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After giving Iron Man a pass, critics generally seem to have knives out for Speed Racer, despite the fact that Speed boasts the most radical visual strategies seen in a movie theater since Sin City, and maybe longer. Yes, of course "unconventional" is not equivalent to "excellent" or even "interesting," and I guess I can understand why you might not want to let the Wachowskis play your optic nerve like a Jew's harp for more than two hours in a sitting. But, man, if you value a little razzle with your dazzle, this one delivers a lot more of that stuff than, say, Iron Man.

Image nicked from Tim Lucas's excellent Video Watchblog entry on Night of the Werewolf.

It's surely convenience, or just coincidence--rather than any nods to quality or pent-up demand--that these are the first two Euro-horror titles to arrive in high definition on Blu-ray Disc. This double-feature package from BCI and Deimos entertainment pairs two films starring the well-loved (and prolific) Spanish horror actor Paul Naschy. Vengeance of the Zombies (La Rebelion de las Muertas, 1972) is a potboiler from cult director Leon Klimovsky involving a charismatic Indian cult leader (Naschy), his less-attractive brother (also Naschy), and a beautiful redhead (Romy) from a cursed English family. And Night of the Werewolf (La Retorno del Hombre Lobo, 1980) is a genre mash-up directed by Naschy in which he stars as the wolfman Waldemar Daninsky and faces off against a bevy of vampire women led by Elizabeth Bathory herself. (Scroll way down to read about some problems with these discs.)

Flight of the Red Balloon is one of those movies where nothing much happens. It's a simple, relatively peaceful film, notable in part because director Hou Hsao-Hsien is shooting outside Asia for the first time. Hou's starting point--dictated by Paris's Musee d'Orsay, which commissioned the film--is La Ballon Rouge, the 1956 Albert Lamorisse film about a little boy and his companion in the streets of Paris, a floating red balloon.

When I read Glenn Kenny's line about Iron Man being, essentially, the best Marvel superhero movie to date, I have to admit: it pissed me off. Or, at least, Kenny pissed all over the Spider-Man fanboy inside me. But movie critics are all standing in line to carry Iron Man's jock, so what do I know?

It pains me to note that The Forbidden Kingdom has the feeling of a valedictory about it. The film is a generally westernized recitation of archetypal martial-arts legends and themes that uses an alternate-realities hook to palm off its main character arc on Michael Angarano, a good-looking kid who comes off as a variation on a theme by Shia LaBeouf, in a bid to give a generation of teenaged American moviegoers a point of emotional entrée to the story of the Asian other. That director Rob Minkoff had the sense to retain the great Asian martial-arts choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping and lyrical cinematographer Peter Pau is to his credit - they give the film notes of beauty and authenticity that play against the inevitable Hollywood gloss slathered across the story (think Karate Kid: The Next Generation) and characters.

The first scenes of The Ruins look like an especially gorgeous episode of some MTV show about rich white people with nothing better to do but lounge in the sun all day. Shot in richly colored widescreen by D.P. Darius Khondji, these are ostensibly early character moments, establishing the tendencies of these two young couples, freewheeling girls and two boys, one uptight and one less so. But director Carter Smith has Khondji linger on the women's bodies, pale in the Mexican sun, attractively toned and -- as the horror fans who will gravitate to a movie like The Ruins will intuitively understand -- fragile in frightening ways. These are the beautiful people, and by the end of The Ruins we'll have spent a lot of time watching them go downhill. Their skin will be mottled with the stains of blood and grime, their clothing filthy from sweat and dirt (and something green), their hungry and terrified bodies ravaged not just by stress and dehydration, but by the immediate threat of alien invasion - by something alive that breaks the skin and then scoots underneath, tearing around your subcutaneous regions like tiny hyperactive moles making tunnels under the grass.

The Blood on Satan's Claw, a 1971 horror potboiler from English genre studio Tigon, lacks the moral underpinnings of Michael Reeves' cautionary classic Witchfinder General but resembles it in setting and atmosphere. Where Witchfinder General was all about the villainous official played by Vincent Price who saw witchcraft in every corner – or, cynically, used accusations of witchery to advance his own personal and political aspirations – The Blood on Satan's Claw clarifies the relationship between wickedness and virtue by showing how evil, in the guise of rebellious children and especially a seductive teenager, can be vanquished by vigilance and bravery on the part of Christian men. It's the kind of movie where the cranky old judge who ducks out of town at the first signs of a supernatural dust-up returns in the final reel, empowered to vanquish the devil himself.

Skeptical viewers may suspect, with some reason, that Wong Kar Wai has been making the same movie for a number of years now – their subjects include displacement across time and space, romantic yearning, color and light, loneliness and reverie. When he changes up the formula, let's say by making his lovers two men (Happy Together) or by goosing the ennui with lavish science-fiction inserts (2046), it only seems to intensify the familiar feelings of gentle anxiety and punch-drunk desire. “We love what we can't have, and we can't have what we love,” Wong once told an interviewer, and over and over his films seem to find new approaches to that same disconnect, traveling roads that wind through familiar surroundings but offer a slightly different view of the landscape.

That great title is the main attraction of this cheerfully nonsensical Warner Bros. farce, which mixes up a couple of bumbling police detectives, Kelly and Dempsey (Hugh Herbert and Allen Jenkins), with a trenchcoated dame (Vesta Vernoff) who stumbles out of the rain and into their squad car claiming that her stepfather has been murdered at a nearby lighthouse. "He's the inventor of a radium ray so powerful that anyone who controls it controls the world," she explains with a straight face, then adds, urgently, "Every nation is seeking it."