In Limited Release:

Only two movies opening in New York this week:

The Killing of John Lennon (IFC Films) - Filmmaker Andrew Piddington explores the last days of Mark David Chapman (Jonas Ball) leading up to the cold-blooded murder of John Lennon at the Dakota in December 1980. After premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival last year, it opened on Wednesday at the IFC Film Center in New York.

Mini-Review: It's a smart move for this movie to be released before the other Mark David Chapman movie "Chapter 27" sees the light of day. Despite Andrew Piddington's unique style of handling the material, somewhere between a documentary and a TV movie, it's hard to watch the same events unfold although the film is a lot more expansive in terms of covering the time after Chapman's arrest. Even more interesting is the film's first act in Hawaii, because we get to see Chapman in familiar surroundings and his gradual decline into madness. Once the movie gets to New York City, it's very much like deja vu as we watch Ball's Chapman go through similar scenarios, which isn't helped since the movie was shot in all of the same actual locations. Despite the extensive amount of research that must have gone into the movie, there are far too many obvious gaffs in Piddington's attempt to recreate New York City in 1980, particularly with things that would not be around back then. Surprisingly, Jonas Ball gives a far more organic performance as Chapman, better looking and far more charming, rather than merely feeling like a parlor trick by Jared Leto of transforming himself into a pudgy Chapman, but this is a similarly fairly slow and dull experience watching this nutcase preparing for the murder, narrated using Chapman's own words, much like the other movie. While in the end, the movie is only slightly better than "Chapter 27," it's still questionable whether even the most morbidly curious John Lennon fan might have any interest in sitting through nearly two hours of this creepy lunatic. Rating: 6/10

A Bloody Aria (ImaginAsian Pictures) - This Korean thriller by Won Shin-Yun ("The Wig") about a music professor and his female student whose joyride in the countryside turns into a nightmare when they encounter four disturbed locals opens on Friday at the ImaginAsian Theatre in New York City and on Friday, January 18 at the ImaginAsian Center in L.A.

Mini-Review: This revenge premise in the vein of '70s classics like "Deliverance" and "Straw Dogs" has a premise with so much potential that it's disappointing that it's so poorly made with some major pacing problems, taking almost an hour to get going without building up much real tension or suspense during that time. Instead, there's a lot of silliness as it tries to keep things light before turning things sadistic without ever going as far as one might expect from the misleading title. Director Won Shin-yun has put together a decent cast for his second film, including Oh Dal-su from "Oldboy" as a crazy ex-military man, and a couple sick and twisted other characters, but the real star is ultra-cute newcomer Cha Ye-ryun as the poor girl stuck in the middle of the whole mess. Otherwise, there's very little real terror or gore or anything particularly scary, and the dark humor isn't nearly as amusing as in other Korean films. The film is also very poorly shot, often using long shots for no particular reason except to distract from the action. Ultimately, there are too many twists that takes the story too far away from the two main characters, focusing more on a local police officer and his bullied younger brother trying to get revenge for years of abuse. Essentially the entire professor-student premise that starts the movie is turned into a red herring. With so much pointless violence for the sake of violence and a terrible non-sensical ending, this film is a grueling and pointless exercise that never fully delivers on its premise, nor comes near to the cleverness of Tarantino's "Death Proof" on updating the '70s exploitation flick. Rating: 5/10

We'll be back next week with our regular size column and four more movies.