In 2012, Guy Pearce started in the sci-fi film “Lockout,” The actor played a man who was going to prison but is offered his freedom if he rescued POTUS’s daughter who had been kidnapped by inmates of a prison. (Sound familiar?)

Director John Carpenter thought so and successfully sued the screenwriter (filmmaker Luc Besson)

Han Van Meegeren was such a cunning, apt artist that he convinced the world his own paintings were actually painted centuries earlier by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer. In fact, such a believer in his own talent was Van Meegeren that during World War II, he sold one of his phony Vermeers to Hermann Göring himself.

The postwar aftermath of this incredibly unlikely but true tale forms

Lite De Palma can still be good De Palma. “Domino” sees the master-filmmaker working with a lesser script yet coming out on top.

The director had made clear his disgust with the making of this film, whose production at one point was in danger of being shut down because of money issues. De Palma still insists many crew members hadn’t been properly paid and says that this “was

In scandal-prone filmdom, not the least is the lackluster career of a great actor, Guy Pearce, though his choice of unclassifiable turns (“Memento,” “Two Brothers,” etc.) may be a factor.

Case in point, the strange and strangely moving “The Rover,” where in a desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland, his character, Eric, maybe a former soldier of fortune, farmer or adventurer, and surely

There’s a famous Hollywood joke about how you can describe any action movie over the past twenty years as something like ”Die Hard in an orbital maximum-security prison.” That would be the one that applies to the very entertaining Lockout, a movie that is Die Hard by way of Star Wars by way of Blade Runner by way of La Femme Nikita by way of The Fifth Element by way of Escape from New York by way of Big Trouble in Little China.

If we were loading cultural items onto a deep space vessel headed beyond the Milky Way and you wanted a prime example of the horror movie with a disturbed little girl (Bailee Madison) moves in with her father and stepmother in a threatening old mansion, a crazy secret murder in the basement, a grumpy groundskeeper who knows all the secrets, an oblivious father (Guy Pearce)