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If Tom Cruise can jet around the globe breaking into high-security vaults in his fifties, then so can Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau, or so goes the thinking. The trouble is, Lau doesn’t have the clever machinations of Mission: Impossible or a stellar villain to rival Philip Seymour Hoffman to play with in The Adventurers, the latest brazenly mindless softball by actor-turned-director Stephen Fung. An unapologetic modern rehash of the sunny European adventure of John Woo’s Once a Thief, with a dash of M:i and maybe even a little Fast & Furious for good measure, The Adventurers is every bit...

John Woo is gearing up “Manhunt,” a return to the crime genre that made him famous in Hong Kong and around the world with such hits as “A Better Tomorrow,” “The Killer,” “Once a Thief,” “Bullet in the Head,” and “Hard Boiled.” The film is set to premiere at the Venice Film Festival next month and then screening at Tiff the following week.

Continue reading Trailer For John Woo’s ‘Manhunt’ Brings Out Doves & Double Guns, Obviously at The Playlist.

John Woo‘s career has had so many ups and downs that we’ve lost track where he stands at the moment.

But seriously, the man is a legend just for the Hong-Kong streak he had going between 1986-1992 ( “A Better Tomorrow,” “The Killer,” “Once a Thief,” “Bullet in the Head,” and “Hard Boiled“).

Continue reading John Woo’s Action Flick ‘Manhunt’ Sets Venice Film Festival Premiere at The Playlist.

After a six-month break forced by a serious horse-riding injury, Andy Lau is back with the treasure-hunt action drama The Adventurers, set to release in China on August 11. Directed by Stephen Fung (Tai Chi Zero, House of Fury), the film boasts of an international star cast of Shu Qi (The Assassin), Zhang Jingchu (Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation), Tony Yang (Where the Wind Settles), Eric Tsang (Ip Man: The Final Fight) and Jean Reno.

The Adventurers (2017) (Source: maactioncinema.com)

Loosely based on the 1991 John Woo action comedy Once a Thief, the film follows a trio of thieves led by Lau’s Cheung Tan, who hatch a plot to steal precious jewels in Europe. Reno is the very imaginatively named French detective Pierre, who has been hot on Cheung Tan’s trail for many years. Thrown into the mix are a criminal mastermind played by Tsang and Cheung Tan’s scorned ex-girlfriend played by Jingchu,...

“The Adventurers” is loosely based on John Woo’s “Once A Thief” and will feature an all star cast including Andy Lau, Shu Qi, Tony Yang and Jean Reno.

One of a dozen projects announced in March by Flagship Entertainment, the joint venture between Warner Bros., China Media Capital and broadcaster Tvb, “The Adventurers” will start shooting this summer at Prague Studios and in and around the Czech capital, Karlovy Vary, Lednice, Bouzov and other locations through September. Then it will move to France.

Syfy will launch a new Pa show in Summer called Aftermath. The 13-episode Canadian apocalypse thriller will begin production on May 2 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Aftermath was created by William Laurin (Missing) and Glenn Davis (John Woo’s Once a Thief) and centers on couple Karen and Joshua Copeland and their children Dana, Brianna and Matt, who must battle for survival after civilization comes to an apocalyptic end, triggered by massive storms, meteor strikes, earthquakes and plague – and the rise of supernatural creatures.

Jason Stone (This is the End) is set to direct the first two episodes while Stefan Pleszczinski (Being Human), Kaare Andrews (Cabin Fever 3: Patient Zero), April Mullen (Killjoys) and Jame [Continued ...]...

Aftermath, a 13-episode Canadian post-apocalyptic thriller series from Noreen Halpern’s Halfire Entertainment, is set to premiere on Syfy in the U.S. and Bell Media’s Space in Canada later this summer. Casting is currently underway, with production set to begin May 2 in Vancouver. Created by William Laurin (Missing, Power Play) and Glenn Davis (John Woo's Once a Thief), Aftermath centers on couple Karen and Joshua Copeland and their children Dana, Brianna and Matt, who…...

Cinema is a kind of uber-art form that’s made up of a multitude of other forms of art including writing, directing, acting, drawing, design, photography and fashion. As such, film is, as all cinema aficionados know, a highly collaborative venture.

One of the most consistently fascinating collaborations in cinema is that of the director and actor.

This article will examine some of the great director & actor teams. It’s important to note that this piece is not intended as a film history survey detailing all the generally revered collaborations.

There is a wealth of information and study available on such duos as John Ford & John Wayne, Howard Hawks & John Wayne, Elia Kazan & Marlon Brando, Akira Kurosawa & Toshiro Mifune, Alfred Hitchcock & James Stewart, Ingmar Bergman & Max Von Sydow, Federico Fellini & Giulietta Masina/Marcello Mastroianni, Billy Wilder & Jack Lemmon, Francis Ford Coppola & Al Pacino, Woody Allen & Diane Keaton, Martin Scorsese & Robert DeNiro...

The following is a list of all comic books, graphic novels and specialty items that will be available this week and shipped to comic book stores who have placed orders for them.

3 Finger Prints

Zombies Vs Cheerleaders Volume 2 #1 (Cover A Mike Debalfo)(not verified by Diamond), $3.99

Zombies Vs Cheerleaders Volume 2 #1 (Cover B Jamie Tyndall)(not verified by Diamond), $3.99

Zombies Vs Cheerleaders Volume 2 #1 (Cover C Adriano Carreon)(not verified by Diamond), $3.99

AC Comics

Crypt Of Horror Volume 17 Tp, $29.95

Alterna Comics

Blood-Drenched Creature Double-Feature Gn, $9.99

Amryl Entertainment

Cavewoman Oasis #1 (Of 2)(Budd Root Special Edition Cover), Ar

Andrews McMeel

Authoritative Calvin And Hobbes Sc (New Printing), $16.99

Calvin And Hobbes The Days Are Just Packed Tp (New Printing), $16.99

Calvin And Hobbes It’s A Magical World Tp (New Printing), $16.99

Antarctic Press

Gold Digger #148, $3.99

How To Draw Adventure Friends And Other Cartoon Heroes Sc, $19.95

Ape Entertainment

Drew Hayes’ Poison Elves #1 (Cover A Darick Robertson), $2.99

Drew Hayes...

When i go into a Chow Yun Fat movie, the first thing i think is “How many people will he kill in this movie”, the guy is just the greatest when it comes to Gun play movies.

Chow Yun Fat was born May 18, 1955. He is best known in Asia for his collaboration with filmmaker John Woo in heroic bloodshed genre films A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled.

Chow was born in Hong Kong, to a mother who was a cleaning lady and vegetable farmer, and a father who worked on a Shell Oil Company tanker. Of Hakka origins, he grew up in a farming community on Lamma Island in a house with no electricity.

He woke up at dawn each morning to help his mother sell herbal jelly and Hakka tea-pudding on the streets and in the afternoons he went to work in the fields.

His family moved...

A Better Tomorrow 2012

Stars: Jin-mo Ju, Seung-heon Song, Kang-woo Kim, Han Sun Jo, Kyeong-yeong Lee | Written by Hing-Ka Chan, Suk-Wah Leung | Directed by Hae-sung Song

A Korean remake of John Woo’s original film, A Better Tomorrow 2012 tells the story of Hyuk (Jin-mo), who lives the fast life as a high-ranking mobster in Busan, South Korea with his closest pal, fellow mobster Lee Young-Chun (Seung-heon). Hyuk is haunted by the memory of leaving behind his younger brother Chul (Kang-woo) and mother as they attempted to flee into South Korea from North Korea. Hyuk is set up by the police and jailed. Three years later, he is released and travels back to Busan to find his younger brother Chul now a high-ranking police officer. Hyuk tries to earn back the trust of his brother, but rejection and betrayal are hard to forget. Things come to a head when Young-Chun pulls Hyuk into doing one last gig.

It’s the start of another week, so you know what that means – more DVD and Blu-ray releases! So here’s the rundown of what’s available to buy from today, August 29th 2011.

Pick Of The Week

Hatchet II (DVD/Blu-ray)

Picking up right where the splatter-tastic original ended, Marybeth escapes the clutches of the deformed, swamp-dwelling iconic killer Victor Crowley. After learning the truth about her family’s connection to the hatchet-wielding madman, Marybeth returns to the Louisiana swamps along with an army of hunters to recover the bodies of her family and exact the bloodiest revenge against the bayou butcher. Boasting a body count that is over double that of the first movie and once more providing ground-breaking work in Old School practical cinema special effects to deliver unapologetically unrestrained gushers of gore, Hatchet II is more, more, more of everything you loved about the original only darker,...

Network DVD have announced that at long last, legendary Hong Kong action director John Woo’s action-packed, breathlessly-paced Once A Thief: The Complete Series, starring Sandrine Holt, Ivan Sergei and Nicolas Lea, will be available to own for the first time on DVD this August.

Brought up to be expert in all manner of criminal skills – from the martial arts to the art of con – Mac Ramsey (Ivan Sergei) and Li Ann Tsei (Sandrine Holt) are forced to use their expertise to fight crime. Working with a former cop, Victor Mansfield (Nicholas Lea), they are part of an elite law-enforcement agency that takes on forces that are too powerful, protected, or difficult for regular law enforcement agencies. The threats they encounter take them into startling, brutal worlds where the stakes are high and failure can earn you a bullet in the head…

A first for television, Once A Thief...

Above: Publicity still from John Parker's Dementia (1955).

Rep houses in San Francisco, like those in most American cities, are struggling to stay open. But for something like thirty nights a year, the clouds lift and big crowds materialize for films of the past: call it the noir exception. To be sure, one needn’t actually attend the Film Noir Foundation’s annual Noir City festival at the Castro or Elliot Lavine’s grittier programs at the Roxie to know that the generic fantasy of film noir (style, sex and violence washed together) still holds powerful allure. You could hardly miss the bus stop advert for Rockstar Games’ latest blockbuster, L.A. Noire, outside the Roxie during Lavine’s latest marathon, “I Wake Up Dreaming: The Legendary and the Lost”. For those of us still invested in the non-interactive cinema experience, however, the popularity of these series is a remarkable if curious thing.

Chicago – John Woo changed my life. I was just the right age when I saw “The Killer” and “Hard Boiled” that they blew my mind. Wait, you mean not all foreign films look like Jean-Luc Godard? I was young enough that I thought foreign meant boring. There’s Nothing boring about the prime of John Woo and one of his best, “Hard Boiled” has now been released on Blu-ray. And it still blows my mind.

Blu-Ray Rating: 4.0/5.0

The action genre is too often the playground of the lazy. Too many directors think that if they just feature enough shoot-outs, car chases, and explosions then they will satisfy their genre requirements. Creativity too rarely plays a significant role. And it was even more of a problem in the late ’80s when the action genre was dominated by muscle-bound icons like Sly and Ah-nuld. While American action was in a rut, John Woo...

As a heartthrob, pop star, and celebrated Hong Kong actor, Leslie Cheung gained legions of fans, making him was one of Asia’s most popular performers and intriguing personalities. The actor appeared in over sixty films, sometimes playing sexually ambiguous characters, as well as romantic leads in both gay and heterosexually-themed films.

It was in 1986 that Cheung’s film career really gained momentum, thanks to his casting as a rookie cop opposite Chow Yun-Fat in John Woo’s popular 1986 crime thriller A Better Tomorrow. The film’s success opened many doors for the actor and allowed him to branch out, appearing in both sequels to A Better Tomorrow (1987 and 1989) and also as one of the many stars of Stanley Kwan’s Rouge, a romantic ghost story in which he played a young man who falls in love with a courtesan dressed as a man. Rouge was one of the most...

A UK trailer has been released for martial arts epic The Legend of Fong Sai-yuk, released on DVD by Cine Asia next Monday, September 6. You can watch the trailer below.

It stars Jet Li, currently on the big screen in Sylvester Stallone's action-hero ensemble The Expendables.

The Legend of Fong Sai-yuk won Best Action Choreography Award at the 1994 Hong Kong Film Awards and the awards for Best Martial Arts Direction and Best Editing at Taiwan's prestigious Golden Horse Film Festival.

It is considered one of the most breathtaking and spectacular martial arts action movies of the 1990s.

Directed by Corey Yuen, the director of The Transporter and Doa: Dead Or Alive and action director of X-Men and Lethal Weapon 4, it also stars Michelle Reis (Bodyguards And Assassins), Chu Kong (Once A Thief) and veteran Chinese actress Josephine Siao (Hu Du Men).

The film is said to boast "some...

Reed’s Bargain Bin [1] is a recurring column where Reed Farrington tells us about a movie he bought for under $5, and whether or not he regrets the purchase. “Blowed ‘em up good, blowed ‘em up real good!” If Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok from Sctv’s Farm Film Report had been on Rotten Tomatoes’ (Rt) staff, then there’s no way that Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (Bevs) would ever be in the list of Rt’s worst movies of the past decade [2]. So, in the opinion of Reed Farrington, does this movie deserve to be at the top of that list? Well, that “worst of” list was the impetus I needed to finish watching this film that had been sitting in my stockpile for the past three years. I hadn’t realized that I had watched all of it up to the last ten minutes. Perhaps this is...