Action
Rod Lott
I love the character of Blade. I love the Blade comic books, starting with his debut in Marvel's Tomb of Dracula in the 1970s. I love all three Blade movies — yes, including that third one. Hell, I even love the short-lived Blade series Spike TV aired in 2006.

Action
Rod Lott
Swords and sandals: Once a matinee mainstay, the adventure subgenre is now all but extinct, kept alive by the occasional Conan movie or Titans clash. DVD helps, too, such as three new offerings from Warner Archive.

Action
Rod Lott
While it's safe to say Dolph Lundgren will never win an Academy Award, the Expendable's performance in One in the Chamber runs rings around his co-star who did. (To be fair, that Oscar winner is Cuba Gooding Jr., whose statuette the Academy likely wishes it could revoke, but still.)

Comedy
Rod Lott
One of many spy flicks released amid the height of the 007 craze, 1965's The Liquidator may look and sound like a James Bond imitator — what with a winning animated credits sequence set to a Lalo Schifrin song belted out by Shirley Bassey — but it's actually a spoof, as quickly becomes clear.

Sci-Fi
Rod Lott
Cinema’s current master of disaster, Roland Emmerich (2012), produced but did not write or direct Hell, a post- apocalyptic film smaller in scope than what the man is used to, yet better crafted.

Comedy
Rod Lott
Ken Russell was either a genius or a madman, but more likely both. The iconoclastic filmmaker made movies that were loved by many — Tommy, Altered States, The Devils, Crimes of Passion — but despised by many, many more. Regardless of your opinion of them, one cannot deny they are different.

Comedy
Rod Lott
Don't call them "zombies" — call them "dissidents." That's one of a few well-aimed bits of political satire that populate the Spanish-language romp Juan of the Dead, but worry not: They're used sparingly and none come heavy-handed — a Castro polemic, this isn't.

Drama
Rod Lott
Judging by the 1962 portrayed by The Chapman Report, everybody smoked cigarettes, LPs of poetry readings were a hot commodity, and the female orgasm had yet to be invented. While this film from legendary old-Hollywood director George Cukor (My Fair Lady) was determined to be earnest and serious in its time, it's quite a hoot today.

Action
Rod Lott
Directed by Dante Lam (The Stool Pigeon), the action-thriller The Viral Factor revolves around the world’s last two surviving samples of the smallpox virus, one of which is an arm’s length away from being used to develop a biological weapon to unleash of five of the world’s seven continents.

Documentary
Rod Lott
I can't believe — just. cannot. believe. — that Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory lost the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature this past spring. And to a football movie, no less! It's another case of the jocks running ragged over the outcasts, except these outcasts were able to effect something few docs achieve: change.