Action
Rod Lott
Premium Rush is the Joseph Gordon-Levitt movie from 2012 that didn't have him playing a Gotham City rookie, a time-traveling hit man or a POTUS' son. (Damn, was this kid busy!) It's the only one of those four that ended the year without any hint of Oscar buzz, yet I'd argue it's the most purely entertaining.

Action
Rod Lott
Fifth in the increasingly slick but decreasingly lucid franchise, Resident Evil: Retribution had potential to be the best entry since the 2002 original. After all, returning director Paul W.S. Anderson (The Three Musketeers) has positioned so many elements from the previous films that it seemed set up to play like a greatest-hits package. Instead, the result is baffling.

Action
Phil Bacharach
Due to the twisted savagery of a young man in a Colorado movie theater, The Dark Knight Rises will forever be a footnote in American history. Hopefully, that horrific massacre will not influence perceptions of this epic conclusion to writer-director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.

Action
Rod Lott
By sheer coincidence, Osombie arrived on my desk the same day I screened Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar-worthy depiction about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Osombie begins where Zero ends: with the American military raid on bin Laden's compound on May 2, 2011. Whereas Zero puts bullets in the al-Qaeda leader's body, Osombie lets him inject himself with an aggressive pathogen so that, once he washes up on the Arabian Sea, he's a full-fledged zombie.

Action
Rod Lott
While not fully lucid, Painted Skin: The Resurrection excels from a standpoint of visuals. Whether that’s worth an entire viewing depends on your tolerance for fantastical whimsy.

Action
Rod Lott
For the first 10 minutes, I wondered if Kill ’Em All weren’t a movie at all, but a collection of unrelated action vignettes — a bomb hit here, a knife throw there, fists and feet everywhere — as seemingly unrelated characters fight, but hardly speak, with no story given.

Action
Rod Lott
It wasn't too long ago you could find crap copies of 1975's Zorro in the dollar-store DVD bins. For a Blu-ray release, Somerville House has cleaned it all up digitally, improving everything but how dull it sometimes is.

Action
Rod Lott
Preceding the start of The Expendables 2 is an ad for its tie-in video game. Why bother playing such a thing when so many sequences of the the movie make you feel like you're doing so already? I mean that as a compliment, because as directed by Simon West (The Mechanic), the sequel’s 15-minute prologue is so unrelenting in nonstop action that it’s likely to turn you giddy.

Action
Rod Lott
In the heyday of DVD, 20th Century Fox brought a lot of contemporary Asian actioners to disc in affordable, collectible editions under the “Hong Kong Legends” banner: Eastern Condors, Magnificent Butchers, Knockabout, In the Line of Duty 4, City Hunter, Naked Killer, My Lucky Stars. Watching The Outlaw Brothers reminded me of those glorious times.

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Rod Lott
I still don’t know why Hollywood felt that Spider-Man, all of 10 years young, needed to be remade — I suspect it has to do with selling toys. Enough of calling The Amazing Spider-Man a “reboot,” too; this is a remake through and through.

Action
Rod Lott
In Maximum Conviction, Steve Austin forever speaks like there’s a pinch of Skoal eating through the corner of his bottom lip, but I have no idea what’s going on with Steven Seagal’s accent attempt: Southern? Cajun? Ebonics? An overly phlegmy head cold? Your guess is as good as mine, and unfortunately, I’ve seen the movie.

Action
Rod Lott
Compared to its 2000 big-budget remake, H.B. Halicki's Gone in 60 Seconds is deficient in slickness, star power, performances, plotting and humor. Yet the 1974 indie original decimates the Hollywood version as an all-around entertainment. Why? Two simple reasons, boiled down to numbers: some 500 vehicles wrecked and a 40-minute chase scene.

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Rod Lott
Although my bank account thinks otherwise, I miss the early-aughts craze of DVDs, in which one count upon pristine prints of one martial-arts film or another hitting store shelves. Many of them starred Jackie Chan or Jet Li.

Action
Rod Lott
To my knowledge, no one ever said, “I can’t wait for the new Robert Conrad movie!” That could be because so few knew he made movies. After all, Conrad spent the bulk of his long career on the small screen, in the likes of The Wild Wild West, Black Sheep Squadron and a highly memorable ad campaign for Eveready batteries.

Action
Rod Lott
In 1986, writer and artist Frank Miller changed the comic-book industry forever with the four-issue series that became the graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns. Its sour disposition and gritty attitude was arguably the darkest depiction of Batman the world had seen, paving the way for the caped crusader’s move to big-screen blockbuster three years later.