The Mano Po anthology, produced by Regal Entertainment, is one of the most successful film series produced in the history of Philippine cinema, second only Shake, Rattle & Roll (Filipino film series) (which has a total of 12 film adaptations with three episodes). The series has now six productions and also includes Ako Legal Wife and Bahay Kubo (A Pinoy Mano Po). All episodes are directed by Joel Lamangan, with the exception of Mano Po 2 (2003) which was helmed by Erik Matti. The six series focuses on the ways and traditions of the Chinese-Filipino community.
The first Mano Po film was starred by Maricel Soriano, Kris Aquino, Richard Gomez, Ara Mina, Eddie Garcia. Regal Entertainment produced the first Mano Po episode, known also as Mano Po 1: My Family. The film won 12 MMFF awards including Best Picture. The second episode focuses on concubinage, despite of the first marriage (played by Aquino and De Leon). Susan Roces and Kris Aquino shares the portrayal of Sol (respectively in adult and younger roles). Christopher de Leon, in his debut role in the series, plays Antonio, a patriarch. Zsa Zsa Padilla and Lorna Tolentino are Antonio’s other mistresses in the movie. Erik Matti directs this film.This film is known for Zsa Zsa Padilla’s line “Ako legal wife! (I am his legal wife)”, which was being inspired for the comedy Ako Legal Wife two years later.
The third episode marks the appearance of Vilma Santos as Lilian Chiong, an anti-crime crusader who was romantically torn between Michael (Christopher de Leon, in their latest team-up after Dekada 70) and Paul(Jay Manalo). This film bagged the 2004 Metro Manila Film Festival Best Picture Award. Santos won the best actress award in the said filmfest.Produced by Regal’s sister production MAQ productions, Mano Po III marks the return of Joel Lamangan as the series’ director. Lamangan, however, lost to Cesar Montano (for Panaghoy sa Suba) for bagging the Best Director Award in the 2004 Metro Manila Film Festival. This comedy, popularly claimed as Mano Po 4(?), focuses on concubinage. Zsa Zsa Padilla won the best actress award in the 2005 Metro Manila Film Festival.
Next is the Mano Po 5. This series is more of a romantic comedy-drama rather than the earlier ones which center around serious drama. However, Angel Locsin’s appearance as the leading role for this film is her last project with Regal Entertainment (not counting The Promise) followed by her transfer to ABS-CBN a year later. The new tale marks the first project of Sharon Cuneta under Regal Films. This is also a reunion movie for Cuneta with Joel Lamangan (last worked in Walang Kapalit in 2003) and Christopher de Leon(last worked in Magkapatid in 2002). The dramatic story focuses on billionaire Melinda Uy, who had a rags-to-riches story of hardships and triumphs as a Chinese-Filipino blooded woman.

A self-assured Midwestern girl finds her confidence gradually crumbling as a barrage of terrifying visions prompt her to investigate a brutal murder in a supernatural thriller directed by Asif Kapadia and starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. Joanna Mills (Gellar) is a successful sales representative for a local trucking company, and though her professional life is at an all-time high, her personal life couldn’t be any more troubling at the moment. Estranged from her father (Sam Shepard) and menacingly stalked by an obsessive ex-boyfriend (Adam Scott), Joanna feels all alone in the world as her downward spiral rapidly begins to accelerate.
When Joanna has a psychic experience in which she literally sees and feels the brutal murder of a female stranger, she soon begins to suspect that she has been targeted as the killer’s next victim. Joanna isn’t the type to go down without a fight, however, and as her increasingly vivid visions guide her ever closer to the victim’s hometown, the secrets that will be revealed leave her wondering if the murder she is investigating may be her own.
It doesn’t feel like your standard teen shocker. It’s also not a remake, but it feels more Asian than most Hollywood horror do-overs: Mellow — nay, snoozy — atmospherics trump actual scares, and it makes almost zero sense. Gellar is a screwy-headed cutter called to a small Texas town, where she is haunted by visions of a dead woman, voices that call her “Sunshine,” and — in what passes for the major goose-pimple tactic — repeated plays of Patsy Cline’s ”Sweet Dreams.”

Set in New York City, Last Night is the story of a married couple that while apart for one night, is confronted by temptation that may decide the fate of their marriage. Joanna (Academy Award(R) nominee Keira Knightley) and Michael Reed (Sam Worthington) are 7 years into a successful and happy relationship. They are moving along in their lives together until Joanna meets Laura (Eva Mendes), the stunningly beautiful work colleague whom Michael never mentioned. While Michael is away with Laura on a business trip, Joanna runs into an old but never quite forgotten love, Alex (Guillaume Canet) and agrees to have drinks with him. As the night progresses and temptation increases for the couple, each must confront who they are inside and outside of their relationship. Last Night is ultimately a film about choices – the choice you make to be with someone, to give yourself physically and emotionally, and how to survive all three.
“Last Night’’ might not take itself seriously enough. It’s a light, minor, eventually tedious movie about married Manhattan yuppies — Sam Worthington plays Knightley’s spouse — who spend one evening in separate cities feeling out their attraction to other people. It’s the sort of movie that thinks cutting between two different stories makes it art. Usually, it feels like an exercise in art. There’s a lot of calisthenics but very little beauty or truth or whatever it is the movie is going for.

In the action-comedy 30 Minutes or Less, Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) is a small town pizza delivery guy whose mundane life collides with the big plans of two wanna-be criminal masterminds (Danny McBride and Nick Swardson). The volatile duo kidnaps Nick and forces him to rob a bank. With mere hours to pull off the impossible task, Nick enlists the help of his ex-best friend, Chet (Aziz Ansari). As the clock ticks, the two must deal with the police, hired assassins, flamethrowers, and their own tumultuous relationship.
It is the wish-fulfillment fantasy that generations of slacker pizza delivery guys have been waiting for. The rest of the world may look down on the stoners who deliver their pies, but Jesse Eisenberg is here to prove that the lowly pizza guy has the catlike reflexes, driving skills and ease under pressure to handle the most stressful of situations (like, say, getting kidnapped by two chubby dudes with an explosion fetish who force him to rob a bank).
All in a day’s work for your noble pizza dude, who makes up for his lack of career/life ambition with a wealth of MacGyver-like survival skills. If parents catch on to the film’s moral—which appears to be that you can turn a lazy college grad’s life around by strapping a bomb to his chest—America might have more to worry about than the debt ceiling.

There is no way for boredom and loneliness at home since there are lots of movies done and released this year. It is just a proof that many people follow movie makers. It also shows that the movie industry is never an outworn business.
Just get the taste of the viewers and what is the “in” today, you will have the great scenario in the cinema.

“Jumping the Broom” is another must-see movie. Just about every single one of them does in the overbearing comedy “Jumping the Broom,” which packs enough drama and silly side plots to fill a miniseries in its 101-minute running time. Weddings certainly are balancing acts that require deft maneuvering and a plate spinners’ precision. But the blunt inexactitude of “Jumping the Broom” asks viewers to buy into major issues of classism, infidelity, bankruptcy and paternity, all in the scant few hours leading up to the wedding of Sabrina Watson (Paula Patton) and Jason Taylor (Laz Alonso). It’s enough to make you want to call off the wedding altogether.
Sabrina is from a well-off family with a gorgeous mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, while Jason comes from working-class Brooklyn.

As long as kids want to dance and Hollywood wants to profit from that passion, as long as daughters pout when fathers proclaim, “I don’t want you to see that boy,” “Footloose” will endure. And be remade. The new version of the 1984 favorite that costarred Kevin Bacon and Lori Singer as the fastest feet in a town that bans youthful dancing is not so much a remake as a renovation. In the great tradition of Los Angeles real estate, a venerable property has been modernized, refurbished and tweaked when necessary to bring it in line with the demands of today’s market.
“Footloose,” was directed by Craig Brewer from a script he co-wrote with original writer Dean Pitchford, stays remarkably close to its predecessor in all the ways that count.
Not only do entire scenes and lines of dialogue appear in both films, iconic objects like a yellow VW bug, a maroon dinner jacket and fire red cowboy boots (who doesn’t remember those boots?) also reappear as if by magic. Brewer says they function as “signposts” to reassure the faithful that all is right with the world. Audiences might expect something different from Brewer because his previous films were the faux-edgy “Hustle & Flow” and “Black Snake Moan,” both of which were led astray by a slick transgressiveness that never ventured below the surface. At their core, though, those films as well as “Footloose” are monuments to the durability of sturdy cinematic clichés, the more venerable the better.

Johnny Depp returns to his iconic role of Captain Jack Sparrow in an action-packed adventure. Crossing paths with the enigmatic Angelica (Penélope Cruz), he’s not sure if it’s love-or if she’s a ruthless con artist who’s using him to find the fabled Fountain of Youth. When she forces him aboard the “Queen Anne’s Revenge,” the ship of the legendary pirate Blackbeard (Ian McShane), Jack finds himself on an unexpected adventure in which he doesn’t know whom to fear more: Blackbeard or Angelica, with whom he shares a mysterious past.

Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) finds himself on an unexpected journey to the fabled Fountain of Youth when a woman from his past (Penelope Cruz) forces him aboard the Queen Anne’s Revenge, the ship of the formidable pirate Blackbeard (Ian McShane).
It is one of the considered excellently-made films in the history of movie industry. The series of this film entails about the adventures of the pirates aboard the ship as well as the opponents.

The year of 2011, is one of the luckiest year for film makers since we have the newly released film entitled “Fast Five”. Former cop Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) partners with ex-con Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) on the opposite side of the law. Dwayne Johnson joins returning favorites Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Matt Schulze, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot, Tego Calderon and Don Omar for this ultimate high-stakes race. Since Brian and Mia Toretto (Brewster) broke Dom out of custody, they’ve blown across many borders to elude authorities. Now backed into a corner in Rio de Janeiro, they must pull one last job in order to gain their freedom. As they assemble their elite team of top racers, the unlikely allies know their only shot of getting out for good means confronting the corrupt businessman who wants them dead. But he’s not the only one on their tail. Hard-nosed federal agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) never misses his target.
But the film hardly warrants its more than two-hour running time, and the actors’ pedestrian byplay is just subpar “Ocean’s Eleven”-style banter. As the convicts, Paul Walker (who seems to be in this film for the money) and Vin Diesel (who’s in it for his career) are serviceable. But Dwayne Johnson, who plays the F.B.I. agent pursuing them, brings a hip, comic knowingness to his role. His skin looks as though it’s been slathered in butter; his enjoyment is infectious and keeps the movie speeding along.

This movie is one of the best released films this year. It tells about a story of a horror whose wish is to attract other creatures so that he can have the best in his life (as he call it). Season of the Witch kicks off the new movie year with a resounding thud as Nicolas Cage, in a wig of blond ringlets seemingly snatched from Gwyneth Paltrow’s Country Strong collection, portrays a knight of the Crusades on God’s duty. It’s the 14th century, baby, and Behman (that’s Cage) and his comrade in arms, Felson (Hellboy’s Ron Perlman), must deliver a witch (Claire Foy) to a monastery so a hotshot monk can read mumbo-jumbo at her and end the scourge of plague that has the population popping oozing postules.

The real plague is the movie, a sci-fi hodgepodge of bad history and worse special effects. Director Dominic Sena allows the actors to mug outrageously in accents that range from fake British to bogus Jersey Shore. I may be making Season of the Witch sound like more fun than it is. Trust me, it’s as bloodless as a starved vampire. Instead of a review, it deserves a stake in the heart. Die, monster, die.

Oscar winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow of “Shakespeare in Love” gives an electrifying performance as a country music superstar in writer & director Shana Feste’s “Country Song,” an earnest tabloid tearjerker about a troubled country crooner in decline. Actually, Feste’s film owes a great deal to the venerable Hollywood soaper “A Star Is Born” that charted the fall of a superstar and the rise of a talented newcomer. Ironically, Feste has said that she drew on the travails that Britney Spears endured when her career took a downward spiral. Mind you, all country music yarns about warblers basically conform to a familiar storyline. You know that “Country Strong” is going to be about the headlines and the heartaches that a vocalist wallows in when either he or she tries to cleanse their shattered souls with booze, pills, and extramarital affairs.
The movie Country Strong is a drama centered on a rising country-music songwriter (Garrett Hedlund) who sparks with a fallen star (Gwyneth Paltrow). Together, they mount his ascent and her comeback, which leads to romantic complications involving her husband/manager (Tim McGraw) and a beauty queen-turned-singer (Leighton Meester).
The plot of this movie is as follows. Soon after a rising young singer-songwriter (Garrett Hedlund) gets involved with a fallen, emotionally unstable country star (Gwyneth Paltrow), the pair embarks on a career resurrection tour helmed by her husband/manager (Tim McGraw) and featuring a beauty-queen-turned-singer (Meester). Between concerts, romantic entanglements and old demons threaten to derail them all.