“300: Rise of an Empire” slavishly re-creates the original. It feels like one of those quickie, direct-to-DVD cash grabs that somehow took seven years to surface.

Christopher Lawrence
Wayde King, co-star of the Animal Planet series, offers a look at some of the Las Vegas-based tanks he and Brett Raymer build for the reality show’s fourth season.
There’s a ceiling on just how exciting the Oscars (5:30 p.m. today, KTNV-TV, Channel 13) can get. You’re still going to have to sit through 18 awards you don’t care about to get to the six you do.
You’ll never see Tiger Woods leave the PGA Tour to spend his days playing putt-putt. Even if the mini-golf course were right next door to a Hooters. So why is Liam Neeson only making movies like “Non-Stop”?
In “Non-Stop,” Liam Neeson stars as an air marshal on a New York-to-London flight who starts receiving text messages from someone on the plane threatening to kill one of the passengers every 20 minutes until $150 million is wired to a bank account.
In the new comedy, executive-produced by the “American Idol” host, one of the main characters looks at a waitress and declares, “I kinda wanna eat off her butt.” Another guy ends up crying, and a third vomits in a purse.