Just moving this note posted by BrianBkyn over from the Forum:  “I think we finally nailed this one down - we have been adding films like mad over the past few days - more than we actually had room for so we had to add two more days. At any rate we like our line-up a lot - and just put the cherry on top by getting Crying Fist - a film that we honestly didn’t expect to get. The site still needs a bit of work but its mainly all there and tickets go on sale mid-next week.”

The schedule of films they have is certainly the most current survey of quality cinema coming out of asia.  WOW! Go there now!

Not content to let the crazy Chinese and Thais dominate the field of the action heroes who moves in death-defying ways, happily abusing stunt-men and props department alike, Luc Besson has been actively nurturing martial arts films in France.  Banlieue 13 is perhaps a step forward and a step backwards.

Continue Reading "Banlieue 13 Review"...

Here’s the one-sheet and trailer for John Singleton’s next movie Four Brothers.

Mark Wahlberg. John Singleton. Meh.

Check out the trailer for Four Brothers here.

One Sheet via IGNFilmForce.

Trailer via Movies.com.

Michelle Yeoh has been considered for a role in the third installment of the Mission Impossible series.

I don’t know how to handle this news. On one side I am jazzed that the greatest Bond girl ever will be on the silver screen potentially kicking serious ass.

On the other side I am wishing her to stay away as news about MI:3 casting has been all over the map in recent weeks and the production has been pushed back and marred with other staffing issues. Movies.com does a good job tracking of all the cast/staff changes since production began.

I just don’t want to see her sign on only to become another victim of casting purgation because Tom realizes that there is someone WAAAAAY hotter than he is sharing the screen with him.

via MonkeyPeaches.

Poor poor Oliver. History unfortunately repeated itself this weekend when famed director Oliver Stone [Platoon, Natural Born Killers, JFK and Alexander] was arrested at a police checkpoint in Beverly Hills, California on Friday evening and hit with drug charges. He was released this morning after posting $15,000 bond. Authorities won’t reveal which substances Stone was on when arrested. Stone was arrested in 1999 under the same charges and was ordered into a rehabilitation program.

So all those times that Stone was saying that Alexander was really good and that audiences simply weren’t smart enough for it and we thought he was on the hard stuff? Turns out we may not have been all that wrong.

via Reuters and Cinematical.

Oooh ... Jiangtou just sent in a batch of interesting news and images from the Cannes Market and first among them is the one sheet poster for Death Trance, the new film starring Tak Sakaguchi, director by the action director from Versus.  Click here for a larger version of that.

Another one from Jiangtou, this time the one sheet for the Chow Yun Fat zombie western The Wretched.  Assuming the poster’s accurate the film has now been picked up by Darclight for international sales, which is a very good thing ... they’ve got a solid record when it comes to getting films on local screens ... check out a larger version of the poster here and the production company’s site here.  Be sure to check out the recent production video while you’re at it ...

More images from Jiangtou, this time for the Steven Seagal / Bey Logan produced Dragon Squad.  Now don’t go rolling your eyes at the mention of Seagal’s name ... it’s been a while since he starred in anything half decent but he’s working purely as a producer on this one and has got some significant talent on board.  The film tells the story of a team of Interpol agents - led by Sammo Hung - pursuing international terrorists in Hong Kong.  Michael Biehn and Simon Yam also star.  Black Mask’s Daniel Lee is in the director’s chair.  The film is slated for a fall release.

Sure, it’s stunt casting but it’s FANTASTIC stunt casting.  Harvey Keitel will be appearing in Singapore-funded Hong Kong triad film One Last Dance, due for release later this year.  Francis Ng and Vivian Hsu also appear.  Check out the production company’s site film site here.

Thanks to Jiantou for the pointer.

Here’s why ...

Sha Po Lang reviewed!

Tony Jaa’s third film info!  All the Ong Bak boys back on board and they’re using swords!

I quiver.  I quiver.

All I can say about this is DAMN ...

DarkSide Magazine and DVD World Magazine, both edited by Allan Bryce, have been caught out for a simply MASSIVE amount of plagiarism spanning years.  It appears that they’ve been lifting online film reviews at least since 2003 and re-printing them as their own work, without bylines and without permission from the original authors.  Who have they stolen from?  It’s not a complete list but among the victims:

Dark Horizons, CHUD, Midnight Eye, NixFlix, DVD Talk, DVD Times, Digital Bits, IO Film, IGN, Bloody Disgusting, Dread Central, The New York Times, DVD Maniacs, DVD File and DVD Drive In.

Dark Side doesn’t maintain a review archive online so I have no way of checking to see if we’ve been hit, but it’s certainly something for any writers working online to be aware of. 

To people who subscribe to the magazine, here’s my advice:  cancel your subscription now.  These people are profiting from other people’s work. 

For full details check the Latarnia Forums here.

The tagline on the face of the DVD cover labels Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Charisma ‘an enigmatic thriller’.  That’s certainly one way of putting it.  Having seen the film a handful of times and finding undeniably compelling I was nonetheless encouraged to hear writer / director Kurosawa confess in the on-disc interview that he himself doesn’t really know what sort of film this is or if it entirely works.

After many longs years scrabbling to make a living in the direct-to-video market Kurosawa finally had a major break through with his troubling, possibly supernatural, serial killer thriller Cure in 1997.  Based on the success of that film Kurosawa turned out a trio of films in 1999, two of which (License To Live and Barren Illusion) have never been available outside Japan and the third of which is Charisma.

Continue Reading "Charisma Review"...

Ah … between the good folks at HVE, Palm, Tartan and Artsmagic roughly half of Japanese auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s filmography will be easily available here in North America by the end of the year and that is a very, very good thing.  One of the latest Kurosawa releases is HVE’s edition of his made for TV feature Séance.

Kurosawa regular Koji Yakusho stars as a sound engineer in a happy but bland marriage to an emotionally fragile woman with psychic abilities.  While in the woods recording sounds for a documentary Yakusho unknowingly picks up a stowaway – a young girl fleeing from her kidnapper hides in his equipment case.  She is locked in, taken home to Tokyo and stored in a garage.  The police, desperate for clues and grasping at straws, eventually turn to the wife hoping that she can tell them something through her psychic abilities but all she gets is confusing, conflicting signals that eventually – after the police leave – lead her to the girl, just barely alive, in the garage.  And this is where things get interesting … by turns afraid that the police will never believe such an unlikely story and hungry for the fame that would come from leading them to the girl the couple hatch a plan to lead the police to carefully planted clues and eventually back to the young girl, who they plan to stash unharmed in an abandoned building.  But the plan goes wrong, the girl is suffocated, and the couple is left consumed by guilt, afraid of capture and being haunted by the ghost of the young girl.

Continue Reading "Seance Review"...

Here’s a short mainly sweet look at It’s All Gone Pete Tong. The title refers to an English turn of phrase which is used when things aren’t going as they should. But as the film shows, there is our idea of what should be and the way things should really be. Reminds of an old story about a man who gained the world and almost lost his soul. Frankie Wilde lost everything and somehow turned out richer for it.

Continue Reading "It’s All Gone Pete Tong Film Review"...

The first time Todd posted this, I think the quality wasn’t up to much. Now it’s Quicktime. Here.

via AICN.