Gale Ann Hurd

"Punisher: War Zone," the gory follow-up to the 2004 "Punisher" based on the Marvel comic book series, hangs around the same neighborhood as " The Dark Knight." Both feature vigilantes who go too far. Both crime fighters speak in an affected tough-guy...

What do you know? A credible Hulk. "Incredible" overstates it, but "The Incredible Hulk" finds a viable way to retell an old Jekyll and Hyde story, dating back to the early 1960s and a Cold War that inspired its share of unruly Marvel Comics misfits. The...

COUNTLESS comic-book bad guys have made the fatal mistake of underestimating the Hulk. Have Hollywood and the media made the same costly error? For weeks, industry gossip and news reports have focused not only on the shaky stance of Friday's “Speed...

You'd think opening a wine bar would be easy. Lay in a collection of interesting wines, lay on some fine cheeses and charcuterie. Don't forget plenty of crusty bread. Round up a crowd of sociable wine lovers and voilà: success. In Italy, you can find...

"Come for the wines, stay for the food" is the motto at the new Vertical Wine Bistro in Pasadena. Vertical, in reference to tastings of several vintages of the same wine, and vertical, I suppose, because the posh wine bistro is upstairs, across from...

You know, "Aeon Flux" isn't that bad. Oh, don't get me wrong. It's silly, it's pointless, and director Karyn Kusama clearly has no idea what she's doing ... but if you're looking for a mindless action movie set in a dystopic future society where hot...

Big question: With an Academy Award for "Monster" and a gutsy performance in "North Country" under her belt, Charlize Theron might be tired of the unkempt, intellectual route. In adapting MTV's animated series of a scantily clad rebel 400 years in the...

Before "The Matrix," there was "Aeon Flux," Peter Chung's sexy, ultraviolent and deeply weird animated MTV series from the early 1990s. Wearing a skimpy leather uniform (when she wore anything at all), iconoclast Flux was part commando, part comic...

1 star (out of 4) Every modern action movie requires a "lock-'n'-load" sequence - that scene in which our hero rolls out his arsenal of guns, gadgets, knives, bazookas and small tactical nukes in preparation for mortal combat. In "The Punisher," the...

"The Punisher" is that rare comic book movie that actually feels like a comic book. Which turns out to be mostly, but not entirely, a good thing. Though he is the namesake of one of Marvel's most popular books, the Punisher — unlike cohorts Spider-...

3 1/2 stars (out of 4) "Hulk smash!" That's the famous battle cry of Stan Lee's Marvel Comics super-antihero the Hulk, the huge, green mutant monster bursting from the damaged psyche and DNA of gentle scientist Bruce Banner. But it might also serve as...

A story about a nice guy who turns as big, bad and green as King Kong on a bender, "Hulk" is based on the character created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who launched their monster around the time that Kennedy and Khrushchev were set to launch their...