One thing I've noticed about most epic sci-fi/fantasy stories is that they're essentially about war, albeit disguised and softened with weird monsters, robots and other creatures with funny names. There's usually a bad guy (with a really sinister sounding name) who wants to take over the world or something similar, and a reluctant hero -- plucked from his comfortable, yet mundane home -- who has to stop him. The trick is to make it all fun. Because let's face it, we humans love war. If we didn't there wouldn't be so many movies and books about war, as well as -- you know -- real wars. (More specifically, I think, we love watching them, rather than fighting in them.) The Lord of the Rings trilogy worked so well because Peter Jackson projected his own twisted glee into every frame; he loved making those movies and it showed. The characters felt an anxious anticipation toward the battle, like a buildup, and the battles themselves were explosive releases. The new film The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, the second in an unfortunately ongoing series, treats war as if it were already played out, rather than happening before our eyes. It's a dead dog dull bore of a movie, but that won't stop it from making a fortune. (See also Jette's review.)

Uwe Boll's latest "masterpiece" Postal was scheduled to open next weekend in 1500 theaters, deliberately going up against Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But, according to a story at Cinema Blend, Boll's people issued a release this morning claiming that U.S. distributors have dropped the film and that it will only be released on four screens. An additional source says the film will open in five cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver and Tucson. Boll claims that he has even tried to rent additional screens, but to no avail.

Typically, the outspoken, outrageous director is calling it a conspiracy, the latest example of everyone being out to get him. He also says, "Theatrical distributors are boycotting 'Postal' because of its political content. We were prepared to open on 1500 screens all across America on May 23rd. Any multiplex in the U.S. should have space for us, but they're afraid."

Frankly, that's highly unlikely, just as it's unlikely that the film is being canceled because it's bad. The most likely reason is that none of Boll's films have ever turned a profit, unlike films by bad directors like Michael Bay, Eli Roth and Brett Ratner, who are moneymaking machines, despite their ineptitude. Postal stars Zack Ward as "Dude," who teams up with his cult leader uncle (Dave Foley) to heist an amusement park. Unfortunately, the Taliban(!) has the same idea at the same time. Of course, George W. Bush (Brent Mendenhall) and Osama bin Laden (Larry Thomas) also appear. Like Boll's other films, it's based on a video game.

It's been two-and-a-half years since we watched the Pevensie children come to life on the big screen in Disney's splashy adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but for the characters, only a year has passed between those adventures and the ones in the new movie, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. Well, time is funny like that when you're dealing with the magical land of Narnia, as the storyline of this movie amply illustrates.

The structure of events in the movie is actually an improvement on the C.S. Lewis book, opening with a captivating chase scene as young Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes) attempts to escape from his Uncle Miraz (Sergio Castellito). Miraz has been scheming to steal Caspian's throne and now wants him dead. But Caspian's tutor gives him a magical horn, the horn of Queen Susan, to summon help in time of need. When Caspian blows the horn, suddenly Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter are pulled out of a London Tube station (which was the first scene in the book) and into a world of wild, wooded ruins that turns out to be Narnia, thousands of years after they've left. However, Caspian thought he was summoning kings and queens, not British children, and how can these kids help him regain the throne and help Old Narnia? And where is Aslan the Lion in the middle of all this?

I noticed that Lloyd Kaufman's Poultrygeist (subtitled Night of the Chicken Dead) has finally emerged in theaters (currently playing on 1 screen). Kaufman is the president of Troma, a production company and distributor that has survived as an indie for over 30 years, mainly due to salesmanship. By any count, they have been responsible for at least 150 movies, and Kaufman himself has over 200 on his resume. Anyone who has ever frequented a video store has probably come across titles like Blondes Have More Guns (1995), Cannibal! The Musical (1996), Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (1991), Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger Part IV (2000) (and, indeed, the entire Toxic Avenger series), Class of Nuke 'Em High (1986), Femme Fontaine: Killer Babe for the C.I.A. (1994), Killer Condom (1996), A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell (1991), Rabid Grannies (1988), Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D. (1991), Surf Nazis Must Die! (1987) and Tromeo and Juliet (1996). They have also distributed such nuggets as Brian De Palma's The Wedding Party (1969), Samuel Fuller's Shark! (1969) and Dario Argento's The Stendhal Syndrome (1996).

Japanese-born director Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) is one of the most satisfying, yet complex filmmakers in history, and also the simplest. Early on he learned to eliminate anything extraneous, such as camera movements, flashy editing, or even camera angles (everything is shot head-on, eye-level with the actors), in favor of composition and pacing. (He only reluctantly made the jumps to sound, and later, color.) His films have a peaceful, tranquil quality, that leave me feeling relaxed afterward, and yet -- as I discovered last summer while devouring the Criterion Eclipse Late Ozu box set -- there's a dark side to Ozu. If his characters eventually find happiness, they find it by letting go, or giving up their values. It's a harsh message for Americans reared on fighting for our ideals, which is perhaps why Ozu's films were deemed "too Japanese" to be released here during his lifetime. Yet the films still work, and here we have a perfect example in Ozu's I Was Born, But... (1932), released as part of the Criterion Eclipse Box Set #10: Silent Ozu: Three Family Comedies. (The Eclipse series offers no-frills box sets of films that may otherwise never see the light of day.)

To mark the tenth anniversary of Frank Sinatra's death on May 14, Warner Home Video has unleashed such a massive volume of Sinatra DVDs that viewers will need to break out the hernia belts. There are 22 discs in all, with 11 titles new to DVD, and five box sets. One box set, The Rat Pack Ultimate Collector's Edition comes with a special deck of "Rat Pack" cards, reproductions of lobby cards, a pressbook and on-set photos, as well John Sturges' Sergeants 3 (1962), available for the first time. The high point of these discs is the DVD debut of Vincente Minnelli's Some Came Running (1958), a devastating widescreen melodrama about an army veteran and would-be writer (Sinatra) who returns to his small town.

A goofy dame (Shirley MacLaine) has followed him home, and a boozy gambler (Dean Martin) befriends him, perhaps ruining his chances with the local schoolteacher (Martha Hyer), probably the only one who understands his literary aspirations. Some Came Running is part of the Frank Sinatra: The Golden Years box set, which also includes Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (a public domain title here available in its official release), None But the Brave (directed by Sinatra himself), The Tender Trap and Marriage on the Rocks (co-starring daughter Nancy). Then we have The Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly Collection, with three discs, Frank Sinatra: The Early Years with five discs, and the four-hour 1992 "Sinatra" TV mini-series. To help with the celebration, Frank's youngest daughter Tina agreed to an e-mail interview with Cinematical. (See related story.)

(In honor of Mother's Day, we're launching a series of posts today written, in part, by our mothers after we asked them one simple (yet very complex) question: What's your favorite movie and why?)

I don't quite understand how I knew, when I asked my mom about her favorite film, that she was going to pick Doctor Zhivago. But I guessed it immediately. She's never mentioned it as a favorite. Maybe it's because when she talks about Omar Sharif in that film, she gets this faraway look that you see when someone's reminiscing about a movie they've loved for a long time. Maybe someday we can watch it together, preferably in a theater. Here's what Mom replied when I asked her about her favorites.

"The first movies that popped into my mind were Great Expectations (1946), Citizen Kane, and Jane Eyre (1944). I must really be living in the past! I just thought they were great movies. But the sentimental me settled on Doctor Zhivago. That was a great epic, had fantastic panoramic scenes, great scenery, and was a wonderful love story. The music was very good and it didn't hurt that I had fallen in love with Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia and loved him in this too. In fact, I thought this was well cast and the acting was great!"

A few weeks ago a DVD of Laurent Cantet's 2000 film Human Resources arrived on my doorstep. I hadn't seen it, but it rung a bell for me, and it took me a little while to remember: the Shooting Gallery series! I couldn't believe I had forgotten about it. It was a huge event in less-than-400-screen lore, successful as well as artistically daring. I poked around and discovered that this brave little distributor had -- of course -- gone out of business. In 2000 and 2001, the Shooting Gallery lined up three series of six movies each, releasing each one for a two-week period, usually on a specific movie screen in selected cities, and then replaced it with the next in the series. If something took off and became a hit, it could play longer. I didn't see all the films, but there were some amazing entries, and certainly some films that otherwise would never have seen the light of day.

The first series unfolded in the spring of 2000. The quirky, dreamy, black-and-white comedy Judy Berlin, starring a then up-and-coming Edie Falco ("The Sopranos"), came first. It didn't exactly break any box office records, but I wouldn't be surprised if it has a small following today. Next up came Peter Mullan's Orphans, which I didn't see, followed by Such a Long Journey, which was yet another story from India about an old-fashioned father balking at the ways of his modern children, but beautifully realized. (The great character actor Om Puri was on hand for a supporting role.) Southpaw was a snappy little boxing documentary about promising Irish fighter Francis Barrett. The sixth film, from Japan, was Adrenaline Drive, a kind of crime story crossed with a drawing room comedy. It seemed ripe for an American remake, which never came.

While Hong Kong filmmakers have a gift for action, they tend to overdo it in the melodrama department, at least when it comes to watching their films through Western eyes. Perhaps the worst Hong Kong film I've seen to date is Jackie Chan's Heart of Dragon (1985), which features Jackie caring for his developmentally disabled brother (played by goofball Sammo Hung, who co-directed). All the heartstring tugging made me want to claw my eyes out. Or take another look at a masterpiece like John Woo's The Killer and you'll see an operatic hugeness to the emotional scenes -- especially between men -- that an American would never even dream, much less dare. These folks have an extremely high tolerance level for sentimentality; it takes an enormous amount before their sap detectors begin going off.

The same goes for action director and one-man HK film industry Johnny To (also known as "Johnnie To Kei-Fung"). To was a fairly minor director during Hong Kong's exciting late 1980s/early 1990s heyday, when imported films began to tantalize American viewers bored with big explosions and Vietnam rescue flicks. His biggest credit was as co-director on the exceptional supernatural superhero movie The Heroic Trio (1992). But after the 1997 handover to China, when most other filmmakers withdrew or abandoned ship, To flourished and eventually became the country's most successful and exciting filmmaker. His action hits included: The Mission (1999), Running Out of Time (1999), Help!!! (2000), Fulltime Killer (2001), Running Out of Time 2 (2003), Running on Karma (2003), Breaking News (2004), Election (2005), Triad Election (2006) and Exiled (2007), along with some 40 other films.

With only a handful of films to his credit, Sixth Generation Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke has become one of the world's great master filmmakers, and he has the lack of distribution to prove it. Like many other greats from Orson Welles to Hou Hsiao-hsien, he has struggled to get spectators and his movies together at the same place and the same time. His film Still Life won the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival and promptly sat on the shelf. It received a cautious and limited release in New York earlier this year, but since it never turned up on the West Coast, the San Francisco International Film Festival picked it up as an entry in the 51st fest (after failing to secure it for their 50th), and it opens at the end of this week at the Roxie Cinema. It's by far the best film I've seen in this year's fest, and it probably would have been the best of last year too.

A good comeback is like a great third act in American lives; it's the triumphant return, the end of the story. James Cagney retired in 1961, then made a triumphant comeback in 1981 with Ragtime. But a good movie never deals with the aftermath of the comeback. Just as often as not, the comeback leads to nothing. Cagney died a few years after the hubbub. Though we all love a good comeback, the following is a list of comebacks that weren't the end of the story, and didn't provide the inspiring coda that they could have.

1. Sylvester Stallone in Cop Land (1997)
Stallone's is one of the most fascinating, dramatic careers in cinema. His fame is so huge that his name and face -- or at least his characters -- are known the world over. He had a fairytale rise to fame with Rocky (1976), complete with tales of writing it in a weekend. He has a lot of charisma, and earned an Oscar nomination for acting. He has directed eight feature films and contributed to the screenplays for nearly twenty. People whisper about how smart and savvy he is behind the scenes.

Some filmmakers, like Chaplin and Kubrick, determined that they should release a film only every few years, to make it more like an event to be anticipated. Other filmmakers work faster and harder in an effort not to be forgotten, like Spike Lee or Woody Allen. It's difficult to determine which method is more effective, but it seems like if a filmmaker turns in over fifty films of mostly high quality, their work is eventually taken for granted. Everyone loves Hitchcock now, but in 1976 when his final film opened, he must have seemed like a relic compared to Rocky and Taxi Driver. That's how I imagine Claude Chabrol today. Now 77, he releases a movie a year, more or less, and passed the fifty-film marker some time ago. Unlike his French New Wave colleagues, he didn't make a single masterpiece in his youth, and so has nothing to live up to. Rather, he's consistently reliable and skillful, and it's difficult to judge any one of his films up against another. Look through reviews of his most recent films, and for each one you'll find at least one person claiming it's his best film in years.

And so comes A Girl Cut in Two, which recently screened at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival. I loved it. It's another superbly-made, highly enjoyable Chabrol film, but you probably won't see it on any top ten lists, nor will Chabrol be collecting any awards for it. I think "consistent" is a bad word among film people; we're more easily impressed by change and diversity, or by the newest, latest thing. Actors like John Wayne were routinely overlooked in favor of actors like Marlon Brando, though Brando could never in a million years have pulled off what John Wayne accomplished in The Searchers. Brando could do lots of things, but John Wayne was the best at being John Wayne. That's my standard rant, and that's how I feel about Chabrol. Now, onto the new film:

Iron Man opens this week, and thus the summer movie season has officially arrived. I love a good summer movie as much a the next guy, but this morning I found myself looking back at some of the little films that cropped up during the summer; some of them managed to get a "summer" feel on a much lower budget and without all the advertisement and hype. My absolute favorite summer art house movie has to be Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (1999). I saw it three times that summer, and each time I clutched my seat, my heart pounding. I was amazed at how brilliantly Tywker had mapped out his three possible storylines and how lovely the small, quiet interludes were. I loved Franka Potente, and I loved his throbbing score, which practically entered into your bloodstream and pumped up your adrenaline by hand. Every color, movement and cut was designed for maximum effect (I've always been puzzled how Tykwer's movies since have seemed so long and sluggish.)

Also that same summer, John Sayles delivered his baffling adventure/suspense film Limbo, which had several people trapped on an island awaiting rescue and stalked by bad guys. The ending had everybody in an uproar and caused the film to die a quick death. The summer before that one, Darren Aronofsky's debut feature Pi gave me a good dose of sci-fi thrills, as well as a few head-scratching puzzles (which were actually real). 2000 was a particularly bad summer, but John Waters' Cecil B. DeMented provided a mischievous little oasis in the middle of it all. In that film, renegade filmmakers kidnap a Hollywood starlet and force her to be in their indie production; each team member has a tattoo of a maverick filmmaker's name. (I've often wondered which filmmaker's name I would pick for a tattoo? Maybe David Cronenberg...)

With the rise of cheap digital video, some might claim that we're in a Golden Age of documentaries, except for the fact that most documentary filmmakers aren't really filmmakers. They copy a basic template over and over again, assembling footage rather than making a movie. Of course, some of this may qualify as great journalism: the 2003 film Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary, for example, or last year's No End in Sight. But very few understand how to combine filmmaking and reporting, how to make the story speak on a personal level. For my money, then, Errol Morris is the greatest living documentary filmmaker. As his reputation has risen -- he went from a guy who couldn't get arrested at the Oscars to a guy who actually won one -- his films have become more like events, like a story you can't possibly miss from a reporter you know and trust. (He has become like a Walter Cronkite or an Edward R. Murrow of the documentary set.)

Morris' Standard Operating Procedure screened this week at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, where Morris received the festival's Persistence of Vision award. The new film can be seen as the third in a trilogy of Morris' war films, with Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999) taking on World War II and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) examining Vietnam. This one stumbles right into the current war in Iraq, and stares right into the face of the Abu Ghraib prison controversy. Of course, this story was extensively covered on the TV news and people have already seen the gruesome photographs, but Morris slows down the story a bit, taking a more careful look after the fact (many of his interview subjects have finished serving their jail time).

The second wedding-centric "comedy" I've seen this year is the new release Made of Honor, and like the first one, Over Her Dead Body (aka That Waste of Paul Rudd That I Had to Look Up the Title For), the word "comedy" deserves to be within quotation marks when used as an adjective. It's not a terrible film, but it rarely rises above the hilarity level of Oh, How Cute. Even the cuteness wears off in the last third of the movie, leaving you with nothing but the feeling that you've seen this all before, perhaps in sitcoms, where it was much funnier.

You can predict the plot from the poster. Tom (Patrick Dempsey) and Hannah (Michelle Monaghan) are best friends who pal around New York together like pale imitations of the leads in When Harry Met Sally, except these two characters apparently never watched the second half of that film. Tom is relationship-phobic -- he has a set of strict rules for his frequent one-night stands -- but when Hannah takes a long business trip to Scotland, he starts to realize that maybe Hannah is a bigger part of his life than someone to antique-shop and eat desserts with. Naturally, when Hannah returns from Scotland, it's with a perfectly sexy, perfectly perfect fiance in tow. And in a move that is meant to be the incitement for high humor, she asks the newly lovelorn and crushed Tom to be her -- you won't believe this -- maid of honor. Have you fallen out of your chair yet, and are you rolling on the floor in hysterics?