Prior to this release, the Happy Tree Friends were the main attraction at a popular Web site, where they developed quite a cult following. It's easy to see why. These hyper-kinetic, ultra-violent, Flash-animated shorts are exactly the sorts of things to provide office workers with an amusing diversion for a few minutes. A large cast of doe-eyed cartoon animals with names such as Cuddles, Giggles and Lumpy are dispatched in a variety of gruesome ways, with results that are like My Little Pony guest-starring in an episode of The Simpsons' own ultra-violent cartoon Itchy & Scratchy. But what works so well on the Internet doesn't necessarily survive the transfer to home viewing. That which is cathartically entertaining to deskbound employees at 3 o'clock on a Friday afternoon is, at times, repetitive and even predictable when viewed from the comfort of one's own armchair. Itchy & Scratchy works so well because of the satire and the increasingly creative and ridiculously elaborate cartoon violence--qualities that are missing from Happy Tree Friends. As a result, it's best to sample this one episode at a time, rather than sit through the whole thing in one go. --Robert Burrow

Two escaped convicts (Jeremy Northam, Steve Zahn) arrive in the town of Happy, Texas, where they are mistaken for a gay couple who...

Released in 1992, Hard Boiled is John Woo's farewell to the kind of blood-spattered cinema of vengeance and redemption with which he had made his name as a director in Hong Kong during the late 1980s. The following year he was in Hollywood filming Hard Target with Jean-Claude Van Damme, and an era had effectively ended. This might explain the elegiac feel Woo brings to his study of two men haunted by the violent consequences of their actions. Chow Yun Fat generates tremendous sullen energy in his portrayal of Tequila, a plain-clothes cop who not only loses his partner in a shoot-out with a gang of underground gunrunners but also discovers that he's unwittingly killed a fellow officer working undercover. Playing opposite him is Tony Leung as the enigmatic Tony, a young police officer who has secretly managed to penetrate the world of illegal arms-dealing in the guise of a cold-blooded gangland assassin. With rival gangs fighting over the weapons trade and Tequila gunning for Tony, unaware of his true identity, Hard Boiled has an unsurprisingly high body count, particularly when the various factions converge on a private hospital, reducing it by the movie's end to a smoking war zone, its corridors strewn with corpses.

John Woo's ability to exploit the comic-book profundities of the genre, endowing his set-piece action sequences with a uniquely emotional edge, comes through in the controlled use of slow motion, cut-away details and brooding freeze-frame studies of the central characters. The image of Chow Yun Fat cradling an abandoned baby against his chest while he blasts his way out of the hospital's maternity unit has an enduring sharpness to it. However, a sense of ending runs throughout the movie, as if Woo were acknowledging that, having done everything he could with the format, the time had come for him to move on. And perhaps it had. --Ken Hollings