Bollywood superstar Salman Khan’s dream project, this highly fictionalized account of the Pindari war against the British, is pretty bad history but pretty good entertainment.

1920, India: A UK reporter arrives in Rajasthan to cover the ongoing clashes between Pindari tribesmen and the local maharajahs who’ve struck deals to benefit their families and "protect" their subjects. Why, she asks, do the Pindari continue to embrace violence when so many of his countrymen favor detente? The answer, as is always the case in India, lies in the past.

1862: Against the counsel of his closest military advisers, the Prince of Madavgarh (Shroff) enlists the aid of Pindari warriors, then cruelly betrays them to the British. The surviving Pindari are divided: Some, led by Chief Hydar Ali (Suri), want immediate revenge. Warrior Prithvi Singh (Chakraborty) advises retreat and regrouping. Not that he’s a coward: He made a lifelong enemy of the prince by hacking off his forearm, But Prithvi counsels that for all their fearlessness and martial skill, the Pindari won’t be able to take on the British until they learn to be devious and manipulative as well.

Some 25 years later, Prithvi sends his grown sons, Veer and Punya (Khan and his real-life brother, Sohail), to study in London. Veer falls in love with Princess Yashodhara (Zarine Khan, who is not related to Salman and Sohail, though her resemblance to Salman’s girlfriend, Katrina Kaif, was much remarked upon), whom he once glimpsed while robbing a train. She defies her snobbish brother (Rajkumar), who treats Veer as a vulgar commoner, but a visit from her father reveals the awful truth: It was dad who betrayed the Pindari, and is hellbent on eradicating every last one of them.

Veer's relationship to historical fact is tenuous, starting with the fact that the Pindari resistance was essentially over by 1819. But to be fair, the film does open with a disclaimer to the effect that any resemblance to actual events or real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental (along with an assurance that all animals were treated humanely and scenes involving falling horses were done with CGI). So you can't say you weren't warned. Veer is clearly modeled on sweeping, sem-ihistorical epics like Taras Bulba (1962) or the more recent Mongol (2007), which attempt to rehabilitate the reputations of historically reviled groups or individuals — Russia's Cossacks, say, or Mongolia's Genghis Khan — in the name of national pride. It was Gandhi's passive resistance movement that ended Britain's occupation of India, but Gandhi notwithstanding, his story is a little lacking in the robust popular spectacle department: No star-crossed lovers, no sweeping battle scenes, no lusty warriors with hard swords and soft hearts. Veer has them all and then some.

The "some" includes painfully broad comedy, a bizarre jousting scene, British aristocrats who talk like costermongers, rubber armor, pearls, jewels and gilded treasures galore (including the Bond-fil-like golen hand Yashodhara’s father wears in place of his severed limb) and several forgettable musical numbers — the exception being "Taali,” whose lyrics, which appear to praise the power of feminine beauty, are cleverly juxtaposed with choreography celebrating boisterous virility. So yes, it's a mixed bag, and its dubious politics are smoothed over by historical distance — if you replaced the Pindari with Afghanistan’s mujaheddin it might be a little tougher to relax and go with flow.

To say that The Book of Eli is vastly more entertaining than The Road isn't really praise, in the same way that "apocalypse lite" isn't really an endorsement. The movie's ruined America looks grim enough, but damned if Denzel Washington doesn't have the light of the future tucked into his backpack, because... well, because he's Denzel Washington.

Some 30 years after a devastating war, America is one sorry-ass heap of rubble and despair where predatory savages lord it over less ruthless folk and much of the world is sightless, thanks to the searing light that still pours through the hole in the sky left by that last great war. Unlike the majority of people scratching out a hardscrabble existence in this nasty new world, Eli (Washington) was born "before:" Before "the flash" that stripped away the Earth's vegetation, before water became more precious than gold, before literacy crept to the top of some list of useless skills no one can read anyway..

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As a longtime Sherlock Holmes fan, I approached this movie with considerable trepidation. And while my concerns weren’t unjustified — to say that director Guy Ritchie’s blunt laddishness isn’t an intuitive match for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters is the understatement of at least two centuries — I was pleasantly surprised by how much I genuinely enjoyed it.

1891: Holmes (Downey) and Watson (Law) catch aristocratic serial killer Lord Blackwood (Strong) in the act of unspeakable satanic shenanigans, saving a young woman’s life in the process. As is his wont, Scotland Yard’s Inspector Lestrade (Marsan) arrives just in time to miss the melee and score the arrest. But despite this high-profile triumph, a black mood hangs over 221B Baker Street: Watson is preparing to leave Holmes — gasp! — for his lady friend, former governess Mary Morstan (Reilly) and the world’s first consulting detective is indulging a royal sulk.

Fortunately for their friendship, events quickly put Watson’s engagement on the back burner: Lord Blackwood, who’s been amusing himself in prison by playing head games with Holmes, is sentenced to die and Watson is asked to serve as attending physician at his hanging. But some 24 hours after the good doctor pronounces the bad blue blood dead, Blackwood’s corpse has vanished; his mausoleum is shattered, apparently from the inside, and the corpse of a red-headed midget occupies his coffin. Could it be a coincidence that scheming con-artist Irene Adler (McAdam), recently bedazzled visited Holmes and asked if he might look into the disappearance of, yes, a red-headed midget? I think not. Watson is, of course, drawn into in Holmes’ investigation, which turns up a ripping conspiracy involving the Temple of Four, a secret sorcerer’s society led by Lord Blackwood’s father (Fox). And needless to say, all is not as it seems.

In between the eye-catching opening and the story’s bang-up conclusion, Holmes and Watson engage in all manner of manly derring-do while squabbling like a pair of bitchy queens. None of this folderol is canonical, though at least one of the four credited writers was sufficiently well acquainted with Doyle’s stories to incorporate all sorts of Holmesian lore into the screenplay, but a good chunk of it is pretty amusing… roughly the same proportion that’s a lot of bloody nonsense.

No one seems to have cared much about situating this particular apocryphal adventure within the accepted timeline of Doyle’s stories: Holmes and Watson’s fractious relationship suggests an early escapade, though by 1891 they’d roomed together for a decade. But truth be told, Doyle wasn’t very careful about that sort of thing either. He considered the Holmes stories as light entertainments rather than sacred texts, and his slapdash attitude towards details has fueled decades of cheeky amusement for the dedicated fans who persist in trying to reconcile the inconsistencies of some 25 years worth of adventures spread over four novels and 56 short stories.

Complaints about the movie’s shameful perversion of Holmes’ character are touching, but many of the affronted appear to have only a passing acquaintance with the source material. Forget the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce movies: Far from being an effete aesthete whose neck could hardly support his big brain, Doyle’s Holmes — particularly in the early adventures — was an accomplished brawler (martial arts included!), a secret slob with a pronounced mean streak, and a trying roommate who uses the sitting room wall for target practice, keeps his pipe tobacco in a mucky old Persian slipper and uses cocaine when he’s bored. And Watson is no bumbling duffer: He’s the same age as Holmes, newly returned from a harrowing stint as a field medic in Afghanistan and a good man to have watching your back. As to that cheeky homoerotic subtext, suffice it to say that it’s there in the stories if you’re inclined to see it.

There’s plenty wrong with Sherlock Holmes: It’s too long and drags in the middle. It sexes up the relationship between Adler and Holmes, which really is a cynical distortion, and for all the frantic goings on, the story really isn’t very interesting. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: An awful lot of Doyle’s Holmes stories are less than thrilling on the plot front — that’s why there are so many versions of the atypically enthralling Hound of the Baskervilles and so few of, say, The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans. The Baker Street chronicles are like original Star Trek: all about the relationships. If you get that right, no one — no real fan — will give a tinker’s damn about the silly aliens or the endless dashing about through London’s sewers.

”I used to be somebody,” sings ruined country-western legend Bad Blake (Bridges, looking uncannily like Kris Kristofferson), “but now I'm somebody else.” Like all great C&W lyrics, those dozen words sum up a lifetime's worth of missteps, complications and rueful perspective gained just a little too late.

Blake used to be a star, a natural-born tunesmith who turned out perfectly crafted songs about heartbreak, hard times and the beckoning road, and sang them with a hit-making mix of grit, warmth and “been there, done that” weariness. Now he's a bitter, barely functioning alcoholic, reduced to living out of his car and playing murkily lit bowling alleys and hole-in-the-wall bars because no one else will have him. Having systematically torpedoed every relationship he ever had, Blake lives on bitter pride and stews in the knowledge that he could write rings around every fresh-faced Nashville star worth a good Goddamn, including his onetime protégé, crossover country-pop star Tommy Sweet (Farrell); he wouldn’t accept a helping hand if it were wrapped around a jeroboam of bourbon.

And then fate tosses him a life raft in the form of a potentially stable relationship with small-time journalist Jean Craddock (Gyllenhaal), a single mother half his age whose bright-eyed little boy is a stinging reminder that Blake abandoned his own son years ago. But he's an old dog who isn't interested in learning new tricks. He can't even be bothered to write new songs, despite a lucrative and thoroughly respectful offer from Sweet.

It’s glib, lazy, critics' shorthand to call Crazy Heart Bridges' The Wrestler. It’s not even particularly accurate: Unlike Mickey Rourke, Bridges is no human road wreck in desperate need of career rehab: He’s logged more than 40 years of steady work in a notoriously fickle business without a single detour into tabloid hell. But the comparison is irresistible, because Crazy Heart is a low-budget, end-of-year release that came out of nowhere and threw Oscar handicappers into a tizzy by introducing dark horse into the best actor race.

Like The Wrestler, Crazy Heart is a middling movie powered by a stunning performance: Bridges powers through the show-biz clichés and finds the sad, proud, cussed essence of Bad Blake — his soul, if you will. And even the tacked-on kinda/sorta happy ending can’t diminish his accomplishment; stunning though Rourke's performance as Randy "The Ram" Robinson is, Bridges' flawless evocation of the slick delusions and ragged charm of a self-destructive has-been is more impressive still. Rourke, after all, has been there. Bridges, a Hollywood kid (his father was '50s TV star Lloyd Bridges) who earned his first Oscar nomination at 22 and is, at the age of 60, doing consistently better work than Robert De Niro, Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman, is faking it with such complete conviction that if you didn’t know who he was, you’d take him for the real thing.

Which is, of course, what acting is all about… oh, and did I mention that Bridges can sing? Not like a classically trained vocalist, but like the guy who could find the everyday poetry in those pitch-perfect pastiches by Stephen Bruton, T-Bone Burnett and alt-country rocker Ryan Bingham and sell it without breaking a sweat. The scene in which Bridges and Farrell effortlessly wrap an arena full of country-pop fans around their fingers with an "impromptu" duet on the Bad Blake standard "Fallin' and Flyin'" stands on its own merits; it flawlessly captures the electric moment when an audience suddenly hears a song that was a hit before their mothers were born as though it were vividly, thrillingly new. When you know it was shot in less than 15 minutes before a pack of Toby Keith fans waiting for their idol to take the stage, well, you just about have to stand up and salute.

So, hell, put my name on the "Jeff Bridges deserves a damned Oscar" petition. Crazy Heart may not be a great movie, but without Bridges it would be a Hallmark Hall of Fame trifle.

Newly graduated from college with less-than-stellar grades, Harpreet Singh Bedi (Saawariya star Kapoor) figures he should be able to make a tidy living in sales. He may be a bit of a party animal and a slacker, but Singh also owes everything to the grandfather (Chopra) who raised and supported him, and intends to pay it back. And Singh is the consummate people person — how can he fail?

Let us count the ways: Singh may be a natural-born salesman, but the casually corrupt ways of his first job, at AYS (“At Your Service”) computer sales is an eye opener: It’s all bribes and lies and vicious backbiting, which doesn’t sit well with him. Singh may be a bit of a party animal, but his grandfather’s Sikh faith is no joke to him: Singh is at heart a moral man… but not too moral. When Singh realizes he’s never going to get anywhere working for the ruthless Mr. Puri (Chaudhary), whose management style is pure reign of terror, he recruits three other unhappy employees — socially inept tech wizard Giri (Santosh); ambitious Koena (Khan), whose beauty dooms her to being a decorative receptionist; and put-upon tea-boy Chotelal (Bhatt), who can’t believe he’s actually being treated like a human being — and forms his own company, Rocket Sales Corporation, named for the paper airplanes his spiteful coworkers lob at him. Singh’s brilliant business plan boils down to this: Rocket will provide 24/7 customer support for the computers it sells. Eureka!

Singh soon has an adorable girlfriend, graphic designer Shereena (Padamsee), and has added both his grandpa and AYS sales manager Nitin Rathore (Kaushik), who’s not as Glenngarry Glen Ross as he initially appears, to the payroll. Rocket is a success, which means that the ruthless Puri is forced to take notice of his upstart competitor. And once he does, Rocket’s days are numbered.

Everything comes up roses in the breezy Rocket Singh, but not before Harpreet and his friends have been hauled through the fire: Rocket Singh is a fairy tale. but it's a bittersweet fairy tale that demands real sacrifice before the happily ever aftering can commence.

Peter Jackson seemed the perfect director to adapt Alive Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, a story of murder and what comes after that’s narrated by a dead girl trapped in the pretty prison of an afterworld that lies somewhere between where she was and where she’s going. Think back past the epic Lord of the Rings films to Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, a richly imagined story of two adolescent girls caught in a poisonous plasticine fantasy world conjured from their half-formed fantasies. Perfect! And yet The Lovely Bones is sadly inert. The story shuttles back and forth between a placid 1970s suburbia and an afterlife that looks disconcerting like the cover of a Yes album; both are bloodless, all look and no vitality.

Fourteen-year-old Susie “like the fish” Salmon (Ronan) dies on December 6, 1973, raped, murdered and dismembered by George Harvey (Tucci), the creepy neighbor every picture-perfect small town and suburb seems to have. It takes her a while to realize what’s happened; briefly baffled, she flees the cornfield where she died and can’t fathom why no one can see or hear her. But once Susie understands and accepts her state — she’s disembodied but stranded somewhere between life and afterlife — she takes a keen interest in the ongoing travails of her family and friends.

Despite the best efforts of local cop Len Fenerman (Imperioli), Susie’s body is never found, though her bedraggled cap — a godforsaken thing knitted by her mother, Abigail (Weisz) — turns up in a nearby field. It becomes gradually, painfully clear that body or no body, Susie is almost certainly dead, though it’s the almost that torments everyone who knew her. Susie’s father, Jack (Wahlberg), is obsessed with finding his little girl’s killer even as he tries to cling to the hope that she’s alive; his fixation eventually drives Abigail to abandon her family and retreat into a soul-searching sojourn on a hippie-dippy commune. Abigail’s hard-drinking, open-minded mother (Sarandon) tries to step in, but nurturing was clearly never her bag. Susie fades to near abstraction for baby brother Buckley (Ashdale), but Lindsey (McIver), who grew up in Susie’s shadow, is determined to find her sister’s killer… and she has a hunch about Harvey. Susie’s friend Clarissa (Michalka), who sometimes vaguely feels her presence, begins dating Jake (Nelson), the dishy Brit on whom Susie had her first and only crush.

First and foremost, The Lovely Bones rests on Ronan’s shoulders, and she’s more than up to the challenge: Her performance is the single best thing about the film. Ronan overlays the awkwardness of a sheltered teenager with the devastating weariness of someone who knows that all possibility is behind her. Dead Susie is all she’ll ever be, and the only way she can remain connected to her cruelly truncated life is by watching other lives go on.

Unfortunately, Ronan is hemmed in at every turn by the kitschy afterlife in which she’s trapped. It’s perfectly reasonable that Susie’s imagination, which shapes her limbo, would be shaped by kitschy ‘70s design. But the specificity of the movie’s set design drags Sebold’s ethereal in-between world down to earth with a crashing thud; Ronan’s pitch-perfect voice-over narration is regularly undermined by the goofy landscape she inhabits, even if it is populated by other girls murdered by sex fiends, some even younger that Susie. The whole thing recalls the tacky afterlives of 1998’s What Dreams May Come, a simplistic and painfully unconvincing fable about love’s power to overcome all.

Jackson and screenwriters Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh — Walsh is Jackson’s wife and both women are his longtime collaborators — are nothing if not decorous; there’s no salaciousness in Susie’s death and no morbid fascination with the minutia of Harvey’s psychosis. All of which is entirely reasonable: The Lovely Bones isn’t voyeuristic serial-killer porn. But the film’s relentless good taste renders it dull and hollow; Susie might as well be away at summer camp, and that absence of tragic resonance robs the story of its thorny, haunting heart. To hear the voice of a dead teenager, a girl whose life was brutally ended before it had a chance to start, blithely nattering about the day-to-day affairs of the living should fray your last nerve. But even Ronan’s considerable skills can’t trump CGI’s power to render everything false and inconsequential, and more’s the pity.

2008
Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow.
Written by: Mark Boal.
With: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse and Guy Pearce.

Kathryn Bigelow’s timely, defiantly personal war movie, written by journalist Mark Boal (whose 2004 Playboy article “Death and Dishonor” inspired In the Valley of Elah), is a vivid, pitiless, ensemble portrait of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Squad that neither glorifies nor vilifies men simultaneously hooked on war's adrenaline rush and painfully aware that their addiction will poison the dream of going home that's keeping them alive.

The year is 2004, the place is Baghdad and the men of Delta Company have one mission: To defuse IEDs for another 38 days without blowing themselves to bloody bits. Bigelow and Boal’s narrative strategy is to stay close to the ground; There are no scenes in which high-level military strategists discuss geopolitical big picture, no nods to civilian analysts parsing the causes and consequences of America's military presence in Iraq. The Hurt Locker is all about the now: These men, this day, this street and that suspicious vehicle or pile of rubble pierced by a suspicious wire. Living to see another day hinges on cutting one wire rather than another, or recognizing which local shopkeeper is using his cell phone to let his wife know he’ll be late for dinner and which is about to detonate a bomb.

Just so you know they’re serious, the filmmakers pull a Psycho early on, casually blowing up an above-the-title actor before getting down to the story proper, which involves the integration of new Staff Sergeant William James (Renner) into the tight-knit ranks of Delta Company. James is a loose cannon who never met an explosive device he didn’t want to seduce and destroy, while methodical Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Mackie) pins his hopes of making it home alive on procedure and protocols, while high-strung Specialist Owen Eldridge (Geraghty) is slowly strangling on his own terror and the exhausting effort of concealing it.

In outline, this sounds like some cliched WWII drama, but Renner, Mackie and Geraghty infuse their characters with seething, unpredictable life: Yes, James is trailer trash with predictably messy personal problems and an XYY-jock’s addiction to danger. But just when you think you have him pegged he goes left when he should have gone right. James, Eldridge and Sanborn are types without being stereotypes, predictable right up until the moment they aren’t just as The Hurt Locker is a white-knuckle action movie until the moment it shifts imperceptibly into psychological drama.

Bigelow first gained attention as a woman who directs action like a man (and t didn’t hurt that she was smart and beautiful into the bargain), but her skill with actors comes to the fore in Hurt Locker, starting with the casting of the pudding-faced Renner: He’s done work as good before (notably in the title role in 2002’s little-seen Dahmer), but the high-profile Hurt Locker put him front and center in a role that showed just how much he could do with no apparent effort. With any luck, Mackie and Geraghty — two equally fine actors who’ve spent years in supporting roles in which their looks counted for more than their abilities — will also benefit. The irony, of course, is that part of what makes their performances so powerful is their relative anonymity; they could easily be real soldiers, a perception enhanced by Barry (United 93) Ackroyd’s you-are-there photography.

That said, even better-known actors with distinctive faces — Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes, Robert Morse — are absorbed into Bigelow’s ground-level vision of war. Criticism that Bigelow and Boal’s relentless focus on the feverish intensity of living with constant danger and the rush that comes from beating the odds is as misguided as reading the movie’s “war is a drug” tagline as an endorsement: The Hurt Locker is about addiction, not partying, pathological maintenance, not good times. James isn’t better than the others because he admits that he’s hooked on the thrill and unfit for peacetime life. He’s just more overtly damaged: Sanborne and Eldridge live for the hope that they’ll make it home, and be able to reclaim not just their old lives, but the old selves who used to live them.

Jason Reitman's bitterly funny Up in the Air, adapted from the novel by Walter Kirn, rests on the shoulders of George Clooney, who lends his considerable charisma to the charming but loathsome "termination facilitator" Ryan Bingham, who shatters lives with an air of practiced camaraderie then hops the next plane out of town.

Bingham is the organization man par excellence, a sleek, rootless corporate fast-gun whose life is built on freedom from excess baggage. Bingham loves the anonymity of airport hotels and the promise of gates and jetways, the restless movement and the comfort of crowds. All the material things he needs fit into one rolling suitcase; his emotional ties... well, he's pared them all away: His parents are dead, he's never been married or had children, he politely ignores his sisters and their families and keeps his love life strictly utilitarian. His ideal woman is fellow traveler Alex "think of me as you with a vagina." Goran (Farmiga), whose idea of commitment is scheduling the next smoking-hot rendezvous in an anonymous airport hotel. Bingham's holy grail is the 10 million frequent-flyer miles that will elevate him to super-deluxe, elite passenger status.

When Bingham isn't firing shell-shocked workers with polished platitudes — "Everyone who's ever changed the world or founded an empire has sat where you're sitting," he purrs, deflecting fears of penury and humiliation with the assurance that the one-size-fits-all severance packet contains all the information the newly unemployed need to make lemonade from lemons — he's polishing the motivational shtick he hopes will make him rich and famous. "How much does your life weigh," his rap begins, as he hefts a metaphorically freighted backpack. Friends, family, homes and keepsakes, Bingham says, are the deadwood that keep us from achieving our full potential. Empty the backpack of your life and the possibilities are endless.

Bingham's rude awakening comes in the form of fresh-faced go-getter Natalie Keener (Kendrick), who?s convinced his boss (Bateman) that the future of firing is teleconferencing. Goodbye travel expenses, per diems and hotel bills; Bingham and his fellow high-flying hatchet men can park their suitcases and work out of the home office in Denver. Of course, for all her pluck and book smarts, Keener lacks field experience — she?s never sat across a table from someone whose years of acquired experience, loyalty and hard work have just evaporated in the face of restructuring, right-sizing or outsourcing. Which is why Bingham is assigned to spend his last footloose and fancy-free days teaching her the ropes.

Reitman's gift is that he can turn bitter, unpalatable material into mainstream movies fodder without stripping away the bite; Thank You For Smoking (2005) and Juno (2007) could be tougher, but they could also be feel-good Hollywood pablum or indie darlings that play a handful of markets and vanish into the home-entertainment morass. Up in the Air is hugely entertaining: Clooney, Farmiga and Kendrick, a relative newcomer whose precocious resume includes a Tony Award nomination at age 12, have the kind of sparkling chemistry that makes narrative twists go down like caviar chased with perfectly dry champagne.

But there's an underlying weight, and it's more than fortuitous timing — if you can use the word "fortuitous" in connection with Up in the Air's opening in the middle of a major economic meltdown that's left almost 25,000,000 Americans un- or under-employed. Reitman's decision to cast real, recently unemployed people as a Greek chorus gives the film a poignant weight. Their improvised scenes seethe with emotionally stunning shock, fear, despair and anger that cuts through reality-TV induced cynicism and cuts right to the bone.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon hits the ground running, secure in the knowledge that Twi-hard fans are in the house and don't need to be brought up to speed.

It's moody high school senior Bella Swan's (Stewart) 18th birthday, and she's in a funk. Where other girls would be kicking up their heels at having achieved legal majority, Bella is torturing herself with dreams in which she's a withered old hag, standing hand in hand with her preternaturally beautiful boyfriend, Edward (Pattinson). After all, she's a now officially a whole year older than he is. In Bella's defense, a morbid preoccupation with aging comes with dating a 109-year-old vampire who's forever 17, the age at which her beloved Edward died and was reborn into undeath.

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Allow me to begin by saying I have little patience for Wes Anderson’s twee tales of love and pain among the adorably quirky, and less for Noah Baumbach’s mewling chronicles of brittle, self-absorbed brattiness. And yet I loved Fantastic Mr. Fox, their sly, witty and utterly enchanting adaptation of Roald Dahl’s mordantly whimsical book.

Though faithful to Dahl’s sensibility, Anderson and Baumbach’s screenplay expands on his slight story, which begins with the raffish Mr. Fox (voice of Clooney) and his free-spirited girlfriend (Streep) conducting a daring raid on a squab farm, only to be tripped up by Mr. Fox’s reckless bravado. “I’m pregnant,” announces the future Mrs. Fox as the iron bars of a ridiculously avoidable trap crash down and her cocky swain assesses the umpteenth fine mess he’s gotten them into.

Seven years later, Mr. Fox has made good on the promise he made that day: He’s abandoned the thieving life to write a frivolous newspaper column no one reads and a life of shabby contentment in the modest but homey burrow the Foxes share with their cub, Ash (Schwartzman). But Mr. Fox pines for days when the world respected his wildness; he secretly thrills to the memory of local lads whispering conspiratorially about Mrs. Fox’s racy reputation and wishes his sullen, perpetually seething son were a little less klutzy comic-book geeky and a little more effortlessly cool. Since none of that is going to happen, he channels his discontents into real estate. Mr. Fox no longer wants to live in a hole in the ground and moves his family — temporarily expanded to accommodate Kristofferson (Eric Chase Anderson, Wes' baby brother), the handsome, spiritually enlightened, athletic vixen-magnet of a nephew, whose dad is hospitalized with double pneumonia — to a handsome aerie in a capacious beech that overlooks lush fields, rolling hills and the walled fiefdoms of the meanest farmers in Christendom: Portly poultry magnate Walter Boggis (Hurlstone), stunted smoked-duck mogul Nathan Bunce (Guinness) and lean, mean cider czar Franklin Bean (Gambon).

Mr. Fox inevitably feels the cold breath of mortality on his handsome tail and concocts a plan to savor the buzz one last time: Abetted by natural-born sidekick Kylie (Wolodarsky), a possum with a heart of gold and a disconcerting hypnovision stare, Mr. Fox plots a series of raids on the Boggis, Bunce and Bean farms, the one last score that will ease him into comfortably numb retirement. And just as inevitably, things don’t go as planned: The thuggish Bean rallies his neighbors to mount a full-out assault on the insolent creatures who dare invade their homes and barns, and Mr. Fox must face the fact that his devil-may-care irresponsibility has endangered not only his own nearest and dearest but the entire animal community, from badger to beaver to bunny, mole and weasel.

Fantastic Mr. Fox’s aesthetic is rooted in Beatrix Potter’s deceptively bucolic yarns (like Mr. Fox, Squirrel Nutkin and the Fierce Bad Rabbit sacrifice their tails to impudence) by way of Nick Park’s cheekily eccentric Wallace & Gromit films. It’s impressively handmade and soothingly tactile; Fox and his friends have the air of old nursery-room toys come to life, which ought to be a little scary (I’m sure I wasn’t the only child who carefully secured certain dolls and stuffed animals before going to bed) but instead feels sweetly reassuring. Yes, toys do wake up at night, but they simply go about their business, reading newspapers, eating dinner and playing little games of oneupmanship amongst themselves. There are no ambiguously sinister teddy bears’ picnics here, only Willem Defoe voicing a southern-fried Richard Widmark of a rat, Brian Cox mouthing the urgent cliches of a local you-are-there! TV reporter and Owen Wilson ambling through the inanities of every middle-school gym coach who unerringly said the wrong thing every single time. Mr. Fox gamely straightens his spine and throws back his shoulders to deliver inspirational speeches, handy summations (“He redeemed himself!") and pithy pronouncements with the self-deprecating panache of a dab hand who knows you get it but is nonetheless contractually obligated to dot and cross the thematic “i”s and “t”s. A spoonful of insouciance not only helps the medicine go down but lends it a cheerful “Hey, we’re all in this together” offhandedness.

Children can delight in the movie’s whimsical conceits (like the meticulously engineered blueberry sedatives that neutralize the farmers’ hell hounds), identify with Ash’s insecurities and giggle at the anarchic sight of debonair Mr. Fox suddenly ripping into his dinner with the restraint of a starving shoat at an all-you-can-at trough or literally baring his fangs during a dispute with Badger (Murray), his relentlessly sensible lawyer. Mr. Fox’s reason for moving — living below street level makes him feel poor — is designed to resonate with the big kids, but think back — how young were you when you grasped the semiotics of lunch-bag snacks? Oreos cool, Hydrox (or worse, generic sandwich cookies) not. Like all the best children’s tales, Fantastic Mr. Fox’s charms are less timeless than disconcertingly mutable.

Richard Matheson's short story "Button, Button" is just the jumping off point for Richard Kelly's The Box, a convoluted moral thriller that gets off to a terrifically eerie start but collapses beneath the weight of its Big Ideas.

December 1976, Richmond, Virginia. The Lewises appear to be living the American dream: They're young and attractive; they have a lovely home and a bright, inquisitive teenaged son named Walter (Stone). Arthur (Marsden) works at NASA's Langley Research Center, where he helped design the cameras used in the Viking Mars missions, Norma (Diaz), teaches literature at the exclusive Libby Hill Academy. They're liked and admired by their family, neighbors and colleagues.

Unlike David DeCoteau’s cheerfully voyeuristic erotic horror movies, which are all about cute, hunky werewolf/warlock/vampire-boys boys vogueing in their underpants, Patrick McGuinn and Andre Salas’ Eulogy for a Vampire is dead serious. Unfortunately, the more serious it tries to be, the camper it becomes.

Twenty-five years ago, Anthony (Hand) murdered the handsome fellow novitiate who broke off their fledgling affair in favor of more spiritual love, and hid his body in a trunk in the basement of the abbey where both hoped to spend their lives.

Now Abbott Anthony heads the cloistered order whose monks live simple lives devoted to prayers, chores, hot sex and more scheming, gossip and backbiting bitchery than any three snooty sororities combined. Gutted animal carcasses that have begun appearing on the abbey grounds, but the Abbott dismisses them as the work of naughty local schoolboys. Other members of the community aren’t so sure; Father Lars (the unfortunately named McWeeney) seems especially worried that something wicked is coming their way.

Could the wickedness be Sebastian (Tursi), a handsome drifter the monks take in after they discover him asleep on the grounds? The grateful Sebastian, who claims to have no memory of who he is or where he came from, attempts to repay their kindness by adopting the brothers’ simple way of life. But his hot body and air of mystery incite lust in every heart… except that of Abbot Arthur, who’s troubled by the nagging feeling that he’s met this young stranger before.

When various brothers begin looking peaked and acting strangely, Father Lars worries that there’s “some kind of flu going around,” but no one who’s ever seen a horror movie will take long to figure out that an is the vampire reincarnation of the Abbott's Arthur’s murdered love, or that he’s out to bring down the house of pious hypocrites, one broken vow at a time. So the movie lives on dies on how hot you find the various erotic sequences, which range from bucolic skinny dipping and frantic underwear sniffing to orgasmic flogging and fairly graphic soft-core grappling. But with hardcore porn available at the click of a mouse, it’s hard to imagine a substantial audience for such modest thrills, especially when you have to sit through long “dramatic” sequences to get to them.

None of the attractive hardbodies who dominate the cast can make a line like “I didn’t know monks had boyfriends or smoked” sound anything but petulantly hilarious, least of all doe-eyed Ruiz, who plays honest and open-hearted novitiate Rafael. But then again, who could?

Turning Maurice Sendak's 1963 Where the Wild Things Ar into a feature film was no easy matter: The story of a angry, frustrated five-year-old Max, who channels his impotent fury at grown up rules and restrictions into a brief fantasy of being king of monster island, is psychologically potent but short on incident and dialogue — the building blocks of movie narrative. The wild things are grotesque, adult sized creatures and Max, a young child, is the lynchpin of every scene. The obvious answer is animation, but co-writer/director Spike Jonze opted for live action and, further, resisted what could only have been significant pressure to make the creatures cute and Max sweet and misunderstood: No major studio goes out looking to sink millions into a children’s movie that will make many parents uneasy. Given all that, Where the Wild Things Are is an admirably intelligent, serious film… and yet I find it curiously unengaging.

Ten-year-old Max (Recods) hates his life: His father is absent, his mother (Keener) harried and overworked and his beloved older sister (Emmerichs) lost in teenaged interests that leave little time for baby brothers. At the end of a bad day that includes a boisterous snowball fight with his sister’s friends that starts out anarchic fun and ends in tears, overhearing his mother engrossed in adult conversation with her new boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo) and an escalating pre-dinner tantrum during which he bites his mother, Max — wearing only a scruffy, one-piece wolf costume — runs away and hides in a vacant, overgrown lot on the banks of a muddy stream. As he seethes at the injustice of everything, Max spies a small boat and embarks on a journey that takes him to the island of the wild things.

They’re huge and funny looking, with great claws and teeth, and Max arrives as Carol (Gandolfini), the wildest of the wild things, is smashing his own village like a petulant child. As the rest of the tribe — patient Douglas (Cooper), Carol’s best friend; silent Bull (Berry Jr.); old-married couple Judith and Ira (O'Hara, Whitaker) and their insecure son, Alexander (Dano) — watch from a safe distance. Max recklessly declares himself king, who take surprisingly well to the idea: It turns out that they want a grown-up hand to impose order and curb their wayward impulses without spoiling their fun. And for a while Max can do no wrong: He encourages roughhousing yet tames Carol, hurls himself into the “wild rumpus” but also masterminds the communal construction of a fabulous fort . Even designated wet blanket Judith and sullen KW (Ambrose) — who’s been awaymaking fabulous new friends who are better in every way than her tribe — come around to the boastful stripling. But in the end, they’re wild things and Max is a boy who needs to go home.

Though Jonze and his co-writer, novelist Eggars (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) set out to tell a story about the dark and side of childhood (not a children’s story), they’re admirably fair to the grown-up world. Max’s mother, whose new boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo) is the catalyst for Max’s ultimate meltdown, remains supportive, attentive and loving despite being pressed on all sides but loving and supportive. Max, by contrast, clingy, sulky, self-centered and demanding — authentically childish traits he shares with the wild things. It all makes perfect psychological sense… too much sense; Where the Wild Things Are has the air of a role-playing exercise from which Max learns to identify behavioral patterns and acknowledge responsibility for his own actions. You can see it sparking all kinds of useful conversations between parents and children, but it’s sorely earthbound (starting with the awkward costumes worn by the actors playing the wild things), lacking in the mercurial magic of a genuinely childlike imagination

Sendak’s book says less (far less) and implies more; it’s evocative rather than didactic and consequently far more haunting: Children can revel in its straightforward anarchy and fill the wordless pages with their own inner, while adults can revisit secret childhood sorrows while filtering them through the prism of experience. Both the book and the film come to the same conclusion as The Wizard of Oz — there’s no place like home — but the film too-often feels studied and over-thought, homework rather than a satisfying flight of fancy.

U.K. novelist Darren Shan's hugely popular, twelve-book series about an ordinary adolescent who discovers his extraordinary destiny at a macabre traveling show makes its first (and probably last) screen appearance in Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, a colossal bore of a teen fantasy movie.

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Veteran TV director Nelson McCormick's The Stepfather is a serviceable remake of the 1987 thriller about a would-be family man whose dreams are repeatedly crushed by willful women and wayward children who just won't act right.

Carefully scrubbed of all but the most sanitized violence in the name of securing a PG-13 rating, the movie begins as Grady Edwards (Walsh, of TV's Nip/Tuc) meticulously alters his appearance before gathering his luggage and leaving the suburban Salt Lake City home where a woman and three children lie dead among the festive Christmas decorations and never-to-be unwrapped packages.

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Parents of nightmare-prone youngsters would do well to steer them away from Shane Acker's bleak animated fable 9, which unfolds in an all too convincingly dystopian future where machines have annihilated the human race.

9 (Wood) — a mute, burlap homunculus with sophisticated camera-lens eyes — wakes up in the dusty attic of an abandoned building in a field of rubble with no idea who, what or where he is. A fortuitous encounter with 2 (Landau), a puppet creature like himself, gives 9 some sense of the ravaged world around him. But before he can fill 9 in on the history of how things came to such a dismal pass, he's snatched up in the jaws of a skeletal metal monster and borne off to some no-doubt dreadful fate…

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A Franken-fright flick cobbled together from chunks of Battlestar Galactica, The Descent, Serenity, Cube, Resident Evil, Event Horizon and, of course, Alien, German director Christian Alvart's Pandorum is an efficient scare machine as long as you can ignore the naked contrivances required to keep the cogs turning.

The year: 2174. Having overpopulated the Earth, mankind builds a massive ark called Elysium and points it toward a distant planet called Tanis that appears miraculously fit for human habitation. Its precious cargo: 60,000 soldiers, scientists and regular folks, most of whom will dream away the flight in hypersleep tubes while rotating skeleton crews keep the Elysium on course and running.

Fast-forwarding now, Corp. Bower (Foster) and Lt. Payton (Quaid) wake up with their skin peeling off in ghastly white strips, their memories riddled with holes and their heads full of questions. Where are they? How long have they been asleep? Why is it so damned dark? How come the door to their hypersleep chamber is locked tight and scarred with scratches? Why do the ship's systems keep coming on with a nerve-jangling jolt, then shutting down again? And where's Cooper, the missing third member of their team, who's neither in his sleep tube nor anywhere in the sealed room? For that matter, where is everybody. Continue reading review.

(2009)
Directed by: Stewart Hendler.

Written by: Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger, based on the original screenplay Seven Sisters, by Mark Rosman.
With: Leah Pipes, Rumer Willis, Jamie Chung, Margo Harshman Audrina Patridge, Matt O'Leary, Julian Morris, Caroline D'Amore and Carrie Fisher.

Welcome to Skank Ho sorority, the pride of No-Name University, in the middle of Anywheresville, USA! In keeping with the proud tradition of the Greek system, you and your sisters will make connections, form lasting friendships and help one another learn skills that will stand you in good stead throughout your lives, including how to make a drunken spectacle of yourself at parties, shower in full make up, screw your shrink for prescription meds, bare your boobs at every opportunity, humiliate lesser girls and cover up mistakes that might tarnish your bright future. Like, say, the grotesque death of a dear friend during a mean-spirited prank.

A streak of genius runs through Crank auteurs Mark Nevaldine and Brian Taylor's dystopian vision of a world in which virtual reality games are played with real people: In Gamer, the titular characters pull the strings of flesh-and-blood avatars who do their bidding, no matter how dangerous or perverse. In the end the Taylor and Nevaldine opt for the obvious, but let's give credit where credit is due: These lads touch a while lot of nerves before they retreat into generic cliches.

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