Sonia Braga

That's some dedication to your story, but it turns out that neither the original Hotchkiss nor the updated one merit that much consideration. The short is your expected coming-of-age tale: A kid named Steve hates girls, but over time (and thanks to Hotchkiss) he comes to love them, particularly a gal named Lisa.

Continue reading: Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School Review

Testosterone opens with graphic novelist Dean (David Sutcliffe) and his devastatingly good-looking Argentinean boyfriend Pablo (Antonio Sabato Jr.) leading a perfect L.A. life. But suddenly Pablo disappears, and Dean simply can't let him go. When he bumps into Pablo's mother (Sonia Braga, having a great time playing the dragon lady of Buenos Aires) at an art gallery, she informs him that Pablo has returned to Argentina, and that's the end of that.

Continue reading: Testosterone Review

Played by John Leguizamo, Victor Rosa is a Latino gangsta with all the ambition of a young Godfather and all the attitude of a taller Joe Pesci. He spends his days violently whacking errant drug dealers and monitoring the sales of his own designer "street pharmaceutical" not so subtly labeled Empire -- which is exactly what Vic thinks he's building in his little bit of the South Bronx. But when his girlfriend (Delilah Cotto) announces that she's pregnant, he thinks it might be time to go legit.

Continue reading: Empire Review

Any chance that "Empire" might be all that different from other drug- dealer- trying- to- go- straight movies is lost with the opening voice-over, in which heroin mini-kingpin Victor Rosa (John Leguizamo) rattles off a dozen street life clichés in 60 seconds, starting with the line, "Damn, if I'd known then what I know now! It's all about making money, baby."

Never mind that the plot includes the hero losing his shirt and his boss's drug money in a Wall Street scam perpetrated by a savvy, Caucasian, uptown con artist. That only serves to prove that Victor is a sucker, not that his story is any different from those of drug dealers depicted in scads of other movies from the last 15 years -- October's "Paid In Full" or 1994's "Sugar Hill," for example.

Universal Pictures even admits as much in the film's press kit, which compares it "in theme and execution" to a "list of urban gangster films" but goes on to trumpet the fact that "Empire" is the first time this recycled story "has been told from the point of view of a Latino character."

Continue reading: Empire Review