British Secret Service agent James Bond (Daniel Craig) is introduced in Prague, where he’s been dispatched to kill both an MI6 section chief selling state secrets and his contact. The kills earn Bond his double 0 status within the intelligence bureau and grant him his mythic “license to kill.”

In Uganda, a terrorist financier named Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) meets with a warlord to take possession of his cash and invest it in a no-risk portfolio. What the warlord doesn’t know is that Le Chiffre plans to use the money to buy up stock in an airline, then short sell the stock before engineering a terrorist attack on the airline, making himself rich.

Bond pursues Le Chiffre’s bombmaker through a construction site in Madagascar and blows up half an embassy in order to get the man. This brings a reprimand from his boss, M (Judi Dench) who considers Bond “too blunt an instrument” and regrets promoting him to double-0 status.

Given time off, Bond instead traces a call on the bombmaker’s cell phone to the Bahamas, where he shadows one of Le Chiffre’s associates and seduces his wife (Caterina Murino) in order to get information. Bond pursues her husband to Miami International Airport, where he foils the airliner attack on the runway.

Desperate to recoup the warlord’s money, Le Chiffre enters a poker tournament at the Casino Royale in Montenegro. M dispatches Bond to beat Le Chiffre in the tournament, so the financier will have to turn to MI6 for protection. A brass tacks liaison officer with Her Majesty’s Treasury named Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) is sent to monitor Bond’s handling of the $10 million buy-in. Unexpectedly, the two develop feelings for each other.

When Pierce Brosnan agreed to take over the role of Ian Fleming’s James Bond – the longest running franchise in movie history, now at 21 films – he agreed to a three-picture contract, with an option for a fourth. After completing 2002’s Die Another Day, Brosnan agreed with producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli that it was time to move on.

Director Martin Campbell – who introduced Brosnan as Bond with Goldeneye – was hired to helm the new installment, and the script by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade was upgraded by Oscar winner Paul Haggis. A global search ensued for the new Bond, though only one other actor was seriously considered: Henry Cavill, a 22-year-old ultimately deemed too young for the part. 37-year old Daniel Craig was cast instead, and drew some criticism initially for being blonde-haired and blue-eyed.

Of the many things I love about Casino Royale as a Bond fan, the film’s greatest achievement is that you don’t need to be a Bond fan to enjoy it. Eon Productions finally realized they had strayed too far from Ian Fleming’s source material and sought to return 007 to his roots. They contemporized Fleming’s 1953 novel and told a story about an assassin spy – “half hitman, half monk” – not out to save the world, but do a job.

This 007 is more athletic, harder around the edges, but more vulnerable underneath all that. Daniel Craig’s Bond is first and foremost a killer, not a debonair fop. The script also gives Bond an actual relationship with an actual professional woman. A real actress was then cast as Vesper Lynd, and Eva Green simmers in this.

With a really good script and great casting, everything else falls into place. I haven’t been a fan of anything Martin Campbell has directed outside of Goldeneye, but I have to take my hat off to the filmmakers here. The budget was around $150 million – a relatively modest expenditure by today’s filmmaking standards – and instead of digital gadgetry, the filmmakers put imagination into this.

The title sequence by graphic designer Daniel Kleinman is captivating. The acrobatic free-running/jumping style of Sébastien Foucan – who plays the bombmaker – and the stunt sequence on the construction site really impressed me. There’s a barrel-roll done with an Aston Martin DBS that set a world record here. There’s also a convincingly brutal scene where 007 is actually tortured.

The only gadgets employed are a high-tech survival kit 007 keeps in his Aston Martin, and his cell phone (Bond uses a Sony Ericsson K800i, due to the fact that the film was co-produced by Columbia Pictures, a subsidiary of Sony). Instead of resorting to explosions or lots of shootings, the film makes you feel almost every death Bond is responsible for.

There’s nothing about Casino Royale that doesn’t work, including the poker, the sensational music by David Arnold and the title song – “You Know My Name” – by Chris Cornell. Most action franchises get more cartoonish as they go and ultimately start to parody themselves. I’m interested to see whether the Bond series goes back to that, or can build on the strength and ingenuity of this picture, which is one of the top three in the franchise’s history.

Documentary directed and photographed by Amanda Micheli begins in 2000, as Lucy Lawless’ stunt double on the TV series Xena: Warrior Princess – 22 year old Zoe Bell – finds herself out of work when the show ends. Bell leaves her family in Auckland and arrives in L.A., where Jeannie Epper – Lynda Carter’s stunt double on Wonder Woman twenty-five years previous – takes Bell under her wing and attempts to help her career in film.

Epper is daughter of stunt pioneer John Epper, whose entire family has dedicated itself to continuing his legacy. This includes Jeannie Epper’s daughter Eurlyne, who landed on her neck during a routine fall four years previous, and has to watch from the sidelines during her rehab, while Jeannie continues to work into her 60s, even after she donates a kidney.

In spite of her connections, Bell is passed over for a job on a TV series, but a year later, Epper gets her into a high fall training session, where Bell comes to the attention of a scout looking for a stuntwoman to double for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. He invites her to audition for the film’s stunt coordinator, Master Wo-Ping, and director Quentin Tarantino.

In addition to Lawless and Tarantino, Micheli interviews Steven Spielberg – who met Epper when she and most of her family worked for him on 1941 – and he talks about the stuntwoman being a recent breakthrough in Hollywood. Up until the women’s movement, men in wigs routinely doubled for women where stunts were concerned in movies and TV.

Stunt coordinator Terry Leonard – who performed the truck undercarriage gag in Raiders of the Lost Ark – states, “The girls do have a tougher job, just because of the costumes.” With wardrobe that usually features a bare midriff, arms, legs or all of the above, stuntwomen can’t pad up. Footage from Wonder Woman shows Epper never used padding at all.

Double Dare came to my attention after seeing Zoe Bell not only play herself in Grindhouse, but perform a mind blowing moving vehicle stunt that surpasses the one in Raiders. She comes off as the same utterly rad chick here. During her audition for Kill Bill, she wipes out on a flip four times in a row, but what impresses Tarantino is the way she wipes out, getting up, laughing about it, and doing it again. Her toughness wins her the job.

This type of strength among women in show business is what Searching For Debra Winger completely ignored, and I don’t mean physical strength. Stuntwomen don’t complain about getting older, losing jobs or not getting respect. Instead, they do what the men do, only they do it better. As Bell departs for China to train with Wo-Ping, Epper’s advice to her is “Don’t get all frazzled when you’re over there. Just do your job.”

Micheli does such a subtle job telling her story that I hesitate to call the film a “documentary” at all. The camera crew and docu-style is almost invisible, and we’re simply able to follow a professional woman in a two or three year span of her career, being mentored by another woman and overcoming barriers through pure devotion to her craft.

Double Dare is only one hour and twenty minutes long, and while I would have enjoyed seeing a lot more stuff, it feels perfectly framed. Spielberg is wonderfully articulate about the Eppers and the tradecraft of stuntwomen. A segment at a Xena convention is wonderful, and watching Bell receive word she’s won the job on Kill Bill is a joy.

Another joy is watching Zoe Bell do a header off a 35 foot ladder into an airbag (it looks like a 100 foot ladder) and hearing Epper ask her if that was fun. “Fuck yeah!” This summed up the movie for me, which is passionate and a must-see for movie fans. It took Netflix two weeks to make this DVD available to ship to me, but if you can locate it, I highly recommend checking this one out.

Hong Kong financed Asian blockbuster follows the Bollywood production model, offering fantasy, horror, romance, physical comedy, special effects and even a musical interlude all in the same movie.

A timid tax collector hilariously played by Leslie Cheung is out in the 19^th century Chinese countryside that should be familiar to any fan of Kung Fu Theater. Drenched in rain, his tax rolls are ruined and he is penniless. Townspeople eager to be rid of the tax man direct him to the deserted Lo Ran Temple in the forest outside of town, from which the locals are sure he will never return.

After an encounter with strange bearded swordsman Master Yan (Wu Ma), Cheung is beguiled by a lute playing beauty played by Joey Wong. Walking corpses and the rest of her spirit family come between the two lovers.

Directed by Ching Siu-tung and produced by Tsui Hark, this enterprise may not add up to much in the end, but the film is a lot of fun to watch. A huge success in Asia that spawned two sequels, a TV series and cartoon, Sam Raimi was clearly influenced by the film’s frenetic running camera when he made Evil Dead 2.

A memorable sequence involves Cheung having to hide under the water level of a tub so that Wong’s ghost family will not smell him. As she tries to get rid of the other ghosts, Cheung’s head pops up and is dunked back in with Jackie Chan-like acrobat timing.

A gang of stop-motion corpses that recall Jason and the Argonauts are also fun. Part of the film’s success was no doubt the introduction of fantasy thrills and underworld chills to the standard martial arts picture. Loosely adapted by Yun Kai-Chi from Qing dynasty writer Pu Songling’s Strange Stories From A Chinese Studio.

Set in 9^th century China, this martial arts extravaganza follows two deputies who have been tasked with killing the leader of the House of Flying Daggers, a rebel group who rob from the rich and give to the poor. One of the deputies, Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) goes undercover at a brothel and arrests a blind dancer named Mei (Ziyi Zhang from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon) he suspected of having information.

When Mei refuses to talk, his partner (Andy Lau) proposes that Jin pose as a rebel, break Mei out of jail and attempt to have her lead him to the House of Flying Daggers. Jin dubs himself “The Wind” and takes off across the countryside with Mei, hoping to seduce her. They instead fall in love, but double crosses, pitched battles in the bamboo forests and chases ensue before a climactic sword duel between the two deputies.

Directed by Zhang Yimou from a screenplay by Li Feng, Wang Bin and Yimou, House of Flying Daggers bends the scale to style over substance early on and never looks back. It does feature the doomed romance that Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon so involving. It also held my attention for much longer than Zhang’s previous film, Hero with Jet Li, but this is still a tough one to recommend.

Taken on its own, the film’s visual palette is sensational, particularly the “Echo Game” that opens the film. Dancing in a luxurious brothel, Mei is positioned on a stage surrounded by drums on poles. Her challenger flicks a nut at one of the drums, and she is to use her extrasensory hearing to hit the same drum with the long weighted sleeves of her robes. One nut, two nuts, three nuts and then hundreds are thrown as Mei spins like a human cyclone, aided deftly and illogically by computer effects.

Ziyi Zhang and Takeshi Kaneshiro have great chemistry, but a character driven story was not ever a going concern here. If computer generated ballet is your thing, you’ll love this. Fans of Ziyi should also be doing cartwheels; she’s one of the most gifted dancers and acrobats on the planet, is engaging as an actor, and impossible to take your eyes off of either way.

While I enjoyed the climactic sword duel, which takes place across a field of pure white snow, there’s not a lot behind the curtain of color schemes and computer effects here.