Dec 18
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Oh shit, I thought. Here we go. It was 2014. I was in a movie theater, watching the first John Wick, a shockingly…
A History Of ViolenceWith A History Of Violence, Tom Breihan picks the most important action movie of every year, starting with the genre’s birth and moving right up to whatever Vin Diesel’s doing this very minute.
Dec 7 2018
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A funny thing happened to action movies in 2018: Horror movies swallowed them whole. This wasn’t an across-the-board…
Jan 12 2018
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If you haven’t seen Wolf Warrior II, the massive 2017 Chinese blockbuster, the first thing you might know about it…
Dec 15 2017
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Wu Jing, now a massive action star, was in the first Kill Zone, the 2005 Donnie Yen vehicle that helped translate…
Dec 1 2017
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It takes a whole lot to turn The Road Warrior into an afterthought. George Miller’s second Mad Max movie, released…
Nov 17 2017
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In the entire history of American action cinema, there are very, very few movies that take their fight scenes as…
Nov 3 2017
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About midway through Bong Joon-ho’s 2013’s apocalyptic class-warfare fable Snowpiercer, we get to the scene with the…
Oct 20 2017
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You’re all alone. You haven’t even been on the police force for that long, but here you are, disarmed and cut off…
Oct 6 2017
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Stuntmen loved Fast Five. The year after the movie came out, I spent a few days at ActionFest, a film festival in…
Sep 22 2017
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In the 2011 South Korean movie War Of The Arrows, a historical drama about a master archer who practically wins an…
Sep 8 2017
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Universal Soldier: Regeneration (2009)
Aug 24 2017
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Aug 11 2017
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“Was that racist, or did it just seem racist?” That was the basic idea of the conversation that my friends and I had…
Jul 28 2017
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When I started this column, I decided that the modern action movie began with Bullitt in 1968. But a strong…
Jul 14 2017
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Last year, when Rogue One came out, America learned something that much of the rest of the world already knew:…
Jun 30 2017
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Paul Greengrass didn’t invent shakycam. The technique of frantic handheld camerawork and chaotic editing had been…
Jun 16 2017
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Quentin Tarantino loves action movies. Quentin Tarantino’s characters love action movies. The history of action…
Jun 2 2017
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It’s one of our great action-movie traditions, right up there with the moment that 007, in the middle of the circle,…
May 19 2017
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Wheels within wheels within wheels: The surprise hit of summer 2001 was The Fast And The Furious, a goofy low-stakes…
May 5 2017
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People laughed. That’s the thing I remember the most from the sleepy art-house cinema where I first saw Ang Lee’s…