Problem: OPTIONS:
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Answer: I loved the first "Azumi" movie. I've seen Ms. Ueto in a variety of her TV appearances and I've seen my fair share of samurai and ninja flicks. I have to say that this movie was much weaker than I'd expected.

Given the movie's cast and set up in "Azumi", they should have been able to do a much better job with this movie, but instead it was slow, plodding in parts, and sprinkled with very poor, unconvincing, and wooden acting.

When they bothered to reference the first movie, they did so in a manner that was pretty loose and weak. In "Azumi", the title character is the best of a group of superior killers. In "Azumi 2" she seems somehow diminished and less-impressive.

That's not to say it was a total loss. There were a few decent fight scenes and some over-the-top characters. Unfortunately, the movie suffers overall from the simple fact that Shusuke Kaneko and Yoshiaki Kawajiri are not Ryuhei Kitamura and Isao Kiriyama. The latter two truly captured the "manga" feel in their screenplay whereas the former never quite "got it."

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Answer: Another one of those films you hear about from friends (...or read about on IMDb). Not many false notes in this one. I could see just about everything here actually happening to a young girl fleeing from a dead-end home town in Tennessee to Florida, with all her worldly possessions in an old beaten-up car.

The heroine, Ruby, makes some false starts, but learns from them. I found myself wondering why, why didn't she lean a bit more on Mike's shoulder, but...she has her reasons, as it turns out.

Just a fine film. The only thing I don't much like about it, I think, is the title.

Problem: OPTIONS:
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Answer:
Dan Duryea, a perfectly decent B-movie actor who made lots of lookalike noirs in the 1940s, can't do much with this one: young man is accused of murdering an unhappily married singer; when he's sentenced to die, his wife decides to solve the case herself with help from the dead woman's husband. After a dazzling opening shot, flick quickly settles into B-movie formula. It certainly looks good, but the twist finish is colorlessly handled and the cast (including Peter Lorre and Broderick Crawford) is just a bit stiff. Based on a Cornell Woolrich novel, and passable for a single viewing.

** from ****