‘Dying’ touches issues of the heart

If you’re settling in for a first-person documentary called “Dying to Live: The Journey Into a Man’s Open Heart,” you can’t say you weren’t warned. A regrettably graceless video diary of one man’s overpowering grief and tsoris, it chronicles an emotionally turbulent year or so in which the 49-year-old Ben Mittleman -- a self-proclaimed “golden boy Jew” who acted professionally for many years -- learned he had the same dangerous heart ailment that afflicted his now-deceased father.

There’s not much to say about a navel-gazing effort like this, since it reflects less an artful examination of mortality than a sentimental revisiting of love and tears. A psychological expose, in other words, this is not. But a firmer objective hand might have wrestled director Mittleman’s intense personality into a more cohesive portrait of humanity’s mysterious coping mechanism.

-- Robert Abele

“Dying to Live.” MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes. Exclusively at Laemmle’s Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd, Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869.

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Two ‘Flash’ cops out on the beat

The Hong Kong carrot dangled before us during the inane but occasionally elegant “Flash Point” is in the action sequences, which blossom like the rare, many-fisted rose bud; the stick is the rest of the movie, with which director Wilson Yip beats us insensible. Set, for no particular reason, on the eve of the 1997 handoff of Hong Kong to China, this politics-free police procedural/sedative features Donnie Yen as Sgt. Ma and Louis Koo as undercover officer Wilson, two cops out to capture a band of Vietnamese triad members who are up to no good. The recommendation here is for the reader to go out and rent Yip’s “S.P.L.,” the 2005 prequel to “Flash Point” and a far funnier, more action-packed and categorically more sensible take on the Asian-action flick.

-- John Anderson

“Flash Point.” MPAA rating: R for strong bloody violence and brutal martial arts action. Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes. In Mandarin and Cantonese with English subtitles. At ImaginAsian Center, 251 S. Main St., Los Angeles, (213) 617-1033; Regency Fairfax, 7907 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 655-4010; Regency South Coast Village, 1561 W. Sunflower Ave., Santa Ana, (714) 557-5701; and Laemmle One Colorado, 42 Miller Alley, Pasadena, (626) 744-1224.