on hand which makes this festival remarkable. More than 400 titles will be screened, including big-budget Hollywood movies and a slew of European films (including several first features) addressing controversial contemporary issues like homosexuality within the Catholic Church or land

“The Sorcerer and the White Snake” does what so many fairytale romances--“Twilight” and “Warm Bodies," to name a few--don't: it goes big. This 2011 Hong Kong film by Chinese choreographer and action director Ching Siu-Tung a.k.a "Tony Ching," recounts the story of a demon--actually a white snake with the seductive head and shoulders of a woman (Eva Huang)--who falls in love with a poor herbalist (Raymond Lam)

You never want the word “cute” to be associated with Al Pacino or Christopher Walken to begin with, let alone an action-comedy starring both of them. You certainly don’t want the term “sappy” to apply. Unfortunately, Fisher Stevens’s "Stand Up Guys" is just that: cute and sappy, with too few smart-alecky laughs to spice up its bland soul. Pacino is a faded hitman just sprung from a twenty eight-year jail stint for the accidental killing of a

I wish I could have been in on the creative meeting when the producers were discussing titles for this thing. Formerly called “Headshot," before someone presumably thought that title was too sissified, “Bullet to the Head” is about as apt a description for a film as I’ve seen in a while. But for all the empty violence, “B2TH” is still kind of fun and compared to last week's “Parker," its craftsmanship at its best. Sylvester Stallone plays Joe Bobo, a New Orleans

“John Dies at the End” has the spirit, if not always the laughs, of Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” trilogy. Don Coscarelli, who has a nearly thirty plus-year career working on B-grade horror films like “The Beastmaster” and Bubba Ho-Tep," has adapted David Wong’s 2004 comic-graphic novel into one messy, freaky, and mind-boggling ride of a movie. Chase Williamson and Rob Mayes are Dave and John, two slacker buddies who take a drug

Every January Hollywood releases streams of dreck, mostly third-rate action vehicles that have long been sitting on the shelf. "Broken City" appears to be an excuse to get Mark Wahlberg fans flocking to the cinema, to net the studios some quick cash during a time when the Oscar-nominated indie pics are the main attraction. Surprisingly, though, it is a compelling thriller, packed with endless twists that eventually work themselves

Terminator, governator, what will we call this new chapter in the life of one of the best action heroes of my generation? What we can be sure of is that Schwarzenegger arrives in another decade coming off much better than he did, as an actor anyway, in the previous one. “The Expendables 2” was a blast and “The Last Stand” is the best starring vehicle he’s had since 1996’s “Eraser." This is a different Schwarzenegger than

Allen Hughes, one half of the directing brothers who did the stylized Jack The Ripper feature “From Hell” and street-life drama “Menace 2 Society," flies solo for “Broken City.” And yet, if his name was not included in the credits you would've never known it. Lacking suspense, style, and the surprise effect "Broken City" falls on its face almost out of the gate. Mark Wahlberg is Billy Taggert, a N.Y. detective who's relieved of