THE Wachowski brothers’ souped up, kaleidoscopic upgrade of “Speed Racer” may look like “The Matrix” on happy pills and feature an A-list cast (including Emile Hirsch, Matthew Fox and Susan Sarandon), but the real stars are the tricked-out cars that hurtle along tracks at 300 mph and battle each other midair.

He speeds into battle in a fiery flash, laying waste to all challengers. That’s not just “Iron Man” but the film’s likely box-office outcome too.

“Street Kings” is like a sideshow shooting gallery that wants to award you a Ph.D. in sociology instead of a stuffed toy or 10 free shots.

The star-studded cast and crew of “Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon’’ saw the world premiere of the Korean film project Monday at CGV Yongsan Theater in central Seoul.

I appreciate “No Country for Old Men” for the skill in the film craft. I understand “No Country for Old Men” for its penetrating disquisition on narrative conventions and its heroic will in subverting them.

Since drawing “First Blood” in 1982, John Rambo, a taciturn, nihilistic Vietnam vet who favors a bow and arrow and knife over modern weaponry (but can pretty much wipe out an entire regiment single-handedly with anything in reach), became the ultimate symbol of action-movie excess.

The science-fiction thriller “Jumper” is being marketed as a cross between the “Bourne” movies and “The Matrix.”

In the 1972 film “Sleuth,” a hammy chamber piece based on a play by Anthony Shaffer, a young hairdresser named Milo Tindle (Michael Caine) arrives at the costume- and prop-stuffed manse of aging crime novelist Andrew Wyke (played with cuckoo brio by Laurence Olivier), who greets him as “the man who wants to marry my wife.”

Like the fallen star that sets everything in motion, the fairy-tale fantasy “Stardust” shines only on occasion. But when it does, the picture bursts with wild imagination, a wicked sense of humor and something that can only be called magic. Then, just as suddenly, “Stardust’s” radiance is dimmed by monotonous special-effects, generic action sequences and postmodern jokes that, in our post-“Princess Bride” and “Shrek” world, fall flat.

In its search for the next fantasy franchise, Hollywood has finally come around to Susan Cooper’s “The Dark Is Rising” sequence of five books, written during the late 1960s and ‘70s. I’m not familiar with the series, but understand that they are much loved by devoted fans for their imagination, wit, style and distinctly English charm — none of which is on display in the choppy initial big-screen adaptation, titled “The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising.”