And here's your spoiler warning. Spoilers ahead!

So in Avatar, Jake Sully is a marine who's suffered a spinal injury (someone "blew a hole in my life," as he puts it) and his life is going nowhere. Until he gets a chance to go to the far-off Pandora and take his dead brother's place, piloting a genetically engineered "avatar." Built out of alien DNA, the avatar allows Sully to walk among the Na'Vi, the giant blue natives of Pandora, and look like one of them. Because Sully is a warrior, like the Na'Vi tribespeople, he finds acceptance in their ranks — even as he knows his fellow humans are preparing to relocate the Na'Vi by force, to get at a rich supply of a rare substance called Unobtanium.

As Jake learns to use his new alien body, leaping from treetops and clifftops, romancing the chief's sexy daughter (Zoe Saldana) and bonding with a flying dragon for life, you'll discover your new favorite escapist fantasy. Jake falls in love with the excitement and the nobility and yes, the biodiversity, of Pandora, and you're right there with him. Avatar's journey really does feel magical and transformative, for Jake and for the audience.

It's hard to imagine a movie where medium and story are so closely married. Even as Jake Sully climbs into a coffin and abandons his human body for a spry alien one, Cameron is hoping to pull you into his alien world to a much greater degree than the usual movie immersion. Cameron has spent untold millions of Fox's dollars to make you forget you're really in a movie theater, instead of on an alien planet. The whole exercise is a metaphor for the experience of watching any movie, with Cameron's camera lens represented by the beds that transfer people's minds into alien bodies.

And the film's 3-D, CG and motion-capture really are all they're cracked up to be. The scenes which look trifling on your little computer window become etched on your mind's eye, when you see them on the big screen in 3-D. The transition from live-action to animation feels like a costume change, and when live-action people are on the screen with CG characters, it's miles away from Roger Rabbit, or even from Andy Serkis' Gollum.

Cameron is clearly saying: Look what technology can do. It can tight-beam your consciousness into a totally foreign time and place. And just maybe, like Jake Sully, you'll find yourself going native.

There's only one problem with this notion, and it nearly wrecks an otherwise nearly perfect movie: The further we venture into Pandora's heart, the more unconvincing it is. At first, the forest moon is heart-breakingly beautiful and well-realized, and every weird creature on the planet stands out in its own way. When Jake gets chased by big dinosaur-like monsters, it's tons more thrilling than your standard Roland Emmerich/Michael Bay CG spectacle. But once Jake gets himself embedded among the alien Na'Vi people, the illusion starts to fall apart.

This is partly because once you're surrounded by Pandora's fantasy-land, it starts to get just a bit too pretty, and certainly too rich. About the time hundreds of glowing tree-spirits land on Jake's blue avatar body, the animation starts to feel a bit... cartoony.

But more than that, we never really see the Na'Vi as a convincing society — instead we see a ludicrous "noble savage" stereotype, that only gets cruder and more ridiculous the deeper into it we go. When Jake is only interacting with Saldana's character, Neytiri, their interaction feels natural enough. But once you're in the middle of a Na'Vi crowd scene, you have a harder time believing in these people. And that, in turn, may pull you right out of the movie.

Cameron has clearly thought endlessly about every aspect of this movie's worldbuilding, but it never seems to have occurred to him that populating his planet with Pocohontas/Tarzan ooga-booga people would be a mistake. The Na'Vi are animalistic and in tune with nature, and they're good-hearted in direct proportion to their simplicity. They worship a mystical world-mind and its messengers, magic happy tree spirits that connect them to their ancestors — through their magical native-people hair. (Their tree/ancestor religion turns out to have a scientific basis, to be fair.)

By the time the Na'Vi's matriarch is leading the whole tribe in a hippie ritual, with lots of swaying in front of the sacred tree, you'll be rolling your eyes so much, it may interfere with the 3-D stereoscopy.

(When I mentioned the term "forest moon" a little while ago, it may have created an association in your mind. That association was not entirely unintentional.)

In a way, Cameron's strengths work against him a little bit here. The humans' world feels completely lived-in. Pandora's soldiers could have stepped right out of the first reel of Aliens. Cameron is in love with all of the toys, from the Huey-helicopter-inspired flying machines to the "avatar" chambers. His human characters are mostly well-worn archetypes, from the weaselly evil corporate guy (Giovanni Ribisi, channeling Aliens' Paul Reiser) to Stephen Lang's brutal Col. Quaritch (bringing the George C. Scott) to Sigourney Weaver's tough scientist with a heart of gold. The human world isn't as original as Pandora, but it feels a lot more fully inhabited. The contrast doesn't do the dragon-riding, hissing, deeply spiritual tree people any favors.

It's likely that if the Na'Vi felt as real as the human society — if you could feel the dirt under your fingernails after a day's bow-hunting and chafe under the patriarchal tribal leadership — then the escapism of running off to join the clan might not seem as alluring. In his earlier movies, Cameron never had to try and make us fall in love with Skynet, or the Alien queen. So it's not surprising that he stumbles when he tries to create an "other" that's lovable rather than scary.

The movie's other big problem is somewhat related: It gets preachy about environmentalism, to an extent that may grate on your nerves. Early on, when Jake is learning about the nature-loving ways of the Na'Vi, he grumbles that he hopes this "tree-hugger crap" won't be on the final exam. And it totally is.

But like I said, Avatar is otherwise a nearly perfect movie. (It's up to you whether stereotypical native peoples or eco-lectures are a deal-breaker.) As an action-adventure movie, it's vastly superior to pretty much any you've seen in the past few years. As science fiction, it's thrilling, because it's pro-exploration and its most unambiguously heroic character is Weaver's character, Dr. Grace Augustine. It shouldn't feel so refreshing, to have a smart, heroic scientist whose scientific explanations are cool and important to the movie, but it is. Weaver has lost none of her fire, and is a joy to watch.

Sam Worthington, as Jake, does a great job of selling his slow transformation from cynical wise-ass human to a warrior of the Na'Vi people, without overplaying it. Worthington has that rare gift, of seeming totally down-to-Earth even when he's in the middle of a totally outlandish scene, and it keeps him completely relatable even as he's embracing a totally alien culture. He really does carry the movie, in both his human and alien bodies.

And you have to admire a movie whose central message is that only by becoming a wholly artificial life form can you touch something true and natural. This contradiction is at the heart of the movie — a luddite fable made with technology so advanced, Cameron had to create it from scratch.

Cameron deliberately avoids any of the usual cop-outs you'd see with this kind of story. The natives know from the first time they lay eyes on Jake that he's a "dream walker" (their word for alien meat-puppets operated by sleeping humans. And they call humans the "sky people.") When they come to accept Jake as one of them, it's with the knowledge that he's actually a tiny pink-skin in a tank somewhere. And the movie's arc isn't the standard one, of Jake realizing that he's "really" a human and should stop trying to pretend to be one of the aliens. Rather, becoming a genetically engineered, and hence synthetic, creature allows Jake to discover who he really is.

So, to sum up, everything you've heard or thought about Avatar is true. It's one of the most vivid, visceral movies you've ever seen. It's cheesy enough for ten Swiss villages. It's James Cameron delivering an action thrill ride, at the top of his game. It's a schlocky Dances With Wolves rip-off. It will transform the way you think about movies forever.

As with LOTR, Peter Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's Bones is the sum of its aesthetic choices, times the auteur's vision. Jackson brings a vibrant surrealism and suspense to the adaptation, and it says a lot that he chose Brian Eno to do the music for it. Spoilers below.

The Lovely Bones is the story of young Susie Salmon, who's murdered by a serial killer, and who then observes the aftermath as a ghost. A girl in her early teens, Susie is compellingly played by the luminous Saoirse Ronan. She observes the grief of her family, and their floundering responses as the police consider every possible suspect but the right one; she experiences an afterlife that seems a strangely logical mix of its own rules and her internal world. (In places it's a little like a subtler version of What Dreams May Come, without the philosophy-and without a Cuba Gooding, Jr). She resists complete absorption into the next world, drawn back to psychically finger the residue of her own uncompleted life.

The novel's story is told by the murdered girl. In the book, Susie says: "My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my dad talked to him once about fertilizer." This voice, as voice-over, usually simple, sometimes penetrating, neatly interlaces and tightens the film's narration. The use of voiceover is famously a cinematic bugaboo, a chain holding many films back - it mars Kubrick's otherwise brilliant film noir, The Killing - but occasionally it can work, and here's the occasion. Saoirse Ronan's voiceover brings the first-person voice of the novel into the film, so that we feel haunted by her as we watch events unfold. Jackson uses the voiceover just enough, and in just the right places.

We know early on - as in the novel - that Susie Salmon will be murdered, because she tells us so. But somehow Jackson makes us afraid for her anyway, though her doom is a kind of fait accompli from the first. Jackson stretches out the suspense about who does it for awhile, but by the end of the first act you know it's "Mr. Harvey." The psychopathic Mr Harvey, a predator who can be just charming enough to be well camouflaged, is played with creepy brilliance by Stanley Tucci - you absolutely know that this character is a guy from your neighborhood who's very fussy about his flowers, very punctual, lives alone. You accept that he builds dollhouses - perhaps miniature houses is a better description - as a hobby. And somehow his little quirks quite logically dovetail with the fact that he likes to rape, murder, and dismember young girls. We infer we shouldn't trust people who are too neat, wound too tight, and too charming. Good advice. The scenes where Mr. Harvey stalks Susie, and entraps her in the little pre-adolescent play-chamber he builds, like a dollhouse, under the cornfield - a resonantly symbolic setting - are quite frightening. One knows what will happen, and it doesn't help. Jackson's skills at suspense and the elucidation of fear – the bringing of background fear cracklingly into the foreground, at precisely the right moment - are powerfully in evidence.

The afterlife of The Lovely Bones has its various facets, like the Bible's "many mansions"; there is a kind of dark afterlife bardo feel to part of it, but there's also the freedom of living one's dreams, in a light-hearted way, as a fourteen year old girl. Never forget, when Jackson shows you her afterlife, that it's her afterlife. It's the afterlife of a girl in her early teens. In one segment that might strike some as a bit airyfairy, there is a Little Prince style planet; there are butterflies and teen-fantasy outfits. She even sees herself fleetingly on the cover of a teen magazine. But this isn't your afterlife. It's the afterlife of a girl who had teen heartthrob photos on her bedroom wall. That sequence is not overlong, and it makes sense. And it's just a portion of her life-after-death - other parts are almost Mordor-like; are certainly fraught with symbol and infused with a living presence, so that we're never surprised when it responds to psychological impulses from Susie or the mortal world. The scenes in the Next World are often spectacular - and yet they meld potently with the drama of the mortal world.

Susie's relationship with her father, likably played by Mark Wahlberg, is more powerful than her relationship with her mother - Rachel Weisz—whom we know largely from her grief. Her father is obsessed with finding her killer, and is thoroughly unsuited for it - eventually, spiritually guided by Susie in an understated way, he intuits the killer's identity. When he tries to do something about it, his fury bears bitter fruit, in keeping with the film's theme of acceptance over hatred.

It may be that the second act, at times, doesn't quite cohere, doesn't always lead immaculately into the third. Occasionally it seems episodic. But the film's imagery and characters exert a pull that draws us relentlessly along, and the third act plays out compellingly.

Susie's sister is the one who finds the evidence the blind, flailing adults overlook while Susan Sarandon, as the alcoholic, bohemian grandmother — holds the family together. Chainsmoking, endearingly incompetent , the character is wonderful, completely convincing, and sometimes quite funny. Sarandon may get a best-supporting-actress nomination for this - she simply becomes this woman.

Susie's murder has been with us from the first, in a way, but chronologically it comes right after she meets a stunningly Byronic young immigrant from Britain (reminiscent of the young man the girls love from the Twilight pictures), who might have been her soul-mate... had she not been murdered; had her life, with all its drama and joy, its highs and troughs not been brutally, maddeningly, senselessly and oh-so-pointlessly interrupted. This is one of the film's most poignant throughlines, and provides some of its emotional resolution, in time. Just in time - to rescue an ending that some might find a little unsatisfying.

The film strays in some places from Sebold's narrative, but the end belongs to the novel, a resolution as much emotional as plot-driven. It's a denouement written by an artist, not by a Hollywood screenwriter. There must have been some Suits feeling angst over that ending, when the studio distributors saw it. (I notice they aren't spending a lot of money promoting The Lovely Bones.) Not that it's a bad ending - it's just deep. And they don't like deep. Will they recognize the cunning symbolism of the faces in the dollhouse windows? The little ships suddenly taking shape in the bottles?

I found the ending to be just frustrating enough — about as frustrating as our world is. And it is another example of choices defining an adaptation. Some fans of the book may carp about certain freedoms Jackson took, but most will hopefully see that in this very creative, authoritative film Peter Jackson preserves the characters, the theme, the dread, the delight found in the novel - and has added just enough of his own.

John Shirley's newest novels are Black Glass: The Lost Cyberpunk Novel, and Bleak History

Showing in a few select theaters in the US, House of the Devil has been a word-of-mouth hit since it became available as a view-on-demand download on Amazon last month. It's the simple story of Samantha, a college girl who needs some extra money and answers an ad for a babysitting job. When her friend drops her off at the remote house where she'll be babysitting, a neurotic older man tells her that actually he needs her to take care of his "anti-social" mother-in-law, and offers her $400 to do it. The whole scenario is creepy, and also, did I mention there's an eclipse going on? Yeah.

Directed by Ti West, a veteran of indie productions, the movie is both a sly takeoff on the classic late 70s/early 80s babysitter-in-peril flick (complete with feathered hair, lurid yellow credits and Walkmens), and a stellar entry in the genre. It's also packed with brilliant cult actors Tom Noonan (Synecdoche, New York), Mary Woronov (Eating Raoul, Devil's Rejects) and AJ Bowen (The Signal). Noonan is pitch-perfect as the man who hires Samantha, and Woronov is simply delicious as his regal, fur-clad wife, who makes every sentence she utters seem replete with ironic double-meaning.

What's so wonderful about House of the Devil is the way director West sets the stage for what we know will eventually become a devil-worshiping bloodbath. Everywhere Samantha goes - school, town, a restaurant - seems strangely empty. Filling this absence of people is the music from her Walkman, TV broadcasts about the impending eclipse, and the realistic chatter she shares with her pizza-guzzling friend Megan. West transforms the necessities of low-budget filmmaking into a moody emptiness that sets the perfect surreal tone.

Adding to the surrealism is the fact that none of our characters behave according to the generic scripts handed down to them by decades of trashy Satan movies. Instead of being menacing, Noonan's devil-worshiper is apologetic and uncomfortable. When Samantha is left alone in the house, she accidentally opens the door to the basement, peers inside, and then withdraws immediately. Same goes for the moment when she almost opens the attic room which we already know contains the remains of a family slaughtered in a previous Satanic rite. Instead of doing the expected "going into the dark, scary place" thing, Samantha orders pizza, does her homework, and dances with her Walkman.

Though this movie is scary, I think its main charm isn't an ability to deliver shocks or suspense. Instead, House of the Devil is thrilling because it's such a thoughtful re-imagining of a genre not exactly known for thoughtfulness. West has taken a cheesy story and made it a prickly, intriguing tale of youthful loneliness and paranoia. Even his Satanists are interesting and unexpected.

If there's any flaw in this fantastic film, it's in the final act when the horror we've been waiting for is at last revealed. All the dark, quirky satire is ripped away and we're confronted with something that looks deflatingly like what we expected. But of course this is only disappointing in context, because the rest of the movie surprises us at every turn. And ultimately you can't ask for more than that in a horror movie - cudos to West for doing something genuinely original with a subgenre so cliched it's become a parody of itself.

Whether you love 80s retro or simply crave a cool new cult movie, I can't recommend House of the Devil enough. It just goes to show that in the hands of the right creative team, Satanism never gets old.

via House of the Devil - official site
watch House of the Devil via Amazon

The Road, which opens today, is based on a bleak novel by Cormac McCarthy where a man and his son travel through a world destroyed by a vaguely-explained apocalypse that has covered the planet in a cloud that blocks the sunlight and kills all plant life. Brutal and horrific, it is a story difficult to adapt to film - especially a holiday film. And indeed, the movie has a troubled history for this very reason. Plagued by endless edits, its release was delayed an entire year: Rumor had it that nobody could figure out how to market the damned thing because it was just too grim.

Whatever that editorial tinkering did, it didn't tone down the grimness. The man known only as Papa, played with ragged intensity by Viggo Mortenson, has lost everything - his beautiful country home, his wife (Charlize Theron), and civilization itself. All he has left is his young son. Most of the movie is preoccupied with the awful, starvation-laced journey the two of them take, through dying forests and cannibal ranches, to the southern coast. They're looking for something better than certain death, trying to keep hope alive.

At the heart of every brilliant road movie are finely-drawn characters. The plot arc may be harnessed to their journey, but only as a way to express how the characters' relationships with the world change as they travel. Great road movies like Thelma and Louise or even Wizard of Oz use landscapes and pitstops to foreground human relationships. And that's where The Road falls flat.

Part of the problem with the father/son relationship in this movie is, to be fair, the actor who plays the boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Whiny and cutsey by turns, he looks like he belongs in a remake of Home Alone - not in a barren post-apocalypse eating bugs. More than that, though, the father's love for his boy is simply too exalted, too idealized, to be realistic or even interesting. At one point Papa and the boy share dinner with an old man by the side of the road, and Papa confesses to the man that the boy "is God" to him. The bloated symbolism in this comment masks a basic meaninglessness - the boy is holy, their family relationship is holy, and that drains all the essential human complexity from both of them.

It's fascinating to see the world become an empty vessel, but all The Road pours back into it are hollow truisms. Family is good. Sons are good. Fathers are protectors. There is even a dreadful product-placement scene where man and boy, on the verge of total starvation, find a giant cache of flagrantly branded food items in a bomb shelter. Here we learn that Vitamin Water is good. Cheetos are good. Jack Daniels is good. What's truly grim about this movie isn't imagining the fall of civilization, but instead imagining what would happen if everything in our society evaporated except for families and advertising.

We need desperately to have characters we can relate to in this world where most people have degenerated into cannibalism or worse. And yet there are very few moments in the film where we actually see any kind of realistic ambiguity or subtle characterization. There is one intriguing moment when Papa and boy are robbed while Papa is hunting for food and the boy is sleeping. When they find the robber, Papa forces him to strip and steals all his possessions - just as he did to them. Though Papa wants to teach his boy to be a "good person," we see that circumstances are forcing him to slide into desperate, unforgivable evil. This is also the only time when the boy acts like the preteen he is, violently disagreeing with what his father has done.

To succeed, The Road needed more scenes like this, where its characters break out of the dull molds of Papa Saint and Boy Angel. We needed to know more about why the man knows so much about anatomy and medicine (was he a doctor?), and what motivates him and his son beyond a nearly religious fervor to survive. And why, if they are journeying to the coast to find a better place to live, does the man never attempt to connect with non-dangerous people? The movie gives us a few possible answers to these questions (maybe Papa has gone crazy over the loss of his wife; maybe there are no non-dangerous people) but they are sloppily vague and leave our characters ill-defined throughout the film.

I don't want to make it seem like the problem with the movie is that the characters are minimalistic. There is an elegance to the idea that the need to survive pares everyone down to their most basic selves. But that's not what's going on in The Road. We're not getting minimalism so much as simplistic sentimentality. We learn that children are beautiful, perfect creatures; families are good; and evil is as easily-recognized as cannibalism. Papa and his son remain one-note throughout The Road; instead of developing, they wander from a blandly dismal scenario into a blandly mawkish one.

As I said earlier, the one consistently breathtaking aspect of this film is the landscape where it is set. Father and son walk through grey, empty spaces full of ashy buildings, abandoned trucks, and greenery reduced to sticks. We've seen post-apocalyptic cities done well before, but The Road's true visual genius lies in its majestic substantiation of total environmental collapse. One way the movie is different from the book is that we're fairly sure that the apocalypse was caused by a meteor crashing to Earth (Papa says there was a rumble) - and it's tossed up enough dust to shut out the sunlight. We witness what would happen to Earth's ecosystem without sunlight. Vegetation has become tinder, animals have wasted away, and the only food left is in cans or on the bodies of surviving humans.

What this also means (weirdly) is this stately art movie is echoing the disaster scenario from blow-em-up apocalypse flick 2012. Given the cliched smarminess at the heart of The Road, however, the comparison is all too apt.

Planet 51's tragedy is that it could have been a decent movie. It starts off with a neat premise: on a distant planet, there is an alien civilization that strongly resembles 1950s Americas — right down to everyone speaking English and grooving to The Chordettes. They even have a love for alien invasion movies, and, through a remarkable stroke of coincidence, the scifi franchise du jour is titled Humaniacs and features a monster that looks like an astronaut. Into this world plunges Captain Chuck Baxter, a middling US astronaut who has been sent to explore the planet (which NASA mistakenly believed was uninhabited) and suddenly finds that, on this world, he is the alien. Naturally chaos ensues. The movie also has some endearing and well-animated characters, especially in rock-craving robot Rover, and a Xenomorph-shaped dog that pees acid. The early clips promised a fun, if light, movie filled with cute science fiction references.

The problem is, Planet 51 has no idea what it's precisely about. Sure, it has a plot: a teenager named Lem has to help get Chuck back to his ship and off the planet before the military captures him and removes his brain (and, hopefully, without ruining Lem's life in the process). But it has the feel of a movie written by committee: too many ideas stuffed in and not enough fat trimmed off. Planet 51 tries to be about so many different things that it ends up being about nothing at all. Is it about the dangers of automatically attacking that which we don't understand? How the media makes us suggestible and paranoid? What it's like to learn that the universe is much larger than you ever imagined? Or is it about having the cojones to take risks and do the things you dream of doing? Okay, so the pants-less aliens have no visible cojones, but you get the point. And this lack of a center is symptomatic in the film's cast of predictable stock characters. Only the dog-like characters get any bite.

Even the jokes are just so much spaghetti thrown at the wall. Crude jokes about alien probes are mixed in with references to classic science fiction films, and great swaths of the film rely on forgettable sequences of slapstick. The odd joke hits, but when it does, it's just a solitary joke, and doesn't contribute anything to the movie as a whole. And, though it's a ostensibly kids movie, the rare jokes that elicited laughs went over the younger viewers' heads. During the viewing I attended, the audience laughed in unison just once — at a penis joke.

There are certain sins that children's films can sometimes get away with because they're geared toward younger viewers: being too busy or too cloying, or having a wearying or simplistic sense of humor. But Planet 51's problems are far deeper: it's a film that simply never engages, and for a science fiction film, leaves us with depressingly little to think about after it's over. Do yourself a favor and, instead of seeing Planet 51, watch these clips and pretend you've seen the entire movie. You'll be better off for it.

The Twilight series, whose second installment hits theaters tonight in the weird form of New Moon, has gone through a lot of changes in its journey from book to screen. This paranormal romance about a postgrunge girl from the Pacific Northwest and the monsters she loves isn't just a fictional world. It's a lifestyle. But what exactly is this lifestyle about? Is it about celibacy and traditional gender roles, the way its conservative Mormon creator Stephenie Meyer would have us believe? Or is it about rampant girl hormones, boys who strip at the slightest provocation, and otherworldly sparkle woodies?

Or is it, perhaps, about something else entirely?

I'll go with door number three. From the moment that Bella arrives for her first day of school and sees vamp Edward ambling toward her in slo-mo, his skin powdered white and lips cherry red, we're plunged into some kind of gender-bending satire of beer commercials. But instead of a busty blonde boob-bouncing her way towards the camera, we have the ridiculously made-up Edward, looking like something that got dunked in a Sephora store and then hurled through the stock room at Abercrombie and Goth. Once the two have kissed in extreme lurid closeup, wolfboy Jacob emerges literally from nowhere to show off his mega-muscles (which everybody comments on endlessly). As he gives Bella a hug, he explains that he likes the Reservation school way better than the white people's school. The scene is sheer comic genius, with the actors panting exaggeratedly as they kiss, and the lines wildly out-of-sync with the action (Jacob is constantly reminding the main characters how white they are in the middle of a "let's kiss" moment).

And it only gets better. Bella's human friends, represented incongruously as hipsters, are in on the joke. Their banter, possibly the best part of the whole movie, tips you off immediately to the fact that writer Melissa Rosenberg - whose main claim to fame is as a producer on ultra-dark serial killer satire Dexter - knows there is a significant audience who has come to watch New Moon just to laugh their asses off. And indeed, when I saw the film at a special sneak preview, loud laughter was as frequent as shots of Jacob's perky nipples.

It's almost as if the ostensible set-up of the movie - EDWARD: We can't be together; BELLA: Ohhhhhh [sigh] - is there just as a kind of blocky set in the background of the real story. A story about smart, snarky teens who think the entire premise of the film is stupid. There's a terrific scene when Bella starts to hang out with her old friends again after months of moping over the missing Edward, and she and her gal pal go to see a zombie movie. As they walk out of the theater, her friend launches into a long rant about how zombie movies claim to have some "deep meanings about consumerism" but that they're just dumb. Hello, moment that is way too meta for this movie.

And that's not the only meta moment. After the zombie rant, Bella and her pal run into a gang of motorcyclists who are catcalling and hooting at them, asking them if they want rides. As Bella stares at the men, Edward appears before her in a really bad Obi Wan-style apparition, urging her to "keep walking - danger." So of course, Bella walks up to the motorcycle guys and hops on the motorcycle, only to see the Obi Edward ghost go all after-school special on her, warning her again about the naughty man. This is the kind of pop culture reference that teens raised on "very special episodes" and old Star Wars movies will get, especially with the cheese larded on in such dramatic proportions.

Don't get me wrong: There are long, boring parts in this movie, mostly featuring the giant lack of chemistry that is Edward/Bella. But there are moments of subversion in between the emo globs that tantalize us into asking what Bella could become - if she would just exit the Twilight plot arc that will eventually propel her into marriage and babymaking.

In New Moon, that exit feels like a real possibility in a way that it won't after next year's wedding-oriented sequel Eclipse. The Bella of New Moon becomes "an adrenaline addict," seeking out motorcycle rides with shirtless Jacob and jumping off cliffs into the water, just so she can see Obi Edward again, telling her to be safe. She also starts cozying up with shirtless wolf boy Jacob and his pals - who cheerfully remind her that she's "not brown enough" to be clever. Again, Bella's friends (and writer Rosenberg) supply the ironic commentary that's running through everybody's heads anyway.

When a human boy with a crush on Bella asks her out to the movies and suggests a romantic comedy, she insists that they go see a movie hilariously called Face Punch, because she's "all about the adrenaline." First of all, Face Punch is now my new favorite movie title - New Moon cannot stop making jokes about teen pop culture. And second, I love the idea that Bella has this totally badass side that in no way matches the character's reputation as chaste romantic girly-girl.

The Bella of New Moon is a chick who fools around with vampires and werewolves, and then goes cliff jumping, "you know, recreationally," as she puts it later. And when this girl finds herself in the middle of over-the-top romantic scenarios, she's not exactly a swooner. In fact, she just wants to get her annoying boyfriend to turn her superpowered and vampy like him. When the boringly tormented Edward hints that he can't make her a vampire because she'll "lose her soul" and she looks kind of irritated and replies, "Well I don't believe in that."

So is this a movie about the glories of celibate romance? Not metaphorically, and not literally either.

Let's just take a quick gander at the much-vaunted symbolism of the series, where monsters stand in for humans and monstrous desires stand in for sexual ones. Edward's brother tries to eat Bella when she gets a paper cut; Jacob's brother also tries to eat Bella when she makes him mad. So: Sexiness is in the metaphorical air. But then things go literal. Jacob takes off his shirt and Bella tells him he's beautiful. Then when Jacob goes Total Wolf, he just stops wearing shirts altogether, spending most of the movie in tight denim cutoffs and running shoes. Edward also takes off his shirt in a scene where his pants ride so low that we see a little wisp of sparkling vampire pubes.

Nobody ever says anything about celibacy ever. Indeed, they spend more time arguing about race than they do about sex. As Jacob snarks to Bella, "Maybe I'm not the right kind of monster for you." All these teens ever do is jump into each other's bedrooms and kiss and pant heavily. This is not a movie about avoiding sex: The sex is just taking place offscreen. I guarantee that people the world over will be jacking off to memories of Jacob and Edward and Bella in their ruffled pink beds tomorrow night because this flick is packed so full of beefcakery. Basically, New Moon is training wheels for future Playgirl readers.

What's amazing about New Moon, and the whole Twilight series generally, is how easily it becomes self-parody. I think that's part of its appeal to teenagers, a group of people who cut through adult pretension and lies so incisively - and yet fall so hard for impossible fantasies. It caters to a youthful desire to watch a fairy tale, and then to see that fairy tale mocked mercilessly as the after-school-special bullshit it is.

I suspect that audiences for New Moon will sometimes choose to see Edward as genuinely romantic, while others will laugh at his makeup. Still others will - like the movie itself - vacillate wildly between romantic yearning and scornful laughter.

It seems that once Roland Emmerich was done assembling all the CG components for destroying the world and gathering a full complement of "Hey, it's that guy!" actors, he realized 2012 had no script, and decided to cull characters and situations from every other disaster movie ever made. Despite its massive scale of destruction, 2012 will be familiar to anyone whose seen any movie about an earthquake, volcano, aquatic disaster, or celestial body striking the Earth.

2012 follows the parallel stories of several characters at the end of the world. John Cusack plays the sort of fellow John Cusack always plays, though this time he's also a struggling writer whose only novel sold roughly 400 copies. And Amanda Peet plays his Amanda Peet-esque ex-wife, who is dating a plastic surgeon named Gordon. Gordon is all kinds of perfect, adores Amanda, and is great with her kids, but of course she's only with him because she can't be with John Cusack. Oh, and John and Amanda (or Jackson and Kate Curtis as they've been named for the sake of the film) have perfectly generic children. There's the requisite daughter with a quirk (she's overly fond of hats) and the son who's mad at his father (and insists on calling him by his first name).

As it turns out, years earlier, an Indian scientist discovered that solar flares are causing mutant neutrinos to microwave the Earth's core, which will cause the tectonic plates to shift and the Earth's waters to boil (but somehow doesn't cause us humans to explode). He warns his friend and fellow scientist Adrian Helmsley (a blandly earnest Chiwetel Ejiofor), who in turn warns a Washington bureaucrat that the world is ending. World leaders are informed, contingency plans are made, precious art is stowed away, and important people mysteriously die. But the hoi polloi are left in the dark, and people in California gradually get used to the regular miniquakes and surface cracks that plague their streets.

After a chance encounter with a crackpot conspiracy nut (Woody Harrelson), and hearing rumblings of the aforementioned contingency plan, Jackson realizes just in the nick of time that the world is, in fact, ending. And through a mixture of superhuman feats and incredibly unlikely bouts of luck, puts his family on the path to safety.

Although 2012's main concern is Jackson and his family, the film shifts perspectives and introduces us to a range of characters, all straight from central casting: a stocky Russian billionaire, a trophy wife who loves her purse dog above all, a pair of horrid children who look like they should be touring Willy Wonka's factory, a world-weary and noble President, the beautiful and intelligent First Daughter, a young Tibetan monk, an interracial jazz duo. It's too few characters and too Western-centric to convey an epic scale, but too many for us to particularly care who lives and who dies. Caring is irrelevant anyway; following classic disaster movie tropes will give you a pretty accurate picture of who makes it to the end of the movie.

All in all, it's a very Hollywood view of how the world ends. With the exception of a few token minorities, it's American and European characters we're tracking, American and European high culture people are trying to save, and American and European monuments we're seeing destroyed. Yes, Emmerich didn't get a shot at the Kaaba, but surely there were other non-natural monuments he could have thought to break apart. There's a lot of menfolk making decisions while the women hang out with the children, and a lot of nice speeches about respecting all humanity while Western leaders are calling all the shots. Perhaps Emmerich is being cynical about the end of the world — suggesting that even then, Westerners and Western culture will get all the breaks — but if the non-Western characters fight as hard for their lives, we don't see it on screen.

But, if you can shut down the centers of your brain that demand logic, storytelling, or characters who aren't secretly Superman, 2012 can be an enjoyable experience. We were promised beautiful footage of the world falling apart, and on that point, 2012 delivers. Whole cities break apart, monuments crumple, volcanos shoot up from the Earth, and waves pull supercarriers from their watery homes and crash them into buildings. Save for a few odd seams, the computer-generated effects look incredible and there's something strangely satisfying about watching things break down so completely. And Emmerich recognizes that the apocalypse doesn't just demand disaster porn; it needs moments of absurdity as well. He manages to make room for some offbeat sight gags, some of which are genuinely funny and surprising. 2012 might actually be enjoyed most thoroughly on mute.

Emmerich has announced his plans to follow 2012 with a television series, 2013, which would pick up after the end of the movie. Perhaps now that Emmerich has finished blowing the world to smithereens, we can get back to characters and drama, and the year 2013 can prove more interesting than the year 2012.

Based on 70s short story by Richard Matheson, who also wrote I Am Legend, the movie's central premise is simple. A strangely-disfigured man named Arlington offers a strange proposition to a young family. If they press the button on a box he leaves with them, somebody they don't know will die and they will receive $1 million in cash. School teacher Norma and her NASA engineer husband Arthur aren't sure what to do when the mysterious Arlington leaves them to make their decision. Is the box a hoax? If not, is it bad to kill somebody they don't know if it means they'll have enough money to continue their comfortable, middle-class existence?

With Arthur's dreams of becoming an astronaut dashed (he failed the psychological test), and Norma unable to continue getting a discount for their son at the fancy private school where she teaches, money has recently become a source of anxiety for the couple. So Norma decides to press the button, though Arthur is immediately upset that she does it.

Once this fundamental plot point fades into the narrative background, cult auteur Kelly is free to do what he does best: Get weird. He slowly builds a portrait of suburban life haunted by a mystical military-industrial complex ruled by aliens and spies. Another NASA employee's wife is brutally murdered while their daughter cowers upstairs, and Arthur suspects it's because of Norma's button pushing. Meanwhile, people with nosebleeds are spying on the couple, as well as speaking in portentious tones about "going into the light."

Arlington continues to keep them under surveillance, and they discover that he's actually with the NSA. He built the box after being struck by lightning and mysteriously brought back from the dead. And it all has something to do with the Mars probe Voyager that Arthur helped design.

The movie is packed with the memorable, strange imagery that is Kelly's trademark. Boxes made of water hover in the air, a perfect recreation of a low-tech 1970s library becomes a haunting maze, and the NASA sets are lovingly rendered, complete with retro computers and lens flare. And the eponymous box itself is designed like some kind of Cold War objet d'art. Balanced atop a 70s-style wood panel box is a big red button that looks like it could launch nukes.

Kelly manages to weave together mystical moral issues with government conspiracies and godlike alien intelligences, but the result is uneven. It's hard to sympathize with a comfortably middle-class couple who are willing to kill somebody just so they can continue to live in a giant house and send their son to private school. And the moral universe Kelly has created in The Box is woefully black-and-white: Either you push the button and you're bad, or you don't push it and you're good. I kept waiting for Donnie Darko to step out from behind a curtain and yell at everybody for trying to reduce all human problems to the bland binary of "fear" vs. "love."

We also discover that the button is always pushed by wives, which suggests that women are the culprits holding humanity back from achieving the level of moral goodness that the aliens require in order to spare us from annihilation.

Despite these problems, there were flashes of goofy brilliance in The Box. Especially in the woefully short segments where we see Arlington's mysterious laboratory, located in a wind tunnel that the NSA has requisitioned from NASA, we get a glimpse of a truly great science fiction story. Arlington and his "employees" are a more deeply strange and stylized version of characters from Fringe, and that's a good thing. There's an especially great moment when one of Arlington's puppets returns to the alien spy installation at a tiny freeway motel, which is packed with other alien-controlled people and partly papered over with tinfoil. There's even a cheesy motel pool that's been improbably converted into an alien portal.

Kelly is at his best when he's making mind-melting science fiction with allegorical underpinnings, but unfortunately The Box is more like a morality play with a few science fiction characters hanging around in the background. Making matters worse is that the moral here seems like easy, unimaginative misanthropy. Unlike Kelly's previous films, which bristle with complicated hopefulness in the face of horror, The Box paints a simplistically dark picture of humanity. Despite the best of intentions, women keep pressing that button again and again - putting their families in danger, and dooming Earth to a harsh judgment from the godlike aliens.

Why are such complicated characters doomed to be inserted into narrative boxes that only clumsily contain them? Unfortunately, The Box doesn't answer that question.

In Men Who Stare At Goats, Ewan McGregor plays Bob Wilton a reporter who's trying to escape from his boring life, so when he gets wind of a secret military program from the 1980s to create "Jedi" soldiers, he follows the story. At first, you think that he's just a very off-beat embedded journalist, following the semi-retired Jedi Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) around, but it becomes clear that Wilton is getting more out of this than just a story: He's becoming Cassady's Padawan and learning to become a Jedi himself.

McGregor, of course, played Obi-Wan Kenobi in the three Star Wars prequels, and the film winks at this fact a few times, when Clooney says McGregor knows nothing about being a Jedi. But actually, in many ways, this is the Star Wars movie I wish McGregor had starred in before — it's about learning the ways of the Jedi, and seeing the contradictions inherent in the phrase "warrior-monk."

In Goats, which is based very loosely on the real-life story of the New Earth Army, we discover that the U.S. Army developed a secret program, following the humiliation of Vietnam, to fight a new way. And this involved developing psychic powers, but also letting in some of the counterculture's spirit of anarchy and playfulness. Drugs, long hair and crazy paintings. Unfortunately, one of the leading Jedi in this organization was secretly aligned with the Dark Side (this is actually explictly said at least once) and he corrupts the organization, tarnishing the other leading Jedis and turning one of them into his henchman of evil. So in the end, McGregor is the movie's Luke Skywalker, learning the Jedi legacy and ultimately helping to restore the light side.

Along the way, Clooney doesn't just teach McGregor how to burst clouds with his mind: he gives McGregor a grounding in the spiritual discipline behind the Jedi way, with a mixture of battiness and sageness that's actually kind of intoxicating.

All of this is played with tongue pretty firmly in cheek, but at the same time, it's made pretty explicit. And the movie is as charming as McGregor, Bridges and Clooney can make it. Bridges, especially, brightens up the screen every time he turns up as Bill Django, the founder of the Jedi organization.

There's a parable, here, of the ways in which America itself has turned away from opportunities to become more peace-loving, more creative, and less exploitative of our natural resources and of each other. And the failure of the "Jedi" program to meld the hippie "peace and love" ethos with the military's buzz-cut culture doesn't just expose the fact that you can't be a soldier and a monk (in our military, anyway.) The culture clash also aims to say something about America, and the ways in which we've betrayed the promise of the 1970s peace movement.

Here's a personal share: I have an alarmingly low tolerance for Baby Boomer nostalgia and, after several years in the Haight Ashbury, my hippie kitsch allergy is at a permanent level of anaphylactic shock. And yet, there is something beautiful and hilarious about the scenes where Bridges transforms his army unit into a group of shaggy-haired, dancing oddballs. And something heartbreaking about seeing the Dark Side destroying the Jedis. Mostly, this is because Jeff Bridges and George Clooney are so much fun to watch, you don't care.

And like I said, Star Wars sits at the center of the movie's themes. At one point, Clooney says that the Jedi program flourished in the 1980s because Ronald Reagan was such a big Star Wars fan. Reagan's Star Wars, of course, was a missile defense program that many scientists claimed was impractical, but Reagan never let go of the idea. Star Wars is so many different things to different people: a glorious war story, a window into one man's personal growth, a parable of controlling your hatred and choosing peace... part of why the original trilogy was so powerful was that it spoke to so many people in so many different ways.

And in a way, Men Who Stare At Goats is as much about the legacy of Star Wars as is it as about the legacy of woo-woo New Age hippie culture. Our culture was so heavily shaped by Star Wars, it opened up different ways of thinking about the way of the warrior, as well as offering some of the most exciting battle scenes ever committed to film. How you view Star Wars says a lot about your outlook on the universe in general.

Goats is often hilarious and sometimes chilling, but it's not a perfect movie. In particular, the pacing is a bit lead-footed at times, and the story loses some of its impact as a result. The movie's mix of absurdity and scary war scenes definitely won't work for everybody — I liked this film quite a bit, but Entertainment Weekly gave it an F. But all in all, I found it an entertaining, thought-provoking ride — of all the oddball films that have come out lately (including The Box and Fourth Kind) I'd say Goats is the most fun, and the most entertaining. Mostly, it's Jeff Bridges and George Clooney obviously having a blast playing another pair of larger-than-life characters, and that's a goat ride I'm always willing to take.

The movie has an incredibly terrifying premise. Hundreds of people have gone missing from the tiny, isolated town of Nome, Alaska since the 1960s. These missing persons cases have never been solved. But then a psychiatrist named Abigail Tyler starts investigating a rash of sleep disorders in Nome, and discovers that her patients are all having the same visions of white owls who interrupt their dreams. And when she hypnotizes one of her patients to find out more about this "owl," he is reduced to abject terror and then flees her office to kill his family and himself. Another patient, when hypnotized, starts screaming in ancient Sumerian and starts levitating.

Eventually Tyler realizes the people of Nome are being abducted by aliens, and she has been too. Set her discoveries against the tragic backdrop of her husband's recent, violent death (by aliens?) beside her in bed, and you've got a mega-spooky idea. Plus, there is actual documentary footage from the "real life" Tyler's sessions with these patients. And she even manages to record herself being abducted by aliens who scream at her in Sumerian.

Having grown up utterly terrified by the alien abduction scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I understand why The Fourth Kind sounds scary. Plus it promised to be a pseudo-documentary, showing us never-before-seen footage of people who have evidence that they've been stolen from their beds at night by hostile aliens. Sealing the deal was a star turn by Milla Jovovich, who makes every action movie more awesome.

But the movie stumbled out of the gate by hanging most of its fear power on a fundamental dishonesty. There is no "archival footage." There are no "actual case studies." Instead, we get badly-acted, blatantly fake documentary footage which fuzzes out whenever anything alien happens. There is some interesting editing, where filmmaker Olatunde Osunsanmi shows the fake footage split-screened alongside a reenactment of the fake footage and you feel like you're either watching 24 or some kind of weird art-school critique of documentary realism. Unfortunately the ashen fake/real Tyler is such a bad actress, and her CGI-widened eyes so "alien," that you wind up with the sense that Osunsanmi and crew thought audiences for this movie would be so monumentally stupid that they would fall for anything.

I'm not against fake documentaries. I loved Paranormal Activity, which was effective because the actors seemed so effortlessly real. Nothing felt stagey or artificial about that movie's "documentary" evidence.

What pushes Fourth Kind from the merely bad into the actually insulting was the filmmakers' insistence that the documentary evidence was real. Actors from the "documentary" portions of the movie are uncredited, and many media outlets are still reporting that the footage is real. There was even an ill-fated Web campaign to create false professional credentials and publications for Abigail Tyler, but after investigative reporter Kyle Hopkins revealed them as fakes they were taken down. Here's what Hopkins wrote:

Try Googling "Abigail Tyler" and "Alaska." You'll get a link to a convincingly boring Web site called the "Alaska Psychiatry Journal" - complete with a biography of a psychologist by that name who researched sleep behavior in Nome. Except the site is suspiciously vacant, mostly a collection of articles on sleep studies with no home page or contact information.

Another site, www.alaskanewsarchive.com, features a story from the Nome Nugget about Tyler moving to Nome for research. The problem? The story is credited to Nugget editor and publisher Nancy McGuire, who says it's baloney and she never wrote it.Both the news site and the medical journal site were created just last month, according to domain-name research sites. Ron Adler is CEO and director of the Alaska Psychiatric Institute. Denise Dillard is president of the Alaska Psychological Association. They said this week they've never heard of the Alaska Psychiatry Journal, or of Abigail Tyler.

So basically the movie's fakery was so badly done that people involved with the movie didn't even bother to create a convincing "Abigail Tyler" website that they could maintain once the movie came out.

What I'm saying is that Fourth Kind reeks of laziness. Despite having a great concept, it fails at every turn to make that concept convincing or menacing. And this lackluster mood permeates all aspects of the film - not just the poorly-executed hoax gimmick at its heart.

There are three competing, poorly-integrated stories vying for your attention in this movie.

First, there's the alien abduction story, and the mystery around what the aliens are doing, which is never solved. All we know is that the aliens are scary, and that they steal people out of their beds. We never understand why anybody would want to be hypnotized by Tyler and Co. after the first few people she hypnotizes kill themselves or get their backs broken when aliens possess them and distort their bodies. Even though Tyler has two credible witnesses to every single hypnosis session, including one that involves alien possession and levitation, those credible witnesses mysteriously never corroborate her story. So we see her screaming and crying when police arrive to arrest her for breaking her patient's back, and neither of her credible friends comes forward to say, "Actually I was there, I am a licensed whatever, and this guy broke his own back while having some kind of alien-induced seizure."

Second, there is the mystery of how Tyler's husband died. She remembers him being murdered by an intruder, and for most of the movie her psychiatrist friend is trying to hypnotize her so she can remember the intruder's face. But then it turns out that actually her husband shot himself, and she hallucinated the murder. And everybody, including her friend, knew this all along. But nobody tried to tell her. So we've got this hallucinating, crazed lady who is being allowed to hypnotize people? And who still has custody of her kids, even though her son is clearly scared of her? By the time the aliens "abduct" her daughter during a fuzzed-out documentary moment, you are ready for her to be arrested and put in a psychiatric hospital.

Finally, there's a whole "chariot of the gods" idea that's sort of flung into the story as if we weren't already up to our eyeballs in disbelief we couldn't suspend even if we wanted to. The aliens speak in ancient Sumerian, which a professor is inexplicably able to understand, despite the fact that the only access to Sumerian he has are from ancient texts. Nobody knows how the language would have been pronounced. Still, he figures out that the aliens are yelling things like "I am god," and using the word "destroyed" a lot. We also don't understand why they're still speaking an ancient language - you'd think by now they would try speaking English since they've been abducting Alaskans since before Sarah Palin was born.

So we're left with an absolute mess of crappily-done documentary footage, inexplicable aliens who act more like demons than scifi creatures, and a main character (Tyler) who seems like a complete crazy lady. Milla Jovovich still manages to shine, though it's hard when she has lines like, "My baby! They stole my baby!"

By the end of The Fourth Kind, you'll feel swindled - and not in the happy, they-fooled-me way. I can only assume that people who were scared by this movie, or even vaguely intrigued by it, were responding more to the movie's concept rather than its execution. There were a lot of ways Osunsanmi could have taken this movie to salvage it. He could have focused on making the documentary hoax convincing by creating believable footage and a smarter online presence. Or he could have pushed the movie over into the realm of Weekly World News camp, winking at the audience while also delivering some chills. Instead, he wrote and directed a movie whose earnestness is laughable - and whose "reality" segments feel more staged than Jon and Kate Plus Eight.

There's a scene early on in Gentlemen Broncos where science fiction novelist Ronald Chevalier (the always wonderful Jemaine Clement) is holding a workshop on fantasy naming. A young girl tells him that she has a troll character named Teacup. He scoffs and explains that there are rules for naming trolls, and that a troll mother would never name a child "Teacup;" only a little girl would.

It's as if writers Jared and Jerusha Hess anticipated what the critics would say about Gentlemen Broncos, namely that the film disobeys the conventions of movie storytelling in favor of their own strange and gleeful energy. Gentlmen Broncos is a movie well aware of what it doesn't do, of what rules it doesn't follow, but it doesn't care. It's naming its troll Teacup whether you like it or not.

That said, Gentlemen Broncos isn't Napoleon Dynamite. Where the latter is a character study of an unusual protagonist, the former is, by contrast, a highly metafictional narrative about creativity and adaptation, with a hero, a villain, and a solid resolution.

Benjamin Purvis, a teenager nominally homeschooled by his loving but distracted mother (an appropriately out-of-it Jennifer Coolidge), spends most of his days writing pulpy science fiction stories. When he attends a writing conference keynoted by Chevalier, his favorite writer, Ben's latest endeavor, a wild tale called Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years falls into the hands of two conference attendees. One is Tabatha Jenkins, a fellow homeschooler who quickly elbows her way into Ben's life. Where Ben is quiet and shy to the point that he doesn't like people reading his stories, Tabatha is brazen, projecting a strange, confident energy. She is utterly without shame, but also unafraid of doing or embracing things that could be perceived as weird, and her remarkable joie de vivre makes her oddness charismatic where it should be off-putting.

The other person who happens upon Yeast Lords is Chevalier himself. Chevalier, with an endless collection of leather jackets and surgically attached to his Bluetooth ear piece, long ago won legions of fans with his series about harpies who shoot lasers from their breasts. It's easy to see Chevalier as a parody of the self-celebrating author (something Clement does with pitch perfection), especially when he presents a slideshow of the forty-some odd pieces of cover art he drew for his first novel. But even as we're laughing at the absurd harpy folk art, there's something deeper underneath. Chevalier was once an excited dreamer who compulsively doodled his bizarre fantasies; now he believes there are rules for naming trolls and his creativity has suffered. He simply can't recapture that crazy imaginative energy he once had, although he can certainly recognize it when he reads Yeast Lords.

Tabatha and Chevalier both want to adapt Yeast Lords, though each does it in a sort of underhanded way, and Ben's original vision gets poked and prodded into new shapes. Interspersed with the main narrative are scenes from Yeast Lords itself, with Sam Rockwell playing the story's shaggy-haired hero, Bronco. These scenes are crammed with all the strange ideas that swarm through Ben's brain: stolen testicles, cyclops turret men, rocket-powered battle stags, and yeast that gives you superpowers. These scenes are pure, straightforward fun, but they also show us first-hand Ben's own vision for Yeast Lords. As Chevalier takes over the story, we see how he changes and bastardizes Ben's original ideas, with Rockwell playing a very different version of Bronco. And as Tabatha and her friends adapt Yeast Lords as an amateur movie, we can experience the same disappointment Ben feels, that the characters and special effects never quite live up to the version in his head.

Gentlemen Broncos has been accused of asking audiences to laugh at the very characters it claims to celebrate: the weirdoes and misfits. And yes, it's easy to laugh at Ben's mother, who makes popcorn balls for every occasion and designs nightgowns that could double as space opera costumes, and Lonnie, Tabatha's lip-smacking filmmaker friend who invites less than flattering comparisons to Napoleon Dynamite. But the Hesses are, in fact, asking you to be a little repulsed by these characters and then look deeper, to see if they know something we don't. Yes, they may not fit into normal society, they may have values that differ from ours, they may make ugly nightgowns and crappy movies, but they're having fun. They're trying to live their lives on their own terms and be creative and pursue their wildest, wackiest ideas. Gentlemen Broncos may invite you to laugh at their foibles and their quirks, but it also invites you to go home, pick up your sketchbook, your camera, or that novel you're working on, and create something as great, as strange, and as utterly your own as Yeast Lords.

There are moments of coolness in this movie for fans, especially those of us who wanted to know more about little-used cylons like the Simon model. We get genuine character development for Simon, as well as a few versions of Cavil and sleeper agent Sharon. Writer Jane Espenson isn't always in her element with Battlestar, but she knows how to write snappy dialogue that Dean Stockwell delivers with pitch-perfect evil prissiness. (There is a great moment where Cavil snarks at a Five model for being too blendy with his fellow models by wearing the same suits, and the Five snaps, "But his jacket was burgundy. This is teal.") We also meet a hooker version of Six who is hilariously awesome.

However, I have to emphasize what I said above: This movie is only going to be cool for fans. Nobody else could possibly understand it - the story jumps around in time throughout the first and second seasons, referencing plot developments that will make no sense to anybody but a die-hard follower of the show. But fans will also quickly become impatient with the story, too. Larded with lots of old footage, "The Plan" often feels like a gussied-up clip show.

A lot of the details that are added in actually make the show even more confusing. For example, a Cavil hanging out with the rebels back on Caprica has a conversation with a Simon model that makes it seem as if both of them know that Anders is one of the final five. Which makes no sense because one of the major issues in the show was that only Cavil knew who the final five were.

We also discover that the Cylons never really had a "plan" at all - basically, Cavil just bamboozled the other models into attacking the colonies for "justice." But what he really wanted was for the final five to be killed in the attacks, and then wake up in their goo buckets having "learned a lesson" that humanity is horrible. Somehow, he thinks that just having lived among humans will have convinced the final five that humans are awful. Then they'll all apologize to him and he'll get a lot of damp hugs from his naked, gooey parents.

Unfortunately, however, the Plan goes awry because none of the final five are killed in the attacks. Plus, they haven't learned anything! They still think humans are cool. Although Ellen is on the verge of death, Cavil decides to keep her alive so that she'll eventually learn her lesson that humans suck.

Could this really have been the whole Plan? Nuke the entire human race so that the final five will resurrect and give out apologetic hugs? I feel like I need another movie just to explain what happened in this one.

However, I don't want you to think that it was all bad, because there were parts of The Plan that reminded me of what made BSG such a great show. One of the Simon models in the Fleet is given a great backstory. He's gone native, married a human, and adopted her child from a previous marriage. His wife, who works with the Chief in engineering, is a strong, interesting character - a woman who once had a job doing aerospace engineering at a top company, who now has to figure out how to make the Galactica's jalopy fighter ships run without any spare parts at all. As Cavil pushes Simon to destroy the ship where he lives, we see the Cylon torn between the family he loves and the Cylons who are his people. It's a great subplot, and could easily have been an episode during the first or second season.

Developments with Cavil's character are also pretty interesting. We see that there are two versions of Cavil who emerge after the colonies are destroyed: one who is the evil Brother we all love, and one who starts to sympathize with the humans.

In fact, the theme of "The Plan," if anything, is that the Cylon's sympathies were always divided. From the beginning, they were torn between love for humanity and rage that they had been enslaved by the creatures who created them. Even Cavil, who is revealed in this movie as pretty much the only reason the Cylons attacked the colonies, is divided in his loyalties. One of the strengths of BSG as a series was that its heroes were dark, and its villains were granted an unexpected goodness. While it doesn't exactly deepen this theme, "The Plan" certainly sticks with it.

I think "The Plan" is destined to be the kind of thing that nobody but BSG completists will want to own. It won't bring new people into the series, and even those who love the series may be disappointed. Though there are standout moments, "The Plan" essentially takes the sensibilities of the final, extremely uneven season of the show and overlays them on the events of seasons 1 and 2. That's something that most of us, especially diehard fans, didn't really want to see.

"The Plan" will be available in stores on Oct. 27.

This review definitely contains spoilers, although it won't give away anything major, that you couldn't figure out from watching the trailers and looking at stills.

So you probably already know what Astro Boy is about: there's a scientist, Dr. Tenma, and his brilliant little boy, Toby, gets killed. So Dr. Tenma makes a robot replica of Toby, complete with Toby's memories, and gives him the most cutting-edge armaments and power source, so he can never be hurt again. But the robot version can't replace Toby, so Dr. Tenma ultimately rejects him — and he goes off to become Astro Boy.

I've grown to have a healthy appreciation for the manga of Osamu Tezuka — his medical thriller Ode To Kirihito is riveting and totally not what I expected — but writer/director David Bowers added to Tezuka's world-building in ways that totally enhanced the story for me. And a huge part of that was Bowers' vision of a world of enslaved robots, which is both funny and occasionally disturbing.

Bowers, an Aardman Animation veteran who worked on Chicken Run and Wallace And Gromit, lets his Aardman roots show most of all when he's dealing with some of the robots in the movie. From Dr. Tenma's robot servant to a flying a window-cleaning squirt bottle and squeegee, to a robot trash-can dog, the robots are always cute and silly, yet also can't help reminding you of their non-person status in the gleaming futuristic Metro City. A clever, retro-looking instructional film at the start of the movie serves to underscore this point, showing robots being used and then tossed aside, onto the giant scrap heap that Metro City floats over.

But don't worry — at no point does Astro Boy give you a dry lecture about robot rights, or the unfairness of enslaving other sentient beings. Instead, it contains tons of sly jokes and clever moments that make you sympathize and identify with the robots — even as we're rooting for Astro Boy's quest to be recognized as a human.

And that's where Astro Boy gets really interesting. Because, of course, the original story is all about Astro wanting to be a "real boy," like Pinocchio. By juxtaposing that quest with the constant reminders that all the other robots are just as aware as Astro Boy himself, the movie makes the standard "quest for humanity" a lot more complex.

Because Astro Boy is the only robot who actually appears human and is programmed with a real human's memories, he's the only bot with the option of blending in with human society. He's also almost the only bot who's not programmed with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, which force the other robots to be servile even when they don't want to be. The more we sympathize with the other robots, who don't have the same options Astro has, the less clear-cut Astro's quest for humanity begins to appear.

Some of the most fascinating scenes in Astro Boy deal with this question of "passing" as human — early on, after Astro Boy is created, he thinks he's a "real" boy — but the other robots can see the truth at a glance. Dr. Tenma's servant bot is instructed to treat the robot boy as if he were human, and this nearly causes a robo-conniption fit. "I'm so freaking out right now!" the robot says a few times. And then later, Astro Boy knows he's a robot, but he's trying to live among humans as one of them — except that he keeps having to worry that the other robots will "out" him.

It's not much of a spoiler to say that Astro Boy gets to be accepted as a real boy by the end of the movie — but that only leaves you with more questions, particularly about how this will affect all the other robots. The movie only offers the barest hints that Astro Boy's special status could end up benefiting all his robot brothers and sisters.

There are two things I love in children's movies: world-building and subversiveness. And Astro Boy has enough of both of them to build a thousand giant robots out of.

We already talked a lot about the movie's world-building in this exclusive interview with Bowers and designers Jake Rowell and Luis Grane: the movie takes place in a floating city, which includes an entire mountain levitated above the ground. And we get little glimpses of the history of the development of the robots in this society, especially when we meet a 100-year-old robot named Zog (voiced, rather laconically, by Samuel L. Jackson.)

As for the subversiveness — well, I already talked about the fact that the movie paints Astro Boy as a bit of a race traitor (in a gentle, sly way that will not make your kids bawl, I promise.) But then the film turns around and gives us a hilariously inept trio of robot liberationists — the Robot Revolution Front, three former appliances (including a refrigerator) who make grandiose speeches that remind me of the People's Front Of Judea in Monty Python's Life Of Brian.

Unfortunately, because the members of the Robot Revolution Front are still bound by the Three Laws of Robotics, their biggest plan for defeating the human hegemony is to attack one of the humans with a particularly large feather — and tickle him. A lot.

One of the biggest cheer-worthy moments in the movie is when we meet a second robot who isn't subject to the Three Laws, and who is willing to kick some ass.

Because we don't really want to see Astro Boy struggling against vague, nebulous anti-robot prejudice, the movie gives us two clear-cut villains: the President of Metro City, who wants Astro Boy's super-advanced power source to power a new war machine, and HamEgg, a roboticist who's fallen from grace and now organizes nasty robot gladitorial matches on the surface.

And it's the former villain, the President, who provides one of Astro Boy's few weak spots. He's so transparently a satire on George Bush and other leaders who want to start bogus wars to boost their approval ratings, that he becomes a bit painful to watch. The movie is fairly subtle about its other messages, but whenever the President comes on screen, we're suddenly assaulted by neon signs blaring "POLITICAL MESSAGE." Also, you'll cringe a bit when a scientist explains the difference between Astro Boy's power source (which is intrinsically good and morally pure) and a separate, evil power source, which creates negative vibes and aggression.

But those are minor quibbles, really — the spoon-feeding around the President only stands out because the rest of the movie is so determined to let you draw your own conclusions. There are no easy answers to Astro Boy's dilemma — he feels like a human boy, but he knows he really belongs to the subjugated robot class — and the movie doesn't really attempt to offer us any.

And that's what makes this such a great kids' movie. It's pure, engaging fun pretty much the whole way through, with a few bits of sadness, like when Astro Boy's flesh-and-blood model dies (there's no blood; he just vanishes.) But the movie takes the "kid caught between two worlds" plot you've seen a million times before and adds an extra layer of weirdness. Both you and your kid will be thrilled by all the zoomy flying-robot action, but you'll both be left debating exactly where Astro Boy should want to belong anyway. And that's definitely one of the hallmarks of a good movie.

Let's get this out of the way right away: Jonze's Wild Things is only an adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic children's book in the loosest possible sense. It shouldn't surprise anyone that Jonze, whose Adaptation was a dissertation on the impossibility of adapting a literary work to film, has treated the Sendak book as a mere jumping-off point. There are only a handful of incidents in Sendak's book, but at least half of them don't appear in the movie. Instead of using the book's spare narrative as a framework and adding to it, the movie mostly creates a new story from scratch.

In a way, WTWTA is the polar opposite of Watchmen: Zack Snyder faced a 12-book magnum opus of graphic storytelling, and tried to distill it to three hours without losing anything essential or changing anything (except the ending.) Jonze takes Sendak's twelve sentences and expands them to 100 minutes of incidents. And yet, both films wind up feeling lovely but a bit empty, triumphs of gorgeous imagery over substance.

This review is not going to tell you whether Wild Things is good, or whether you'll like it — after talking to tons of people who've seen the movie, I've come to the conclusion that this is such an idiosyncratic, strange movie that it's impossible to predict whether you'll like it or not. So far, everybody I've talked to has either loved it or hated it — and I have a feeling that sharp divide will be the norm. It also may be the sort of movie that you'll only fully appreciate on a third viewing, with the right substances in the mix. (If you want to read an unreservedly rave review of the movie, check out Entertainment Weekly's.)

Wild Things is not a movie about a little boy who wants to be wild, traveling (in his fantasy, or via magic) to a strange land full of monsters who make him their king and let him be as wild as he wants, until he gets homesick. Rather, Wild Things is a movie about the terrors and insecurities of childhood, and the monsters we all have inside of us. It presents an unnerving portrait of childhood as a stormy, exhilerating time, in which play is intensely serious and important, and loneliness is the biggest nightmare of them all.

Max, who's around ten, lives with his divorced mom, who's slowly failing at her job and barely making ends meet thanks to her shitty absentee ex-husband. She's dating a new guy, whom Max hates. Meanwhile, Max's older sister, Claire, who used to be his friend, has stopped hanging out with him because she's trying to get in with a cool crowd at school. Max acts out, trying to get people to pay attention to him, but it only makes matters worse — so finally, Max screams "feed me, woman!" at his mom, in front of her new boyfriend, and then actually bites her. He's sent to his room, but he runs away from home, until he finds a boat, which takes him to the land of the Wild Things.

Whether you love or hate this movie will depend most on how you feel about the Wild Things, who are sort of weird and totemic. They look like the creatures in Sendak's book — until they open their mouths.

What comes out of the Wild Things' mouths is a stream of complaints and bitter observations, punctuated by moments of extreme, shining whimsy. It keeps you off guard: The monsters, one and all, seem miserable, upset and perennially disappointed by life, but then they come out with cute, occasionally hilarious lines. While the monsters serve to amplify the conflicts, anxieties and destructive glee inside of Max, they don't really feel like aspects of a child's psyche to me — they come across more like emotionally stunted, narcissistic middle-aged people.

I didn't realize the main monster, Carol, was voiced by James Gandolfini until after I saw the film, because i saw a super-early screening and hadn't read much press before hand. So to me, Carol just sounded like a cranky, neurotic old guy with anger issues. At times during the main body of the story, I felt like I was sitting on a particularly long therapy session in a group home, or a Seinfeld episode with fewer jokes.

On the other hand, other people I've talked to who've seen the movie found the Wild Things much more convincing, and compelling, as aspects of Max's inner life, made real and massive. So your mileage may indeed vary.

But whatever you think they are, it's made clear that the Wild Things form an utterly dysfunctional family, one where you sense the same arguments have been going on for decades and will continue for decades more. Carol is upset because another one of the monsters, K.W. (Lauren Ambrose) has decided to leave the group and go spend time with her new friends, who turn out to be weird owls that you have to hit with rocks before you can talk to them. Carol is bursting with resentment and neediness, and when we first meet him he's trashing the other Wild Things' houses like an alcoholic, abusive dad. K.W., meanwhile, just acts like she's sick of everyone's shit.

Then there are two other Wild Things, Judith and Ira, who constantly feel neglected and marginalized within the group — Judith complains every few moments that whatever activities the gang of monsters does, she and her companion are pushed to the side. Nobody cares what they think, nobody pays attention to them, etc. There's also a big bull, who's sort of bull-like.

Here's the scene where we get introduced to some of them, and Judith is like "Oh, you don't need to know me, I'm kind of a downer." The tree-destroying thing is cute, though, as is the tongue thing:

So, yeah... dysfunctional family of losers. Who are depressed. A lot.

But it's not all anhedonia — a big point of the film is that Max shows up and shakes up the monsters' dreadful staleness, becoming their King and giving them a whole bunch of new games to play. "We'll take care of each other, and sleep together in a real pile," Max says. Unlike the people in Max's real life, these monsters pay attention to him and are curious about him, and sort of become his minions.

When Max convinces the Wild Things that he's a King, and that he was a King among the Vikings for twenty years already, it's a brilliantly whimsical scene. Max Records, as Max, shines the most in these quirky moments where's spinning a line of amazing B.S., talking about his crazy super-powers and his amazing leadership skills. The "let the Wild Rumpus begin!" sequence is severely fun and insane, culminating in a crazed puppy pile. And later, when Max concocts a crazy scheme to build a huge fort, with a crime lab and spy gadgets and all sorts of other weird superhero/scifi touches, he's the total nerd-kid avatar, with a team of monsters doing his manic bidding.

But you sort of know, all along, that this whole "king" thing will not turn out well — and that's the biggest departure from the book. Forget the fact that the movie dispenses with the book's "bedroom turns into wild jungle" sequence — the biggest change is that it's much clearer that Max is a failed king, and the monsters end up hating him. This happens partly because Max decides to split the monsters into "good guys" and "bad guys," drawing them into a war fought with dirt clods, which quickly turns ugly. Max makes Judith and Ira into "bad guys," exacerbating their persecution complex, and you can just see in this clip the beginning of things going South:

Sorry to give away so much of the movie's plot — this really isn't a movie you'd go see for the plot, though. It's much more about the weird little touches and character quirks, the lush visuals, and the blaring-loud, wordless score by Karen O. and Carter Burwell.

As I said in the beginning, this movie offers the coldest comfort of any film in Spike Jonze's career. It feels like a journey into sheer dysphoria — Max's home life is unrelentingly horrendous, and when he escapes to a fantasy land, it turns out to be even worse. The film's message seems to be that life sucks, growing up sucks, and most of all, any attempt to escape into wildness or fantasy will only turn out even suckier.

I don't think WTWTA is too scary for small children — but I suspect it may be too nihilistic. Teenagers and tweens, though, may love it.

The film reinforces its dark message with an unblinking stare aimed at blank landscapes. When we first meet Max in the "real" world, the world is blanketed with snow, and Jonze's camera zooms in on the unrelenting whiteness. Max builds a snow fort and hides inside, and he appears to be in a blinding snow tunnel. When Max travels to the land of the Wild Things, at first he's in that famous forest/jungle setting, but the film quickly moves to the blank dunes of the Melbourne area, where Jonze filmed. The landscape is meant to reflect the moods of Max and the Wild Things, which grow increasingly joyless and unrelenting.

Here's a bit where Carol and Max walk through a desolate landscape, and Carol talks about how the landscape used to be rocks, and now it's sand, and soon it'll be dust, and who knows what comes after dust? And then Max says the sun is going to die, and Carol tries to put a brave face on that piece of info:

(The film's visuals, it must be said, really are incredible — the film has brilliant design, from the monsters to their weird circular wicker-like buildings.)

If you think of this as a kids' movie, you'll be sadly disappointed. If you think of it as an adventure film, you'll be puzzled. But think of it as a continuation of Jonze's first two movies, and it makes perfect sense. Like Malkovich and Adaptation, WTWTA is about someone who's uneasy in his own skin — Max literally seeks liberation by donning his wolf costume, and this leads him to his adventure — and like the heroes of Malkovich and Adaptation, Max discovers, the hard way, that being someone else is no solution to his problems, but also that it's a kind of trap.

The main difference is that Wild Things feels much more surreal than those first two films, thanks to the weird Jim Henson/CG creatures. And it's about a kid, rather than a thirtysomething or fortysomething guy. In a sense, Wild Things does for the coming-of-age tale what Jonze's first two movies do for the midlife crisis/second chance story: strip away the candy coating on the fantasy to reach the pure existential crisis beneath, and show how insoluble that crisis really is.

Spoilers ahead!

I know the ultra-low-budget Paranormal Activity has been hyped a lot, and so I'm loathe to perpetuate that. Nothing bursts a nacreous bubble of delightful fear more easily than being told over and over that you're going to be scared. But the fact is that this horror movie gets it right on almost every level. Everything from the setting and characters, to the tightly-plotted story and minimal effects, worked brilliantly. Nothing ever felt like padding or gratuitous "we're going to amp up the tension with cheap jolts" bullshit. The terror was raw and real - all the more so because it was so understated.

Like intelligent urban horror TV series Supernatural, Paranormal Activity seamlessly blends contemporary suburban life with ancient forms of unexplainable violence. The film begins with day trader Micah buying a fancy videocamera to record the weird, paranormal disturbances he and his girlfriend Katie have started experiencing. Early in the morning, they hear footsteps and breathing, and sometimes the water turns on and off by itself. Micah, a product of the "if it's on YouTube it's real" generation, wants to get the whole thing on tape. It's as if he thinks the very act of documenting this phenomenon is a way of warding off danger.

One of the first things Micah films is a visit from a paranormal expert whom Katie has called in to investigate their situation. As the expert asks Katie about her life, we discover (along with Micah) that she has been plagued by some kind of otherworldly force throughout most of her life. Sometimes the presence makes itself known; at other times it seems to be gone. The investigator looks alarmed and admits he's out of his depth. He specializes in ghosts, and it seems that Katie is dealing with a demon. He leaves her with the advice not to pay attention to the demon (say, with a video camera) or try to communicate with it, and gives her the number of a demonologist to call right away.

This is, dare I say it, where the movie gets realistic. Micah is one of those brash, slightly stupid people who thinks he can solve everything on his own - even things he doesn't understand. His attitude, as he puts it, is that the demon is in his house, bothering his girlfriend, and so he's going to fix it. Instead of encouraging Katie to get more help, he teases her about the demonologist until she agrees not to call him "unless things get worse." He also wheedles her into letting him film their demonic visitations at night.

As each night falls, and the camera's timestamp begins to spin forward, we watch in a kind of paralysis of fear as the demon makes its presence known (though we never see it). What makes these scenes so tense isn't the idea of a woman being stalked by a demon - we've all seen that before - but the way Micah and Katie's dysfunctional relationship brings on the horror. Katie is young and uncertain about what to do, even though she's dealt with this demon her whole life. She wants to banish the creature, but allows Micah to railroad her into calling the demon out just so he can get more cool footage.

Even when it becomes overwhelmingly obvious that there really is a supernatural creature in their house, and that it wants to destroy Katie, Micah refuses to stop trying to reach out to the monster. He makes things much, much worse, and Katie lets him. What we're seeing, more than a haunting, is the shocking portrait of a man who enjoys torturing his vulnerable girlfriend for kicks. Viewed in this light, the demon becomes a nauseating embodiment of Micah's disregard for Katie's life.

Usually images from a horror movie stay with you because they are so bloody disgusting. But there were completely ordinary images in Paranormal Activity that have been haunting my brain for the past 24 hours, all because of how disturbing they were in context. One of these images is of Katie sleepwalking, or rather sleep-standing, under the influence of her demon. We see her climb out of bed and simply stand, staring at Micah. As the minutes and hours tick by in fast-motion, her body seems to twitch back and forth with the tiny motions people make when they stand still. Just watching her stand for hours, swaying slightly, is possibly one of the most terrifying sequences I have ever seen on film.

Like I said, the chills in this movie depend entirely on context. If it weren't for the pitch-perfect, improv-style acting from stars Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat, as well as a great script from director Oren Peli, none of Paranormal Activity would have worked. Peli, a former videogame designer, filmed the entire movie during one weekend in his suburban San Diego home. And that works in his favor: The claustrophobic interiors of the couple's home add to the atmosphere. We never leave the house, and the longer we are there the more we feel strangled by Micah's overbearing aggressiveness and Katie's hopelessness in the face of danger.

I couldn't help but think that Peli's experience with videogame design was part of what made the film's structure work so well. Each night felt like a level, and the movie rapidly progresses to a showdown with the final boss. At no point is our terror attenuated or our attention distracted by outside things. There are no cats or dogs in the house to provide fake tension ("Oh that sound was just the cat!"), and every scene in this 90 minute flick feels absolutely crucial to the development of the story.

During the final sequences, which were the only parts of this $11,000 movie that producer Steven Spielberg helped with, we get just enough monstery payoff to justify our fear. But just like in real life, nothing is satisfactorily resolved. Instead Paranormal Activity gives us a messy, ambiguous slice of Katie and Micah's lives, which just happen to include a monster.

Paranormal Activity opens in theaters across the US tomorrow.

I am not going to toy with your emotions the way I usually do in reviews like these and give you some long political analysis about class or social anxiety or lesbians. The fact is that this movie was lame, both as a movie and as a cultural symptom. It was dimly lit, filled with boring spaceship corridors and even more boring monsters, and lightly sprinkled with a backstory far more interesting than the front story. Watching Pandorum was like playing a metal album backwards to hear the Satanic messages and getting only some voice saying, "I like balloons" over and over again.

A couple of white dudes wake up covered in slime on a generation ship, and can't remember who they are. The power is running down, but luckily one of them (Ben Foster) remembers he's the ship's Chief Of I Know Stuff About Technology. And the other one (Dennis Quaid, looking snacky) remembers he's the Chief Of Guiding You Around The Ship From Your Comm Thingie. So Ben goes hunting for Energy Source Place Across The Ship and Dennis stays back at the ranch staring at a glowing map and says things like "Are you there? I'm going to route you around that pile of stuff."

It's hard for Ben to get to the Energy Source Place because there are all these zombie mutant things dressed like Savage Natives from some old-school white person's vision of the Old West or maybe Africa. You know, they have spears and wear bone necklaces and scream and drool a lot. But because they live in this lightless spaceship they are white and have no noses. Makes sense, right?

So there's your Mystery, kids. Why are these white savages on the ship? What happened to the crew? Will Dennis Quaid ever get another role where he can be both snacky and get some good lines?

As if those mysteries weren't enough, every once in a while there is a completely random moment where we get the fisheye lens thing on Dennis or Ben and you're supposed to wonder IS THIS ALL JUST SPACE MADNESS? (Yes, the word pandorum means space madness, not some kind of weird sexual secretion related to santorum, though there are a lot of santorum-esque secretions in this movie.)

Meanwhile Ben meets a couple of crew members who are inexplicably awake also and have had to descend to shocking levels of bad hygiene to stay alive. The thing that's a bummer is that when you get the multiple, contradictory Big Reveals at the end of the movie you're like, "What? Why didn't they make a movie about all this cool stuff instead of this dumb movie where they run around a lot and get covered in santorum?"

Another bummer is that even though two of the main characters are scientists, one of whom has a fully-functioning lab, we never actually go into the lab to figure things out. Why isn't there a scene where they, I dunno, put tissue from one of the space zombie savage creatures into a DNA sequencer and figure out what the fuck it is? Seriously, people, this movie had way too little science in it and way too much running around boringly. And the monsters? Not even cool. Just Reavers crossed with those guys from I Am Legend and CHUD (the movie, not the blog).

Oh, also? That cool image of the arm and face with all those tubes and shit poking out of them that you've seen on the posters? NOT EVEN IN THE MOVIE.

Basically the only reason to go see Pandorum this weekend is if you've already seen District 9 twice, Jennifer's Body once, and already watched Fringe, FlashForward, Supernatural, and Glee on your DVR. And you've already watched the entire Sarah Connor Chronicles and Middleman DVD box sets twice through. I'm not trying to be harsh here. I'm just trying to give you some options.

Or maybe I've just got . . . SPACE MADNESS!

Surrogates, opening today, is at its most potent when it reminds us just how much having a body totally sucks. Bodies break down, they get sick, and they fall apart. No wonder that everybody would rather jack into impervious, lovely robot bodies to face the world. Of course, it all goes horribly wrong, because somebody finds a way to destroy a robot "surrogate" and kill its operator at the same time. You won't be too shocked to hear that this turns out to be the result of a huge, confusing, nonsensical conspiracy in which nothing is what it seems.

There's been a lot of body horror involving technology lately — both Robert Downey Jr. and Jason Statham have had crude batteries inserted into their chest cavities, in Iron Man and Crank 2 respectively, and there was lots of cyborg self-loathing in Terminator Salvation. But Surrogates is the first movie I can remember seeing where the real self-loathing comes as a result of removing the body from technology.

When FBI agent Tom Greer, played by Bruce Willis, first ventures out into the world in his "meat bag" body, all of the robot-avatar people stare at him with pity, when they're not just ignoring him and elbowing him aside with their super strong robo-limbs. He's like the old man surrounded by perfect young people at the end of Logan's Run. The scenes of Willis staggering around the perfect robo-world, the stench of bodily decay coming off him, are extraordinarily powerful. They've managed to make him look way older and more decripit than he really is, while his ideal robot body (which we see a lot of early in the movie) is airbrushed into looking vapidly handsome.

And just to drive the point home, Willis takes more punishment than even an action-movie hero ought to be able to handle. He rarely manages to land a punch, but he's constantly being beaten, kicked, slammed, and caught up in nasty car accidents. Super-robots throw parking meters at his head and he barely ducks in time. He gets more and more bruised and slashed up, over the course of the film.

The movie aims to tell us that Willis' weakness and vulnerability is a result of too much reliance on technology — this is what happens when you lean on something too much, and then it's yanked away from you. But actually, you could just easily see Willis' decrepitude as proof that technology is awesome, and it's a mistake ever to yank yourself away from it.

The main thing standing in the way of that interpretation is how disturbingly candy-coated the robot bodies in the movie look. Sometimes, you start getting used to seeing the airbrushed loveliness of almost everyone in the film, and then you catch sight of a real person — or you just get a weird robot crowd scene — and you're unnerved once again. The movie has some really nice visual effects and concept design, especially in those scenes where we see the ugly, Terminator-esque endoskeletons under the immaculate skins.

And the movie definitely wants you to know that excessive reliance on technology is bad and wrong — it's one of the preachiest films I've seen in ages, and it's by no means subtle. Willis' character starts out being opposed to the use of robotic "surrogates," and his conviction rapidly hardens. Meanwhile, we are lectured constantly about the evil of using robot bodies to interact instead of communing in the flesh. And the people who are pro-Surrogate are always revealed to be evil, misguided or in need of an epiphany of some sort. Some of the preachiness comes from the Prophet (Ving Rhames), the leader of the anti-surrogate and generally Luddite resistance, but a lot of it comes from various mouthpiece characters, and bits of symbolism that are labeled "SYMBOLISM" in bright flashing colors.

The surrogates, of course, are a metaphor for our own reliance on technology to interact with the world. Our iPhones, our Blackberries, our laptops, our xBox lives. We're cutting ourselves off from real humanity by using these toys instead of going out and getting a sexually transmitted disease the way God intended.

The movie's preachiness is one huge problem — and it does get awfully tiresome after an hour or so of having messages shoved in your face — but the movie's other huge problem is that it is every bit as moronic as you'd expect from a film from the writers and director of Terminator 3. I went into this film trying to have no preconceptions, and hoping that T3 was just an aberration — but no, this film is the absolute definition of an idiotic action movie. Stuff happens for no particular reason, and there's a shocking twist every 10-15 minutes that comes out of nowhere, and then goes right back there. If you tried to diagram the plot, you'd wind up drawing an evil squiggle. One great source of plot twists is the fact that you never quite know who is really operating a robot surrogate.

Oh, and characters regularly say things like, "The only way to deal with addiction is to kill the addict!"

For some reason Surrogates reminded me of I, Robot. Maybe because both movies feature James Cromwell in a similar role. And they both have technology that everybody insists is safe inevitably biting us in the asses. But most of all, both movies have absolutely gorgeous concept design, amazing visuals, some really fun action sequences — and completely braindead storytelling. I would say Surrogates is slightly better than I, Robot, if only because it packs more of a punch to the gut.

Honestly, if you don't expect the plot to make sense, and if you enjoy giggling at ridiculous and often preachy dialog, you'll probably enjoy Surrogates a whole bunch. Bruce Willis keeps getting up, no matter what they throw at him. Even after his FBI boss says he's off the case, he keeps investigating the case. He's got some backstory involving a kid who died in an accident and a wife who's never really recovered, but mostly he's a stock-standard Willis character who won't quit until he gets to the truth. And there's nothing wrong with that.

The other thing that I really liked about Surrogates is the world-building. You get lots of interesting and sometimes horrifying hints about how this world works, including glimpsing an army "peace action" where robotic troops blow the shit out of meatsacks in some third-world country. And you sort of gather that poor people are stuck with shitty robot bodies, and you witness what looks like two surrogates beating up on a prostitute at one point. There's a nice undercurrent of corruption under the perfect shiny robot-sleeved world, which is way more effective than the movie's overt attempts to harangue us.

So to sum up: dumb movie, weak nonsense plot, incredibly preachy and sledgehammery. At the same time. it's a fun action movie with some nice set pieces, and the production design and world-building are really lovely. And it's mostly worth it for Bruce Willis' craggy, saggy, excessively mortal countenance, as he stumbles in some state of grievous injury through a landscape full of way too pretty people.

Cloudy takes us where Judi Barrett and Ron Barrett's beloved children's book did not: Inside the lives of the villagers of Chewandswallow. Before bacon and eggs rained from the skies, the town was the number one sardines producer. But when the sardine market took a turn for the worse, the town was forced to eat the cities remaining sardine stock the people became pretty miserable (Insert 'Swallow's daily paper headline "Sardines Are Super Gross").

Meanwhile, the town's littlest scientist, Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader), is dealing with some problems of his own. An aspiring inventor, complete with adorable mad scientist rock star posters, Flint spent his childhood in misery after being teased mercilessly for all his failed inventions like the ratbird or spray on shoes that you can never take off. It's the classic (and yes, a bit overdone) your-inner-self-is-special tale. Eventually, Flint holes up in his lab with his sidekick Steve, a monkey wearing a Flint-created thought-translator (which means we get to hear the inner workings of a monkey's brain, mostly hilarious one word statements HUNGRY, EXCITED, GUMMI BEARS or STEVE!!!! voiced by Neil Patrick Harris) looking for the best invention. After lots of role-playing self-narrating moments in his backyard laboratory constructed to look like a version of 2001: A Space Odyssey made up of shower curtains and egg crates, Flint creates a robot that will turn water into food... which eventually ends up in the sky pumping out food for the masses, much to everyone delight and eventual terror.

In spite of its obvious plot, every joke, side story, character and event fits into the other, perfectly weaving an incredibly emotional and engaging story that will have you laughing out loud through glossy tear-filled eyes. And, yes, I'm not the only audience member that wiped away a few stray tears by the end. Everything has a purpose in this film, be it a homage to the original with an outdoor restaurant minus the ceiling so the spaghetti can just drop in, or Flint's distant father's muppet unibrow marring his eyes from view. For when that character finally lifts up his heavy brow, the comical pay off is classic.

It's the mix of little things like the shallow thoughts of a talking monkey added to the insane attention to detail that directors and writers Phil Lord and Chris Miller put into the script that elevates this film above all the other "it's not a Pixar" animations. Their razor sharp banter puts it miles above Monsters Versus Aliens and will keep you in stitches along with the little ones. And sure, some of the humor may be over the kiddies' heads but, to quote the directors themselves, "I didn't know what Bugs Bunny was doing when he pretended to be Humphrey Bogart as a kid, but I still really enjoyed what the character was doing. And now that I'm older it's adds something new because I know who that is... He's an actor, right?"

A lot of people will try and label Cloudy's humor as "quirky" or "off the wall", but I call it current. It's the type of cutting-edge "ha ha's" perfect for today's audience, a mixture of wit and blatant in-your-face comedy backed by heart. The ability to write cutting satire that also oozes love was apparent early on in their work as co-executive producers for the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, which is another great example of the Miller and Lord style. Each character gets skewered in their time onscreen, but in a loving way. Plus, not once do you see any of these laughs coming - the jokes, like their characters, are wholly original takes on a possibly cliched moment. While other writers might have gone for the cheap and easy, Lord and Miller kept it smart and surprising all the way through.

Another delicious course to the veritable bounty of treats awaiting inside Cloudy is the 3D element. In a movie industry where each new release is practically falling all over each other to slap the "IMAX 3D" sign on the front of their marquees, it's nice to see this technique actually enhance the viewing experience. Not once did the filmmakers lean on the over-the-top pointing sticks into the crowd 3D shtick. And what was 3D film created for, if not to put the audience in the middle of a cheeseburger storm? It's beautiful and takes you right inside the ice cream color palate world of Chewandswallow.

For the odd purists that demand a by-the-book recreation the Barretts' masterpiece, I'd like to point out that an exact recreation would merely be a 10 minute movie. This film, which worked closely with the Battetts throughout the production process, truly brings Chewandswallow to life, filling the town with folk that you grow to love so that, when the flea from a spagetti tornado, you're actually rooting for their safety. The film also easily incorporates classic images from the book into the plot, making note not to leave behind a single sailing sandwich or pancake squashed public school. In fact, it even helps to explain and flesh out some of the more miraculous weather occurrences. Who didn't want a closer look at the giant orange Jell-o mold on the horizon? The movie doesn't overshadow the book for a second - it's more of a loving addition then runs along side the original.

The only pitfall for this lovely film is the constant juggling of moral lessons it labors to keep in the air. Sure, they were going to have to touch on the excess issue when Cloudy opens up a nacho cheese hot tub smack in the center of their town, but I was much more invested on the character dilemmas and the relationships rather than being forced to realistically fathom what happens to a child when you throw them in a jellybean pool (Turns out it's a food coma)... But, at the same time, the whole experience was still fairly funny. And in the end, if you don't at least get a little chocked up in the end, then you're just a cold plate of left overs.

All food puns aside, Cloudy is all heart and laughs, and my favorite movie this summer.

Jennifer's Body is as simple as chocolate-spiked spit and as complicated as you want it to be. I like that in a movie.

Here's the simple part: Nice, nerdy Needy (the awesome Amanda Seyfried from Big Love) is BFFs with the bitchy hottie Jennifer (Megan Fox). They live in a small, Minnesota town where such an unlikely pairing is possible. There are so few kids in their town that two little girls who played in the sandbox together can stay friends as teens. But there's a problem. Jennifer is always pushing Needy around.

That's how the two wind up at a show for some lame indie rock band called Low Shoulder. A band whose lead singer Jennifer is scheming to hook up with. It turns out that Low Shoulder has a scheme, too: They want to sacrifice a virgin to Satan so that their band will achieve some success without having to do something "lame" like go on Letterman. Because they're in such a backwoods town, they assume Jennifer is a virgin. But as she says later, "I'm not even a backdoor virgin." Turns out when you sacrifice a non-virgin to Satan, it causes the sacrifice to go all undead demon on your ass.

And that's when things get sick. Jennifer has to drink blood to survive, and she's not satisfied just eating dumbass members of the football team. So she starts going after people Needy likes, including Needy's floppy-haired, cute boyfriend Chip. There's an amazing awkward/cute/horrifying scene where Chip and Needy are losing their virginity together, intercut with Jennifer sipping blood out of the ripped-open torso of another guy Needy has an unacknowledged crush on.

Once Needy figures out Jennifer is a demon, she sets out to stop her. Of course everything culminates in a Needy vs. Jennifer vs. Chip showdown at the prom, an event that is hellish for girls even if they don't have best frenemies who are monsters.

Sure it's a cliched structure; you've seen it a thousand times before. That's the way horror movies work, though. They offer up a generic story and the good parts, the original parts, come in the little tweaks and fucked-up details that offer you a glimpse of the real-life horrors that lurk beneath the CG fantasy. And that's why Jennifer's Body is so rewarding as a movie: Things get really complicated the more you think about how this movie overturns your expectations.

So now for the complicated part. Let's begin with how this flick breaks one of the cardinal rules of small-scale horror. Here you have a female monster menacing a female character. Usually female monsters - especially sexy ones like Jennifer - are out to get men. Female vampires chomp on men; Grendel's mom tries to smack down Beowulf; the Species chick murders guys who are boning her. There are exceptions, like the woman vs. woman fights in Aliens or Friday the 13th (the very first movie). But those movies are quite memorable because they fly in the face of our expectations.

Jennifer eats men, but she does it to get at Needy. She eats the men Needy loves. As director Karyn Kusama has said, Jennifer's Body is a movie about toxic friendships between women. By placing this story in the context of a monster movie, it also does something interesting. First, it acknowledges that women are horribly dangerous, which you already knew if you watched The Sarah Connor Chronicles. More importantly, it acknowledges that women are dangerous to other women. Not just in a mean girls way, but in an "I will rip your lungs out" way.

Although we've seen countless movies where men are dangerous to women, and to each other, you can probably count the number of stories that acknowledge female/female violence on one hand (please count all women-in-prison movies as one finger only). This is a topic we don't like to think about because it fundamentally undermines cultural stereotypes of women as bitchy but harmless. Here we see bitchiness treated the way male aggressiveness is treated in pretty much every single action movie you've ever seen. It's deadly, important, and potentially civilization-destroying.

At the same time, Jennifer's Body also plays with the pervasiveness of male/female violence in the real world. Jennifer returns to Needy's house after her proverbial ride in Low Shoulder's van looking like a rape victim, vacant-eyed and covered in blood. She vomits up a horrific stream of black, ferromagnetic fluid, then runs out the door. In that puddle of black goo, which Needy spends all night cleaning up, we see the first signs that this ain't no girly rape revenge movie.

When Jennifer is given superhuman power by a bunch of douchey guys, she doesn't go after the guys for vengeance. Hell, she's psyched to be a god. Instead she goes after the real source of all her agony: Her best friend, who manages to have a nice boyfriend and an interesting future as a "narrative nonfiction writer" despite being a total meganerd. She's not as pretty as Jennifer, and yet Jennifer suspects that Needy is somehow, sneakily, better than she is.

This is a movie about female wrath. And it's not the clean, sympathetic wrath we saw in Thelma and Louise; it's not the trampy blankness we wanked over in Species. It's ugly, wrong, powerful wrath. The kind that builds empires and destroys towns. And men are irrelevant to this wrath, in the same way Jennifer's life was irrelevant to the guys in Low Shoulder who murdered her.

There's something deeply subversive about a movie that says women are angry, but not at men. Women have enough power now that men are hardly the issue. Now, we've got something to work out among ourselves.

I'm not sure what people are expecting when they go to see a movie like Jennifer's Body, but based on early negative reviews I'm pretty sure it wasn't this. All I can assume is that they expected something really highbrow, based on the fact that it was penned by "I have a vocab" writer Diablo Cody. Or maybe they thought it would just be long scenes of Megan Fox's tits, which would also be a letdown, since there are no tits.

Actually, that's not true. When Needy stabs Jennifer in the chest with a box cutter, Jennifer screams, "My tit!" and Needy corrects her: "No, your heart."

Jennifer's Body is in many ways just a horror trashfest, but there's also a raw, gaping wound of truth in its heart. Anyone who can take their eyes off Megan Fox's tits and look at the rage in her face will see just that.

Oh, and there are definitely spoilers in this review, although I try to avoid giving away any major twists.

As you probably know, 9 is based on a short film by writer/director Shane Acker, which garnered an Oscar nomination a few years ago. The film impressed both Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted) and Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands) so much, they both agreed to serve as producers and get it made into a full-length feature. The full-length version contains the same beautiful, unsettling animation as the short film, but fleshes out the characters and the backstory of the world — and the crucial question is whether you'll find the fleshed-out, longer version as intense and fascinating as the short film.

In 9, humans have built super-intelligent war machines, which have gone on to create other machines in their own image and then risen up to destroy us. There's never any doubt that — as Flight Of The Conchords would say — the humans are dead. So instead, our protagonists are also machines, but they're cute, cuddly machines, with skins of sackcloth and cartoony eyes that are constantly refracting their shutters in a lovable fashion. But the "ragdolls" have their own internal power struggle, between the hegemonic, conservative 1 (Christopher Plummer) and the rebellious, inquisitive 9 (Elijah Wood). 1 wants to keep the ragdolls safe, cowering in hiding, while 9 wants to go out and find the truth about their existence.

As I said, this is an unusual post-apocalyptic narrative in that we see two groups of machines fighting each other over the ashes of humanity. We slowly learn more about how the human race died, and why the bad machines are so furious. The film makes a stab at explaining the difference between good and bad technology — it has to do with how we use it, but also what parts of ourselves we put into creating it — and we see how the machines rose up and destroyed us. The scenes of rubble and devastation, with the last remnants of humanity dying off as the first ragdolls flee, are among the film's most affecting and disturbing.

The contrast between the two types of machine is really at the heart of 9 — the killer bots are all dark metal and sharp edges, glowing red eyes and bestial energy. The ragdolls, meanwhile, are meant to have a lot of engaging personality. They're definitely cute, and their concern for each other and their curiosity about the world contrasts sharply with the callousness of the slaughterbots. And the film makes sure we learn each ragdoll's unique personality early on. As Timur Bekmambetov said in our exclusive interview, each ragdoll represents an archetype, including the hero, the friend, the dictator, the crazy person, and... oh yeah, the girl. (Jennifer Connelly, representin' for the ladies.)

Sadly, the ragdolls and their "personalities" are really the main area where the movie falls the flattest, and it's almost a fatal flaw. The ragdolls — including our hero, 9 — feel so one-note that they become boring as characters. Take the central conflict between the rebellious 9 and the autocratic 1 — it feels like we see variations on the same scene a few times, but nothing interesting ever happens. We hear 1 say almost exactly the same line, "This folly will lead to no good," or words to that effect, over and over again. And then 1 narrows his little lenses in a grimace, and stalks around, while 9 spouts vague phrases about wanting to understand stuff. These two are the only ragdolls who are graced with anything even remotely approaching real personalities, and they come across like they're reading off the cliffs-notes versions of cue cards.

Where the ragdolls do shine is in their occasional moments of actual playfulness, but these are few and far between, and mostly fall towards the end of the film. There's a great bit where 8, the "big lug" who follows 1's orders unquestioningly, starts putting a magnet near his head and getting high off it. His eyes flicker and he gets this goofy grin on his face, and his enjoyment is infectious — everyone in the theater started laughing at that part. There's also a weird-but-great interlude with a record player where the ragdolls celebrate their victory (wrongly, it turns out).

Eventually we do find out the ragdolls' origins, and the movie even sort of makes a stab at explaining why each ragdoll only seems to have one aspect of a complete personality — I won't give it away, but this Washington Post review gives away the secret early on.

Honestly, I went into 9 expecting to fall in love with the film — the clips and art I'd seen had wowed me, and it seemed bracingly original. But even with a running time of 79 minutes, the film felt draggy and uninvolving. There are two different sequences where ragdolls run away from an explosion and somehow outrun it. There are two different bits where you think one of the ragdolls is dead, but then his lenses suddenly jerk to life. The film's central MacGuffin felt oddly random, and the plot depends on the characters being total idiots, until they're suddenly invincible. And the ending is both a big treacly and totally unsatisfying.

On the other hand, the film is always gorgeous — the lush animation is really its strong suit, and seeing the ragdolls on the big screen, you can really appreciate the detail that goes into them. Their stitchwork actually moves in fascinating ways as they move and talk. And there's a fascination and joy to watching them lope around the ruined landscape and dodge blades and flames — given how fragile and flammable they always seem to be. 9 is really worth seeing just for the visuals and its gothic, grotesque aesthetic of machines made in the image of animals, fighting machines made in our image.

Shane Acker has an amazing imagination and a great eye — and if he can just come up with a compelling story next time, he'll be our hero.