By most standards, the “Appleseed” series has a long history. Starting as a manga series in 1985, Masamune Shirow’s creation has seen the original 4-volume manga collection, three feature length films, a video game adaptation, and a 13-episode TV series.…
Part sweetly predictable coming-of-age story, part loving 80’s movie throwback, “Ping Pong Summer” sits in that comfortable spot between empty nostalgia and cloying earnestness. Newcomer Marcello Conte stars as the chippily-named Rad Miracle, a shy 13-year-old spending his 1985 summer vacation in…
On the heels of what will probably be a relatively successful new “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” film, Paramount is releasing a documentary that takes the entire franchise back to its roots. And what humble roots they were during the mid-1980s…
Ypres. A city in Belgium. It’s pronounced “ee-pruh”, but in the parlance of the British Army in World War I, called “Wipers.” And in this shell-frayed pocket of the great, muddy overcoat of WWI, an extraordinary thing took place. “The…
A vast, chilly wasteland. Violence and madness. Reason competing with animal instinct. No, it’s not a documentary about Black Friday shopping at Walmart. In the 13-episode SyFy original series “Helix,”Billy Campbell stars as Dr. Alan Farragut, a CDC scientist sent with…
While the production history of “The Boondocks” is not as tortured as, say, “Community” or “Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark,” Aaron McGruder’s animated series has seen its fair share of bumps and bruises along its divisive path to Adult Swim glory. Cramming…
The found footage horror movie has come in for a lot of abuse lately, much of it deserved. With few exceptions, the trope of “here’s the footage we found with the mutilated bodies” has become a self-serving screen to mask…
As much a workmanlike parade of stock characters as a movie, “A Fighting Man” takes a standard boxing movie premise and runs it through its paces with moderate competence, if not inspiration. Dominic Purcell stars as washed-up boxer Sailor O’Connor, out of…
Sometimes familiarity breeds not contempt, but satisfaction. Formulas stick around when they work, whether it’s the Pythagorean theorem or the recipe for Coke or the genre conventions of the legal thriller. Knowing what Coke is gonna taste like is part…
Since Roland Emmerich has pretty much cornered the market on big-scale steroid-enhanced end of the world extravaganzas, the makers of “Parts Per Billion” go the opposite direction. If “2012” was a duvet of the end of days, “Parts Per Billion” is a…