THE RAID: REDEMPTION

This film gets a new, silly subtitle in America and a silly, nu-metal soundtrack, but rest assured, you will still leave the theater clutching your sides and coughing up blood.  This movie will kick your ass.  In the slums of Jakarta, a SWAT team raids an decaying apartment tower where a crime lord has set up shop.   They have to ascend 15 floors of desperate and deranged slum dwellers who have been promised free rent for life if they kill any of the intruders.  Punch, kick, throw, slash, stab, shoot, crash, boom, bang, KAPOW!  It's an inside-out Indonesian Assault on Precinct 13 (the original damnit!)

SAFE HOUSE

Bland but capable Ryan Reynolds is a CIA agent based in Cape Town South Africa who badly wants a promotion to another more glamorous assignment in another more glamorous city like Paris.  It's his lucky day!  Denzel Washington plays an infamous traitor (with the unlikely name of Tobin Frost) who turns himself in and gets water boarded by the T-1000 before mercenaries show up and start executing everybody.  Denzel Washington could play this part in his sleep and probably did.  On paper, the similarities to Training Day (boring vanilla lead pulled in over his head by morally gray Denzel) must have seemed like a surefire bet.  But in practice there are no quotable lines, no memorable events, and no chance at the Oscars.

JOHN CARTER

What if you crossed Dune with Indiana Jones and nobody came?  John Carter is an adaptation of one of the grandaddies of the sci-fi genre celebrating it's centenary this year.  A confederate veteran searching for gold stumbles across a cave with some crazy shit in it and next thing you know he's on Mars, which the locals call Barsoom.  Locals?  Giant, four-armed nomadic warriors called Tharks, as well as two warring futuristic cities of humanoid martians.  Carter gains super strength and agility and naturally finds himself caught up in epic planetary warfare.  Get your ass to Barsoom!  Seriously, it's a pretty good movie.

WANDERLUST

Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston play stressed out Manhattanites who ditch the Big Apple for suburban Atlanta which they promptly ditch for a hippie commune.  Are there hijinks?  The first thing they see when they arrive is a man carrying wineglasses, totally nude, wandering the woods at night.  So rest assured, there are plenty of hijinks.