Action
Rod Lott
Parkour was hot half a decade ago (remember "Casino Royale"? "District B13"? That one episode of "The Office"?), but no one told the filmmakers behind the new "Freerunner."

Action
Rod Lott
Warner Premiere's latest DC Universe original animated film, "Batman: Year One," adapts Frank Miller’s acclaimed graphic novel of the same name. The movie isn't as good, naturally, and part of that is because this barely qualifies as a feature. It's been shoehorned into an hour.

Action
Rod Lott
A major influence on Edgar Wright's "Hot Fuzz," 1974's "The Super Cops" fictionalizes the almost impossibly effective police work of then-real-life NYPD detectives Dave Greenberg (he of the red Batman-logo ring tee) and Robert Hantz, first seen as themselves via vintage news footage.

Action
Rod Lott
Bangkok, Oriental city. And the city don’t know what the city is getting. In the slick “BKO: Bangkok Knockout,” that’s a ruff-em’-tuff-em’ rumble involving a fight club named Fight Club getting to do what it does best: fight!

Action
Rod Lott
By legal precedent, "X-Men: First Class" should be terrible, given it's the fifth entry in a franchise barely a decade old. Instead, by some early Christmas miracle, it's arguably the series' second best, behind 2003's "X2: X-Men United."

Action
Rod Lott
I can't think of the last time a straight-up martial arts film got a wide theatrical release. Ten, 15 years ago, it used to happen all the time after Jackie Chan burst through with "Rumble in the Bronx." Not every Hong Kong actioner is worth importing these days, of course, but "True Legend" s widespread love that one hopes it will find on Blu-ray and DVD.

Action
Rod Lott
Initially, "Set Up" sets itself up as a B version of Ben Affleck's "The Town": A few longtime friends — one of whom has a pop in prison — don masks and automatic weapons to pull off a daring daylight robbery. It quickly takes its own path as Vince (Ryan Phillippe, "The Lincoln Lawyer") double-crosses his pals, shooting them so he can make off with the diamonds.

Action
Rod Lott
Ah, the ol' four-color logo for Avco Embassy Films — how comforting it is to see. And what a joy to see it attached to 1980's "The Exterminator," an exploitation action classic that somehow always eluded me, although I distinctly remember Roger Ebert losing his crap over its violent content, as Gene Siskel sat patiently across the aisle.

Action
Rod Lott
Not long after “Batman” changed Hollywood in the summer of 1989, every studio wanted to have the next comics-based blockbuster. I remember visiting Penn Square Mall’s multiplex (as I did often back then) and seeing a poster for “Captain America.” The one-sheet was comprised of little more than a close-up of Cap’s iconic shield and a promise to arrive next summer.

Action
Rod Lott
I'll admit it: I used to take Sylvester Stallone for granted, if I thought of him at all. By the time I came around in the mid-'90s — circa "Cliffhanger" — his glory days long had past. His comeback with last summer's "The Expendables" got me all nostalgic for the action films of his prime, and I've been snapping them up as I find them ever since.

Action
Rod Lott
I wasn’t sure Shout! Factory was going to be able to top this summer’s release of “The Women in Cages Collection” in its line of “Roger Corman’s Cult Classics.” But it’s done just that with “Sword and Sorcery Collection,” rounding up four flicks for your pecs-and-sex viewing pleasure.

Action
Rod Lott
In the early 1980s, we Americans just couldn't get enough of our high-tech helicopters! In fact, in January 1984, we had two competing series on the subject: “Blue Thunder,” based on the previous year’s hit movie, and “Airwolf,” producer Donald Bellisario’s attempt at stealing “Thunder”’s thunder.

Action
Rod Lott
"Blitz" isn't your average Jason Statham flick, in that: a) it skipped theaters, and b) his partner is a homosexual. I can't recall seeing that mix in cinema crime stories since the days of Ryan O'Neal and John Hurt in "Partners," and that 1982 film was a comedy.

Action
Rod Lott
Had "Stone Cold" Steve Austin been born about 20 years earlier, he could have had a brief but decent big-screen career as a rival to Jean-Claude Van Damme or Chuck Norris. Instead, his small role in last summer's smash "The Expendables" excepted, the former pro wrestler has been relegated to straight-to-DVD fare since fronting the box-office dud "The Condemned."

Action
Rod Lott
Hitting video one week after "Tekken" is "The King of Fighters," and the two share an awful lot in common: The live-action films are based on video-game franchises, more or less skipped theaters, place style over substance, and flirt with unresolved daddy issues as a subplot.