Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Review by Siraj Syed: Mind-boggling 2,734 VFX shots in 136 mins French director Luc Besson has made the most expensive French/European film ever. It is also the most expensive independent film, at about $200 million. From initial responses, it looks like the film will fall far short of recovering its cost, and that will be a pity. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets adds a new, fresh feel to the sci-fi, interplanetary, inter-galactic, alien...

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent Who imagines surreal lush worlds like French director Luc Besson? This is a man who could plead The Fifth Element in any court of World Cinema, lol. And now, VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS, the much-anticipated Dane DeHaan starrer with runway oddity Cara Delevinge drops July 21 worldwide from EuropaCorp and STXfilms. The crew prepares for a scene with star Cara Delevingne (center) of Luc Besson's "Valerian and the City ...

Transporter Refueled, Review: Fuel efficient and fired up Originally titled The Transporter Legacy, the film’s French title remains Le Transporteur: Héritage, while in American English, it is Transporter Refueled. It is the fourth film in the Transporter franchise, with Ed Skrein replacing three-timer Jason Statham in the title role of Frank Martin, a move that a lot of Statham fans have found hard to digest. The first Transporter movie (2002) was a moderate success. It spawned t...

Taken 3, Review: Haven 3--End of the road for fugitive Mills Kills Liam Neeson returns as ex-CIA agent Bryan Mills in Taken 3, aka Tak3n (no spell-check required), the latest film in the vengeance-driven action franchise. Once again, his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) and her mother Lenore, Mills’ separated wife (Famke Janssen), now married to Stuart St. John (Dougray Scott) are in peril. Lenore is found dead in Mills’ home, with her throat slit, and Mills holding a knife. Obviously,...

  by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent   Though the nickname may be over the top, actor Choi Min-Sik is often called the 'Robert De Niro' of Korea, and with the villain he plays opposite Scarlett Johansson in Luc Besson's box office smash LUCY, you can see why some people would say this of him. Okay, okay, he is much younger (52) and some say better looking than Robert De Niro, but audiences sometimes need a peg to appreciate an international actor. With hi...

Lucy From La Femme Nikita and The Professional to The Fifth Element, writer/director Luc Besson has created some of the toughest, most memorable female action heroes in cinematic history. Meet the latest: Lucy (Scarlett Johansson). Lucy is attractive, not tall, not muscular, with a cutish face, vulnerable, even gullible--An unlikely action hero, an unlikely drug-racket battling, science’s accidental guinea pig who is about to prove unwittingly the theory of an eminent scientist concerni...