HollywoodChicago.com Content

CHICAGO – In our latest action/thriller edition of HollywoodChicago.com Hookup: Film, we have 25 admit-two passes up for grabs to the advance Chicago screening of “Drive Angry 3D”!

CHICAGO – Shouldn’t there be a rule against having the words ‘criminal’ and ‘suspect’ in the same title? We get it. It’s overkill.

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Liam Neeson

CHICAGO – This 28-image slideshow contains most of the official press images for the highly-anticipated “Unknown,” starring Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, January Jones, Aidan Quinn, Bruno Ganz, and Frank Langella. The film was directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. It will be released on February 18th, 2011.

CHICAGO – I could never quite get my finger on why the super-talented Zhang Yimou (“Hero,” “House of the Flying Daggers”) chose to make “A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop,” a loose remake of the film that introduced Joel and Ethan Coen to the world, “Blood Simple.” It is a case of a talented Chinese director attempting to make a very American genre: noir. To what end? Would it be interesting to watch the Coens remake “Hero”? Sure, but mostly as curiosity and I expect more than curiosities from someone as notable as Yimou.

CHICAGO – There just aren’t many high-quality martial arts movies making it to the U.S. theaters any more and so the “Ong Bak” series of films deserves a bit of attention for that reason alone. There’s no denying that star Tony Jaa is a powerful force of nature with some of the best moves in the genre today. Sadly, the third film in the series, “Ong Bak 3,” recently released on Blu-ray and DVD is a mess, as behind-the-scenes drama apparently sabotaged the franchise. Only diehard Jaa fans need check it out.

CHICAGO – Shawn Ryan produced one of the best cop dramas of the ’00s in “The Shield” and has proven that he will be a creative voice in the medium worth watching with his work on “Lie to Me,” “Terriers,” and, most of all, the new FOX drama, “The Chicago Code.”

CHICAGO – It’s difficult to think of a more appropriate film to be released on the first day of Black History Month 2011 than Anthony Fabian’s under-appreciated gem, “Skin.” First screened on the festival circuit in 2008 before being rolled out for a super-limited theatrical run in Fall 2009, this moving and important fact-based drama never got the exposure it so richly deserved.

CHICAGO – When most people think of UCLA sports, they think of the NCAA basketball team. Then it’s UCLA football, then UCLA dorm girls and somewhere down the line it’s UCLA baseball.

CHICAGO – “Do you know what it means? Rock ‘n’ roll? Sex.” To a kid trying to both get laid as often as possible and break out of the numbing routine he sees most of his friends go through, a line like this can be life-changing. “Nowhere Boy” certainly implies that it was for John Lennon, as it came near the beginning of his love of music and we all know where that led.

CHICAGO – Tyler Perry must have a bit of internal conflict. On one hand, he gets critically slammed for films that display little creative effort at all like “Madea Goes to Jail” or “Why Did I Get Married Too?” but those movies make money. Then he tries to do something clearly considered artistic with his adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf,” now truncated to simply “For Colored Girls” and recently available on Blu-ray and DVD, and it makes less than most of the films he’s directed.