The Last King of Scotland is the story of Idi Admin (Forest Whitaker), the leader who came to power in Uganda in a coup in the 1970s.  But the story is told through the eyes of Dr. Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) who is bored with his life in Scotland and decides to go and see the world, but lacking the imagination to select a place to visit, closes his eyes, spins a globe and makes a promise to himself that he will go to whichever country his finger lands on.  Obviously that country is Uganda.

With their premiere film writer/director team Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine gives us a pulse-pounding adrenaline-fueled action thriller starring Jason Statham and Amy Smart that starts with a rush and doesn’t stop that rush until the credits roll in Crank.

Statham plays Chev Chelios, a hitman for a local organized crime gang, who awakens to find that he has been poisoned and the only way for him to live long enough to exact his revenge upon the people who poisoned him is to keep his adrenaline at high levels by ways including fighting, cocaine, sex, injections of epinephrine, energy drinks, high-speed police chases, and more.  Basically, if he slows down, he’ll die and he doesn’t want to do that until he can kill Verona (Jose Pablo Cantillo) the man who poisoned him.

The movie is action packed and so filled with intensity that the viewer finds themselves feeling some of the same adrenal effects Chelios is trying to achieve.  It is a fantastic film from a team with zero Hollywood experience, but who are now building upon the success of their first film.  Statham is perfect in his performance as Chelios and Amy Smart performs as his slightly ditzy, slow-witted, pot-smoking girlfriend magnificently.  If it isn’t already clear where I’m going with this: see this movie.

This adaptation of the book does nothing but shave off the important and interesting parts of the novel and then tries to cram what’s left into a more-or-less cookie-cutter Hollywood plot, and ineffectively, at that. Director Ron Howard casts Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Jean Reno, Paul Bettany, and Alfred Molina in what can best be described as an interpretation of the plot as conceived by author Dan Brown.  Robert Langdon (Hanks) is a respected symbologist and is called to the Louvre late at night to find a mysterious murder scene. 

Director Zack Snyder‘s monumental Greco epic is something few have not yet heard about.  It skillfully combines an intense visual and coloring scheme, superb writing, fantastic acting, and absolutely monumental effects and sets to bring to life a famous battle in which a group of Greek soldiers were able to hold back the immense army of the Persian Empire.

Lucky Number Slevin can be seen almost as an adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest from a more modern perspective with the clever, witty rapid speech of very early films.  The director Paul McGuigan seems to have made this adaptation work, and work very well at that.