Restaurant Reviews
Carol Smaglinski
As a veteran restaurant reviewer, the first question I usually get asked by a new acquaintance is, “OK, so where’s the best restaurant around here?”

Sports
Heide Brandes
The legend began in China more than 2,000 years ago.

CFN
Gazette staff
An Oklahoma man got some good news during an “Antiques Roadshow” taping in Tulsa when one of the PBS show’s appraisers valued a set of Chinese rhinoceros-horn cups to be worth between $1 million and $1.5 million.

CFN
Gazette staff
Blake Griffin has expressed his interest in playing overseas, and he’s also interested  in playing in the sea.

Action
Rod Lott
Set in South China 1919, the China/Hong Kong blockbuster Let the Bullets Fly slaps the viewer to attention with a bravura beginning: an action set piece in which masked robbers on horseback use the most ancient of technologies (the ax) to stop a train by flipping it over. With that opening, comparisons to South Korea’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird are inevitable, right down to the needless bloating running time.

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.

Action
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
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.

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.