Battle Royale is finally available on DVD in America. 12 years ago, it was considered dangerous to release the movie here. A watered-down American remake got canceled 5 years ago because even that was feared to be too controversial. Then The Hunger Games happened, and suddenly kids killing each other became mainstream, so it's finally been released and people who didn't import or pirate the movie can finally see what all the fuss was about. Like Hunger Games, Battle Royale was first a book, and that book has been available translated in English for quite some time now. Not getting into the whole "Was Hunger Games a rip-off?" can of worms (short answer: not really), I preferred the Battle Royale novel to The Hunger Games. Yet for the exact same I think Battle Royale makes a better book, I think The Hunger Games works better as a movie.

Perspective is the main issue here. Hunger Games has one POV character, Battle Royale has many. In the 600-plus page novel, all of these different characters can be developed. A two-hour film doesn't have that luxury and it becomes difficult to keep track of all the characters and locations. Structurally it doesn't make for a great film. But in parts, the film of Battle Royale is able to capture amazing moments. A scarily cheerful instruction video, a beeping collar threatening to explode, a nerd reciting math equations while shooting his classmates, a group of girls fighting over who poisoned who, a psychopath jumping from behind with a sword, all these and many more images make powerful impressions. That the cinematography is always clear, allowing the horror onscreen to sink in, is one advantage this movie has over The Hunger Games. That the horror is so insane is what has made this film a cult classic.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about Battle Royale is the age of its director. Kinji Fukasaku was 70 when he released this film, his last. It's amazing an old man was able to make a film so youthful, so provocative, so anti-establishment and anti-adult. The horrors he faced as a 15-year-old in WWII obviously stayed with him. Battle Royale may not add up to the sum of its parts, but its undeniably powerful how its director was able to make a film about teenagers that so clearly remembers what being a teenager was like. B+

Note: The theatrical cut of the film is only available in a boxed-set with Battle Royale 2, which from what I've heard sounds like one of the worst sequels ever. The single-disc DVD is a Special Edition with three extra scenes at the end. None of them add anything to the film and actually detract from the feel on the real ending; the inspirational speech at the end needs to cut right to the J-rock over the credits, but the extra scenes continue the same maudlin background music long after it's right for the emotion of the film.

Good work, Joss Whedon. Good work. You now have two scripts in serious contention for best of the year praise. Cabin in the Woods was actually made years back (Chris Hemsworth is featured here before he was cast as Thor), and is only now seeing the light of day after the kerfuffle of MGM's financial issues. Long delays for already-finished films is usually a bad sign, but Cabin in the Woods' release is only bad for horror filmmakers realizing certain tropes in their films will never be taken seriously again. It'll probably be out of theaters soon lost in the shuffle of summer releases, so if you haven't seen it, go see it while you can. If you have seen it already, God, that was one crazy movie, wasn't it?

For the courtesy of those who haven't seen it yet, I'm limited in discussing said craziness here in detail. Do not seek out spoilers if you haven't seen it yet; you will want to be surprised. If Avengers is primarily an exercise in character and action for Whedon, Cabin is an exercise in plot creativity. You may see some things coming, but I am certain you will not see everything coming, least of which the amazingly bonkers ending.

It starts off as a meta slasher spoof, a subtler Scream or a smarter Rubber. It's clever but only intermittently laugh-out-loud funny and the initial scares are outweighed by the silliness of it all. However, as the twists pile up and action escalates, the film becomes an absolute genius deconstruction of the entire horror genre. As I said earlier, certain horror tropes, mainly slasher tropes, are thoroughly decimated, but in the bigger picture the genre can benefit from this deconstruction, as it ends up arguing for the necessity of horror itself. Whedon and new director Drew Goddard serve up some successful jump scares along the way, but it's the central metaphor of the film and its argument for why we need horror that lingers in the mind and, depending on how one reads it, ends up most disturbing. A-

The Marvel Studios experiment has succeeded. For all the missteps made in the movies building up to this one, The Avengers is one of the best movies of its kind. A massive crossover of a kind unprecedented in cinema history, this could have easily have turned out nothing more than a producer's dream. With the Joss Whedon, a genius and serious comic fan, at the helm, however, it ends up fulfilling the fan's and the moviegoer's dreams as well.

When dark and gritty has been the aesthetic of choice for the superhero genre, The Avengers is gleefully silly. The best kind of silly, because it's human silly (or in the case of scenes focusing on Thor and Loki, mythological blown-up-beyond-human silly). This is not Iron Man or Captain America's movie, so you'll have to wait for their own movies in the next couple of years to go more in depth into their personal issues left unresolved, but they're great characters and Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans are still great in the roles. Scarlett Johanson's Black Widow, previously introduced in Iron Man 2 with little to do but kick ass and look hot, is actually shown to be an interesting character in her own right, and she still kicks ass and looks hot. Of the character's being juggled, only Hawkeye gets the short shift, more a plot device than a fully-fledged hero in his own right. If this is any one hero's movie, however, it's Mark Ruffalo's Hulk. Oh my puny god, is he great! Bruce Banner in this movie is tragicomic, carrying all the fear and self-hatred that comes with the character but suppressing it under a Dude-esque Zen chill. He establishes a great comic rapport with Iron Man, who gets along with him as a scientist but is also impatient to get to see the rage monster in action. When the monster is finally unleashed, it's worthy of all the great build-up it has received, and all the cheers the scene must be receiving at theaters across the globe.

It's expected The Avengers would have huge action sequences and a special effects budget to feed a small country. These do not let down; unlike the previous Marvel Studios movies, there's no climax let-down. What might not be expected is that The Avengers is also one of the funniest character comedies in recent memory. Joss Whedon's dialogue is snappy as always, and the verbal fights between Earth's Mightiest Heroes are as fun if not more than the physical ones. The Avengers may not have a lot to say, but it's too smart and entertaining to really quibble with. It's a fantastic start to what looks like a stand-out summer movie season. And be sure to stay through all the credits! A+

Captain America: The First Avenger, the last of Marvel Studios' movies building up to to The Avengers, is up there with the first Iron Man as the most entertaining of the bunch. Where Iron Man was a complete movie that happened to have an invitation for sequels, though, Captain America is frustratingly incomplete. Will The Avengers address all the hanging threads here, or will we have to wait for Captain America 2? Or will the issues I'm wondering about not end up addressed at all, which in retrospect would make this movie and the movies following it a bit of a disappointment? Such is the dilemma when reviewing chapters of a bigger serial. That I'm involved enough to be asking such questions is a credit to the movie's strengths.

Superhero origin movies always contain a sense of inevitability in their plot proceedings, so it's tone where these movies get the chance to excel at something unique. Spider-Man was pulpy, Batman Begins gritty, Iron Man snarky. Captain America's tone is retro, 1940s earnestness with an awareness of being rather silly but not becoming parody. Steve Rogers, played by Chris Evans with a few cool body-warping special effects, is a boy scout but he's neither boring nor a joke. His good nature is inspiring because he starts off incredibly vulnerable and even after the super-syrum kicks in, he finds himself vulnerable again in the end. He plays off well against Tommy Lee Jones as the general who doesn't see the hero in him and Stanley Tucci as the scientist who does. How they introduce the costume, the silliest most dated aspect of the Captain America character, is brilliant, done with a little help from Alan Menken in the film's greatest scene.

The origin stuff done pretty near perfectly, the movie then goes beyond that and begins to show fault. After a rousing prison rescue, most of Cap's exploits are shown in montage as opposed to full action sequences; it seems like it's just the trailer thrown into the middle of the movie. The last action scene is where most of my dissatisfaction with the movie as a single movie comes in. Earlier in the film Steve makes it clear he doesn't want to kill anyone, and the last action scene has him killing a lot of people in surprisingly brutal ways. Now of course there's a difference between wanting to kill and needing to kill, and he's at an incredibly low point where it's conceivable he would kill, but there's no time in the movie for reflection after the killings. What happened to him following the scientist's advice about staying true to the man he was? There's plenty of meat here for future movies to deal with. But will they? B (grade could be bumped up or down depending on how future movies turn out)

Yes, another recent film with weird title issues. Personally I like the British title (the one with the scientists) more, but obviously someone thought Americans don't like scientists and changed it. Ah well. There's still scientists in the movie, including Charles Darwin. The jokes about his conflict with the church from the books the movie is based on have been removed, but it's still Charles Darwin, and I take it a good number of Americans still don't like that guy. If they don't like the movie because of that, well, I'm sorry for them. Because this movie is fun.

I love stop-motion animation. To my knowledge, there hasn't been a single feature length stop-motion film that has been anything less than delightful, probably because they're so rare and so hard to make that if you're even trying you better have something good to justify the work. The mere fact this movie is the return to stop-motion films for Aardman Animation, the studio that did the Wallace and Gromit series and Chicken Run, pretty much meant I knew I was going to like this the second I heard it was being made. The animation here is as tactile, expressive, and packed with quick sight gags as those previous films were. Now, it's not completely stop-motion, for there is a lot of CG for water and various background effects, but that stuff blends in fine with the hand-sculpted characters, and whatever "old school" cred the film loses for the CG it should make up for with a number of hand-drawn 2D animation scenes scattered throughout the film. Just looking at the film makes me smile. Listening to it, with top British talent such as Martin Freeman and David Tennant, doesn't hurt either.

Beyond just smiles, there's a lot of laughs in the film as well. The trailers gave away some but far from all of the biggest ones. Unfortunately the film's a wee bit unbalanced; after opening with constant inventive wackiness, at some point in the middle of the film, after the science competition I'd say if I were to pinpoint a moment, the laughs slow down as the film becomes more concerned with trying to move its rather slight plot along. But even when the plot seems to drag the movie down, there's still Flight of the Conchords music and Jane Austen on a date with the Elephant Man to pick things up. Ultimately, I think half hour gag-a-minute shorts like Wallace and Gromit may be the best way to go if Aardman wants to return to these characters in the future, but there's still plenty to treasure in this longer film. Now how are they going to retitle The Pirates! In An Adventure With Communists for America? B+

You're not likely to find a film like A Separation from an American director, and not just because of its specific sense of place in contemporary Iran. Even stripping away the issues of setting and culture, the plot of the film, a series of complexly intertwined tragedies and decisions with hardly any positive outcomes, I can only imagine being handled one of two ways in popular American film: as overbearing sentimental melodrama or as detached ironic nihilism. As much as it tugs on the heartstrings (Stephen Colbert's read of the film as "a call for jihad on my emotions" is hilariously accurate), A Separation does not have time for sentimentality, and while it acknowledges its dramatic ironies, it's never anything less than serious and humanistic. It's a film of conviction and purpose, and it's kind of amazing.

I won't touch too heavily on the plot in this review to allow going into the movie fresh, but you will have a lot to think about during and after the movie. Crap piles up, but you keep wanting the characters to pull through, not because they have much promise of hope, but because you know they have their reasons for whatever mistakes they make and they deserve hope, even when some of them don't always seem to be good people. The trust that they have reasons for their actions contrasts with the deep mistrust created towards what those reasons are or even what those actions are. The questioning continues through the credits and after in a combination of curiosity and incredible tension.

So Asgar Farhadi has made a film that's serious, human, intense, intelligent, culturally significant to the point it may just prevent a war if the right people see it and are affected by it, and just plain great. What he hasn't made is one that's particularly entertaining. After sitting through it, I wanted to watch The Artist, the year's other best film with an almost opposite substance-to-entertainment ratio, immediately after. Needless to say I don't anticipate sitting through it again. But I'm absolutely glad I did, and if you're prepared for it, you'll be too. A+

Luis Bunuel was famous for working in many cinemas, from the French to the Spanish to the Mexican, American, and Italian. It's curious that until now his single contribution to the Japanese cinema has been unjustly ignored. The reasoning makes sense; Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi were lending the Japan an air of respectability at film festivals, and the subversive anarchic work that is Vampire Girl Vs. Frankenstein Girl, directed by Bunuel under the pseudonym of Yoshihiro Nishimura, was buried for decades in fear of threatening that image. The extreme graphic content would have had it banned pretty much everywhere in the world at the time anyway.

The uncomfortable restraint of the graphic content, however, makes a parody of the censorship standards still in place for most every country's films up to the 1950s. It is a film about the need to bleed. The wrist-cutting club in the film is made up of desperate souls who cannot bleed, for no reason other than contemporary film logic dictates that no matter what violence they face film characters simply do not bleed. Vampire Girl, who recollects the horror genre that gave vital power to cinema before the Hayes Code and whose power follows a inconsistency consistent with the vision she is sometimes but never entirely censored by outward forces of film logic, is free; not only is she capable of releasing others into abstract bursts of gore, her own bleeding is what gives her power over others, particularly over the male hero. The evil school principal, as he mutilates bodies to create his Frankenstein Girl, can't quite immerse himself in the blood of his creations. The blackface club reveals contemporary common film sense at its most offensive horrible levels, and a sexually frustrated narrator further drives home the divide between our reality and this fever dream of contemporary cinema.

Naoyuki Tomomatsu and Bunuel's bastard son Yoshihiro Nishimura Jr. restored Vampire Girl Vs. Frankenstein Girl a few years ago, with some disappointingly substandard CG effects where there was once state-of-the-art stop motion. FUNimation's translation fails to translate all cultural references across time and space: the black community in the village of Obama has nothing to do with our current President, and old film serial references get replaced with contemporary Japanese references to The Grudge and such. An imperfect representation of a surrealist masterpiece, go in with a proper understanding of this film's context and you'll be pleasantly surprised. A

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The Hunger Games stands out as one of the most faithful screen adaptations of a novel I've ever seen, not ultra-literal like the first two Harry Potter films or Watchmen, but missing almost nothing and more to the point gets across the feel of reading the original book. Considering that the book was written in first person and the movie isn't, this is a significant accomplishment. Credit's due to Suzanne Collins, the writer of the book who happened to co-write the screenplay and thus had significant say over how her work would be adapted. I can't think of many writers adapting their own work to the screen; William Goldman did it with The Princess Bride, Louis Sachar did it with Holes, Arthur C. Clarke wrote the book and movie of 2001: A Space Odyssey simultaneously and turned out two very different products, and Katsuhiro Otomo and Hayao Miyazaki have put their manga magnum opuses into animation. Hunger Games as a film isn't 2001 or Akira, but the source material wasn't. What it is is a damn good thriller that respects its teenage audience.

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss is also instrumental getting the feel of the book to the screen. We can't hear Katniss's inner monologue, so instead we get her face, her physicality, and her dialogue. She can be sarcastic when nothing else will suffice for a given situation but the soul of her character is that she's incredibly true to herself even when placed in a setting where you're expected to be fake. I know some readers imagined her to be biracial from the way she was described in the books and I feel for them in wishing more actors of color could get leading roles in major films, but Lawrence is so good I can't complain about this particular casting (Amandla Stenberg and Lenny Kravitz's perfect turns as Rue and Cinna which have been giving racist viewers ulcers further give me the impression the casting people knew what they were doing). Her strength helps lend the film a wonderful economy where major emotional beats can be developed in short amounts of time, useful for adapting those packed sequels.

With the groundwork so strong, my only frustrations with the film are merely cosmetic. The effects aren't totally convincing. President Snow should look a lot creepier. Cuts aside, how does everyone stay so clean during the games? Some of the action could be shot clearer; I have to assume the excess shakey-cam was to avoid an R, but really, when a guy bashes in another guy's head with a brick early on in the film, the PG-13 rating isn't making total sense anyway. Not that 13-year-olds shouldn't see the film, but it is more intense and upsetting than a lot of R-rated films I've seen. So parents should know what their kids are seeing, but if they chose to see it with their kids, they should appreciate a film that respects their intelligence as if they're adults. A-

With Stray Dog, Kurosawa uses a very American form, that of the detective noir, to get as close as he could to the truth of Japanese life in the post-war era. Under American occupation, censorship laws prohibited Japanese filmmakers from showing the destroyed parts of Tokyo, American GIs, and pretty much any evidence of the occupation in general. Yet the destruction hangs in the corner of the frame as the camera follows Detective Murakami (a surprisingly clean-cut young Toshiro Mifune) through Tokyo in search of the robber who stole his gun. Perhaps the ruined buildings and starving people went unnoticed the censors in the constant movement and energetic montage of the long scene. Or maybe it was the film's American-ness, complete with a baseball scene, and the general acceptance of darkness in genre filmmaking that generally wouldn't pass in other mainstream dramas, that allows its tragic Japanese-ness to flourish.

Other filmmakers like Ozu would make fall-out of the war an implicit theme for their characters. Kurosawa makes it explicit. In one of the more contemplative scenes in the film, Murakami talks with the older Detective Sato about what makes people become criminals. He points towards the conclusion that in the war, much of Japan became criminal, and if he should feel some sympathy towards his target if essentially everyone is vulnerable to becoming bad. Sato shuts him up, saying "leave the analysis to detective novels," the most self-aware line in the film, which uses such decidedly novelistic techniques as a first-person inner monologue.

Technique Stray Dog has in spades. It's an entertaining film that was incredibly edgy for its time. It's not Kurosawa's most electrifying film. With Rashomon coming out the follower and Seven Samurai and Ran still further in the future, he still had his best years ahead of him. But if this is lesser Kurosawa, it's far from a lesser film in general. B+

Yes, I'm calling this movie by the title that appears in the end credits, not the generic "John Carter" that's been used in all the ads for the film. Or alternately, John Carter and the Princess of Mars makes for a good appropriate title closer to the book, especially since the Princess is one of the best parts of the movie. Seriously, what sort of title is John Carter? How does that drum up interest in a movie? And interested you should be, because this is good movie with great ambitions, the first major film adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp sci-fi classic that inspired pretty much everything else in the genre.

The best performance in the movie, as I mentioned earlier, is Lynn Collins as Princess Dejah Thoris. God, I'm in love with this character now. She's a scientist, a warrior, feminine but not weak, strong but not invincible, and kicks a whole lot of ass, moreso than in the book. John Carter himself is also developed a bit differently than in the book, sidestepping the unfortunate implications of the Confederate soldier as hero by making him more disillusioned by the war. It's an interesting take, but Taylor Kitsch is better in throwaway comic moments than in his character's grimmer funks. Woola's been cutesified but still awesome. Tars Tarkas and Sola, humane outliers in the warrior Thark society, were my favorite characters in the book, and my only complaint about them in the movie is that there's just not enough of them! For all the comparisons this movie is going to get with Avatar, let it be said that this movie is by far superior when it comes to giving its aliens personalities.

A few structural flaws keep the movie short of its potential greatness. The opening 5 minutes are completely pointless and only complicate things by throwing in narrator that appears nowhere else in the film. At a few points later on, the film loses sight of the actual narrator of the story, John Carter himself, by including scenes he couldn't possibly have been there to tell about. Pretty much all is forgiven when John and Woola are cutting down an army of Warhoons as director Andrew Stanton (a Pixar regular and director of Wall-E, one of my favorite films) cuts to the past to show a scene from John's past that had only been hinted in flashes before. Awe-inspiring moments like these show this big budget production as a labor of love, for Stanton and for screenwriter Michael Chabon. Ignore the negative press about its budget or whatever, and you may be awed as well. B