Red Vines have better twists

The Uninvited manipulates its audience for no reason other than because it can. It sets up one story only to swap in another later, it bludgeons the soundtrack with ominous rattling and volume spikes, it shows us dreams that are blatant lies, and then, in the throes of desperation, it cheats one ending with another. Abuse like this hasn’t been dealt to punching bags.

No wonder studios stopped screening horror movies for critics: modern horrors are visual cons intended for teens with disposable allowances, not critics who can see through the wafer-thin plot devices and petty manipulation. Strangely enough, though, The Uninvited was screened for critics, which means someone at Dreamworks didn’t get a memo or the studio actually believes in its film. Or a third choice: no one at Dreamworks even cares anymore.

The Uninvited is a remake of the Korean movie A Tale of Two Sisters. Both movies were released after The Sixth Sense, which is a critical piece of trivia you’d look up on your own after viewing Uninvited. I’ve saved you a Google search, and maybe by the end of this review, a trip to the theater.

A lot can be diagnosed about a movie by its first line. I’m reminded of Terrence Malick’s Badlands, in which Martin Sheen begins his descent into madness with this: “I’ll give you a dollar to eat that collie.” In Uninvited, two teens are making out. He sits up: “I love you … and I have a condom.” Nothing says “welcome to our movie” better than empty proclamations and safe sex.

He is random dude at party. She is Anna (Emily Browning) and she’s dreaming of the night her mother died under mysterious circumstances. She wakes in therapy, her shrink telling her, “Sometimes we survive by remembering. Sometimes by forgetting.” He doesn't know it, but he just gave away the ending of the movie. It's Anna's last day in a psych ward; the camera cleverly shows us the scars on her wrists and then the loony neighbors in robes. Daddy, an author of books better than this screenplay, takes her home to a sprawling mansion on a lake. The boathouse, where mom died, has been rebuilt and dad (David Strathairn) has a new girlfriend, a too-young-for-him babe named Rachael (Elizabeth Banks). Rachael, realizing she's in a film, commits various acts of step-momery: shadowy eavesdropping, kitchen renovation, heavy-handed requests for grocery assistance and sexy workouts in stretch pants and nipple-accenting sports bras.

Anna, modest and wholesome, cavorts around the lake with her sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel), whose wardrobes consist of bikinis for all occasions. Based on increasingly deranged dreams — dead bodies in plastic bags, twisted corpses with broken backs, catatonic, pale-faced children — Anna and Alex come to the conclusion that Rachael was responsible for their mother’s death. So Rachael, the bimbo, has to go.

Meanwhile, their father is oblivious, the film’s most aggravating flaw. Strathairn, who was recently Edward R. Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck, plays his author as a practical guy, but so clueless it’s amazing he could even conceive children, let alone raise them past their terrible twos. He never notices their cries for attention, the daggers shooting from his new girlfriend’s eyes, the manipulation of Anna’s moods by Rachael’s snotty attitude. Later, when the rules have changed and the father’s role has been reversed, his actions still seem cold and distanced. If there’s ever a sequel (The Re-Invited maybe) it should be about Anna’s legal emancipation from her dad, the heartless jerk.

Poor Anna. She’s the film’s scapegoat, and it all seems too cruel to young actress Emily Browning, the teen version of Angelina Jolie who gave an energetic performance in A Series of Unfortunate Events. Anna’s perception is shaped by her dreams, which is Uninvited’s most manipulative cheat. If dreams are absolute truths, then the movie shouldn’t be able to swap them in and out like socks. As we’re beaten over the head with these subjective plot-altering dreams, we’re distanced from the one character we’ve come to like in a film that’s not all that likeable.

Anna’s whole messy affair — none of which is very scary, I should add — ends with a twist that redefines everything that happens before it. I’m convinced these endings were designed to create repeat business for movies that most people will have regretted seeing once, nevermind twice.

When a tango just won't do ...

Some movies leave us speechless. Some movies just leave us. They silently float from the screen in pieces until nothing’s left but emptiness.

Ten years ago I was working as a projectionist at a movie theater. After a shift I sat in on the late showing of Robert Zemeckis’ Contact, which ends on this contemplative note, silent and soothing. The camera panned up and we were looking at the stars with only our thoughts and nothing else, and then the screen faded to black. Everyone just sat in the theater. No one moved. No one spoke. In the hallway, you could have heard the electrons spinning on the head of a pin as people filed out while reaching into their souls for answers to the film.

I’ve seen many good movies since then, but none that had the same effect. None until Waltz With Bashir, a film that ends with a punch to the gut, a gasping horror. And then silence. Spoiling the ending any further would be criminal, so I’ll zip it up there.

Waltz With Bashir is a war story made even more graphic and — irony be damned — real through its medium of choice: animation. It’s animated in the rotoscope style, which involves drawing or painting over live-action movement captured on film. It also comes from Israel, so the language spoken is primarily Hebrew. All totaled up, this is the best Israeli rotoscoped war movie in Hebrew you will ever see; not to mention, one of the most important foreign films ever made.

Bashir, which is somewhat autobiographical, is written, directed and produced by former Israeli soldier Ari Folman, whose story provides a general outline for the film. He also voices himself, a soldier trying to shed light on a recurring dream that may be his last memory of a massacre in Lebanon.

It begins with a different dream: A man is plagued by 26 savage dogs in his sleep. He shares the dream over a beer with a friend he served with in the military. “How do you know there was 26, and not 30?” the friend asks. The man, recounting a great pain, explains: As a sniper during the 1982 war in Lebanon he was afraid to shoot people, so his commanders ordered him to shoot dogs that gathered on the edges of towns. He remembered each and every dog, all 26 of them. And now they haunt him while he sleeps.

The film is not about the dog sniper, whose story provides the setup for Bashir’s colorful style and tone, but about the friend, Ari, who questions why he doesn’t remember his own war experiences in Beirut. Waltz With Bashir, very much like the culturally significant Slumdog Millionaire in its hyper-stylized construction and use of flashbacks, is Ari’s interviews of those he served with. The interviews are quiet and solemn, almost journalistic, but the flashbacks they spawn are high-energy rock-'n'-rolla, indicitive of the intensity of war and its waging. Ari hopes to find someone who can interpret his own dream, in which he’s on a beach near a city as flares float down from the sky.

Like Apocalypse Now before it, Bashir is war amped up to a surreal level. The images we see could be from dreams — maybe some really are dreams — but the movie presents them as reality: an AK-47 electric guitar, a soldier frying an egg on the hood of a bombed-out car, a convertible with balloon streamers in a column of tanks, a soldier waltzing in a street as he returns machine gun fire. The film also employs trick photography to tell its story: an RPG firing at slow motion, commuters in time-lapse, various color effects, silhouettes, bleached-out landscapes. These things are real, if only in the minds of the people who experienced them.

But an early scene in the movie questions even this logic. We’re told that a researcher showed 10 photos to to people from their childhoods. One of the 10 is fake — fabricated to look like the person was at a carnival. For all 10 photos, including the fake, most people could identify the memory and provide a story to go with it. The conclusion he makes is that memory is not real, just our perception of memory — “Memory is dynamic; it’s alive,” he says. The scene, which tells us to question what we see in a film based entirely on memory, ends deceptively with a man talking in a kitchen and behind him is a window that looks out over, of all things, a carnival. Is the carnival in the background itself a skewed memory? Was it used in the discussion because it was an available example right out the window? The movie holds its secret, including its last big one, very close.

Bashir is also a satire on war, especially war in the Middle East, where innocent life is extinguished more out of carelessness than out of hatred. In an early scene, soldiers are ordered to shoot, so they do … into the darkness at nothing — it’s amazing they had enough ammo for more than about 15 minutes. In another scene, a Mercedes speeds down a road and Israeli soldiers blow up entire neighborhoods around it without so much as denting a fender. A sniper aims for the driver and shoots, but the bullet passes through the front windows and kills a man on a camel who happened to be passing by. Jets strafe and miss, and artillery rounds sail hundreds of yards too far. By the time the car exits the scene, all of Beirut is crumbling. The scene is made more sinister when it’s revealed the commander who gave the order to destroy the car plucked the command from a random scene in a porno he was watching. Suddenly Kurtz doesn’t seem so nutty.

What it all leads up to is a revelation: Ari was witness to the Sabra and Shatila massacres of West Beirut, where Lebanese Christian Phalangists were given access to Palestinian refugee camps to kill thousands of men, women and children. “You have become your own Nazi,” someone tells Ari, whose role was not murderer but casual observer. The film ends as his memories flood over him, washing away his innocence but not his shame. These massacres were real, and Waltz With Bashir is Ari Folman’s admission of his role. And his apology.

Note: Waltz With Bashir was released in other markets in December and is therefore eligible for this March’s Academy Awards. Had it been screened in Arizona in time, it would have ended up very high on my list of best films from 2008.

All originality is gone ... even with movie posters

With billions of people on this planet, it's true when they say all originality is extinct. Natalie Portman, bless her heart, in Garden State when she stood in her room and did something completely original — even that was a something some Chinese person did like six hundred years ago, five minutes before he was strapped to a canon and had his insides blown out like confetti for doing something that was clearly retarded. Here, I'll try: "kfdfasfkjasdfijf adfijdfijfidfjsdifj dfjdfklsdfj jsefjdfjwfjefuhv." Even that permutation of random letter mashing is plagiarism of something somewhere.

This all leads up to two posters. Yes, they look alike, but is it coincidence or just shameless plagiarism at its worst? One is Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds from several years ago, and the other is Knowing, that new Nic Cage movie about a kid whose time capsule buddy can predict natural disasters. Each poster has a world on an all-black background. Pretty basic design, I know, but come on; just look at them.

A look ahead: Cinema 2009

And I thought oh-eight was great.

Here is an abbreviated list of movies opening in 2009. In no way is this list complete, but it is the largest list Pick-Up Flix has undertaken for a movie preview. As always, see you at the movies.

— Michael Clawson

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Notorious
The Scoop: It's a bio-flick on slain rapper Notorious B.I.G. as he works up from rock-slinger to hip-hop superstar. By the looks of the trailer, the film portrays Sean "Puffy" Combs (here played by Derek Luke) as Biggie's driving force and also his downfall.
Why Care? The young actor Jamal Woolard does a mean Biggie, voice and all.

Opens Jan. 16

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Taken
The Scoop: A retired spy, who plays hardcore bad-ass like he knows what he's doing, goes on the hunt for an abducted daughter traveling in France. The first trailers reveal too much, though: she is abducted by human smugglers
Why Care? Liam Neeson, who will next play Abraham Lincoln in a Steven Spielberg project, looks convincing as the desperate dad in this sleek international thriller.

Opens Jan. 30

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Coraline
The Scoop: A little girl finds a secret door that leads to another world that mirrors her own with some scary deviations. The plot might be in direct competition with Where the Wild Things Are (see below).
Why Care? The stop-motion animation looks delightfully quirky. Also, there’s a movie poster for each letter of the alphabet. Clever stuff!

Opens Feb. 6

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Fanboys
The Scoop: Star Wars dorks travel to George Lucas’ ranch to steal Episode I for a dying friend. Along the way they meet some real Star Wars actors and William Shatner, who shats his dialogue like usual.
Why Care? The movie makes fun of, and also cheerfully embraces, Star Wars culture. It almost didn't come out, though, with so much wrangling over the elements of the plot. At one point, the real fanboys seemed to revolt until producers blinked and agreed to release the film as it was originally written.

Opens Feb. 6

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He’s Just Not That Into You
The Scoop: Women fall into and out of love in Baltimore.
Why Care? The female cast: Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Connelly, Scarlett Johansson and Drew Barrymore. On the bad side: Besides having a terrible title — almost as bad as I Think I Love My Wife — this flick will attempt, and fail, to create meaningful stories in a post-Wire Baltimore.

Opens Feb. 6

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Franklyn
The Scoop: A Matrix-y dark sci-fi that looks half dream, half dominatrix hell, where a guy with a mask gets revenge against a totalitarian state for a variety of things, some of which might involve a very hot Eva Green. The trailer has lots of guns, kung-fu and rain, because fighting always looks cool in the rain.
Why Care? It's writer/director Gerald McMorrow's pet project. Don't bother look for a McMorrow in your Rolodex, though — this is his first big movie. And by the looks of it, he went all out with special effects, stars and a killer dystopian sci-fi landscape.

Opens Feb. 20

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Watchmen
The Scoop: Superheroes and villains of all makes and models clash in Alan Moore’s graphic-novel-turned-film. Seriously, there's a guy named Owl Man, or Owly, or Owl Hawk ... have all the good superhero names been taken?
Why Care? I’m not sure really. Ask a Watchmen fanatic. It all looks like superhero mumbo-jumbo to me. Beware, though: the movie might be delayed by courtroom litigation.

Opens March 6

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Race to Witch Mountain
The Scoop: Two kids with other-worldly powers must be protected from our UFO-killing government by a meathead who was formerly a professional wrestler, the fake kind.
Why Care? Disney has brought in Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to anchor this kid-friendly remake. But does anyone seriously remember the original?

Opens March 13

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Duplicity
The Scoop: Corporate spies join forces to plunder a lucrative business deal from beneath their respective boss’ feet.
Why Care? Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, both as sexy as ever, reunite for the first time since Closer.

Opens March 20

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I Love You, Man
The Scoop: A guy with no friends has to find a bromance in time to have a best man at his wedding.
Why Care? Paul Rudd and Jason Segel (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) are comic dynamite.

Opens March 20

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Monsters vs. Aliens
The Scoop: Aliens invade Earth and all hope rests on a group of monsters who have been secretly imprisoned by the US government. The monsters include a fishy creature, a blob of blue ooze, a gerbil, a cockroach and Susan, a 50-foot homemaker.
Why Care? The first trailers paint wild, inventive fun across the board. Although, it is no Pixar.

Opens March 27

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Fast & Furious
The Scoop: Felony-collecting gearheads unite to rev engines and bring down a drug dealer with fast wheels. The first trailer, which is apparently half a scene from the movie, shows that the stunts have become more outlandish and the cars more acrobatic.
Why Care? Vin Diesel, who’s been absent from the series for two entries, returns. Apparently, he can now talk at a rip-roarin' six-words-a-minute.

Opens April 3

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Dragonball Evolution
The Scoop: A warrior summons all his mystical powers to fight a force greater than anything seen in a magical kingdom where orbs control the balance of power among fighters. (I can't read that sentence without wanting to club a Dragonball fan in his mouth.)
Why Care? It’s a hit anime cartoon. Children who’ve seen the show will dig it; adults most definitely won’t.

Opens April 8

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The Soloist
The Scoop: A reporter (Robert Downey Jr.) discovers life in a gifted musician (Jamie Foxx) who’s homeless and kinda loopy.
Why Care? Jamie Foxx, love him or hate him, plays crazy all too well.

Opens April 24

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X-Men Origins: Wolverine
The Scoop: The origin story of Wolverine, the X-Men’s tough-as-nails bruising rogue. Oh, and he has retractable claws that can cut anything, even those knives that never go dull.
Why Care? Hugh Jackman has done Wolverine with great success three times before. His return should be fun.

Opens May 1

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Next Day Air
The Scoop: A deliveryman drops a drug shipment to the wrong address. Trouble soon follows. Hey, wasn't this the big conflict at the end Three Men and a Baby?
Why Care? Lyricist lounger Mos Def, who stars here, is almost a better actor than a rapper, which is no easy feat.

Opens May 8

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Star Trek
The Scoop: So begins the life of James T. Kirk. The film will introduce us to the Enterprise, deep space, Spock and everything else in the Trekkie universe.
Why Care? Because Captain Kirk isn’t played by William Shatner (Chris Pine this time), and because director J.J. Abrams (TV’s Lost) has made this new Trek a real action film, not just men in jumpsuits falling down on that bridge set.

Opens May 8

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Angels & Demons
The Scoop: Religious expert Robert Langdon uncovers a terrorist plot at the Vatican. The weapon: anti-matter, of which a single grain can evaporate the heal and toe of Italy.
Why Care? Ron Howard again directs Tom Hanks in a film based on a book by Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code). Catholics should love it because it shows a high-ranking cardinal doing all kinds of un-Catholic things in their Holiest of Holies, the Vatican.

Opens May 15

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Bruno
The Scoop: Sascha Baron Cohen plays a flamboyantly gay fashion designer as he experiences American culture in the style of Borat. We've already heard of Bruno staging a coup at a fashion event. No doubt the lawsuits are already pending.
Why Care? The full title is Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt.

Opens May 15

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Terminator: Salvation
The Scoop: The computers have scorched the Earth and taken out most of humanity in a nuclear holocaust. All that’s left is the human resistance led by John Connor (Christian Bale). Finally, we get to see the world that three movies attempted to stop.
Why Care? Even though McG (Charlie’s Angels) is directing, Bale can be trusted, especially after his Batman reinvention.

Opens May 22

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The Brothers Bloom
The Scoop: Grifter brothers wine and dine an heiress out of her money, but not without falling in love with her and her eccentric, infectious spirit.
Why Care? Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz are magical. No really, Brody does this thing with a cigarette through a coin that's pretty neat.

Opens May 29

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Up
The Scoop: An old hermit, tired of living in a construction zone, affixes millions of balloons to his house and floats away. A Boy Scout tags along for the adventure that stretches across the United States.
Why Care? Up is a Pixar film, and Pixar films are as close to perfect as the cinema gets.

Opens May 29

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Land of the Lost
The Scoop: Will Farrell and friends discover a prehistoric land of dinosaurs and absurd creatures. The look and feel of this one is supposed to be cheesy and fake, so maybe it will be fun.
Why Care? Because it’s based on the old serials, it’s campier than Jurassic Park.

Opens June 5

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The Year One
The Scoop: Two lazy cavemen (Jack Black and Michael Cera) are exiled from their village and must survive on their own in their prehistoric world.
Why Care? Harold Ramis, the geeky Ghostbuster, is directing. His résumé also includes episodes of The Office, Analyze This, Groundhog Day and Caddyshack. It better be better than that 10,000 B.C. or that other ug-ug caveman movie with Darryl Hannah.

Opens June 19

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Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
The Scoop: Optimus Prime and other transforming Autobots fight off waves of Decepticons to protect a human who saved the day in the first Transformers.
Why Care? Transformers, they’re more than meets the eye. And Megan Fox, inexplicably branded the hottest person alive by too many magazines, is back. I hated the first Transformers — fueling even more Michael Bay hatred — so I wish this one nothing but bad reviews and broken film splices.

Opens June 26

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The Road
The Scoop: A father and son seeking warmer climates south walk a deserted road in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Along the way they meet skewered babies, roving cannibals, legless buffets and The Wire's Omar.
Why Care? Viggo Mortensen looks like he brings the father from Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to life. To obad this movie has been delayed; the release date is still not final.

Opens first half of 2009

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Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
The Scoop: A sloth, mammoth, and saber-toothed tiger leave the Ice Age to join dinosaurs in prehistoric times.
Why Care? The animation looks beautiful and John Leguizamo’s silly sloth voice is hilarious, if also very mean toward people with speeth impedemenths.

Opens July 1

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Public Enemies
The Scoop: Law enforcement pros attempt to take down a set of notorious gangsters, including John Dillinger, in 1930s Chicago.
Why Care? 1. Michael Mann (Miami Vice, Heat) is directing. 2. Christian Bale stars. 3. Johnny Depp stars. 4. No other reasons are even required.

Opens July 1

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2012
The Scoop: The Mayan calendar ends in 2012. Apparently, so does the planet unless a group of scientists stop it. But if the Mayans were so smart, why aren't they doing Ponzi scams in New York City today.
Why Care? The movie is directed by Roland Emmerich, who also did another world-ending adventure, The Day After Tomorrow. The trailer shows a giant wave destroying a Buddhist temple. Apparently, these giant waves never get old since we see them in every one of these movies. At this point Emmerich is just plagiarizing himself plagiarizing.

Opens July 10

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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
The Scoop: Harry Potter starts his sixth year at Hogwarts and, of course, everything goes haywire with evil villain Voldemort running loose. This year has big revelations for Dumbledore, Harry’s wise magician principal.
Why Care? The movie was supposed to come out in 2008, but was delayed, with much sighing from Potter fans, to this summer. I understated that: in reality, when news came that the movie would be delayed, Potter fans all at once shit themselves.

Opens July 17

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The Taking of Pelham 123
The Scoop: Armed terrorists hold a New York City subway car hostage until the police come through with a huge ransom. Strangely enough, the subway car they hijack has urine and/or vomit on at least three seats.
Why Care? Great cast: Denzel Washington, John Tavolta, Luis Guzman, John Turturro and James Gandolfini, who we don't see enough since The Sopranos.

Opens July 24

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Funny People
The Scoop: Adam Sandler plays a terminally ill comedian who makes friends with a novice opening act.
Why Care? Judd Apatow (40-Year-Old Virgin) might actually — although, no promises — give Sandler a reason to be funny again. And the cast is huge: Sandler, Seth Rogen, Leslie Mann, Eric Bana, Jonah Hill, Jason Schwartzman and the RZA.

Opens July 31

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G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra
The Scoop: Villainous terrorist cell Cobra must be eliminated by G.I. Joe, an elite company of soldiers.
Why Care? Besides girls (and even some of them), who didn’t play with G.I. Joe action figures as youngsters?

Opens Aug. 7

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Inglourious Basterds
The Scoop: American soldiers strike fear in Nazi-occupied France by terrorizing Axis forces with unmerciful brutality.
Why Care? Quentin Tarantino has been working on this grindhouse remake for years. And Brad Pitt stars. But what gives with the spelling of the title?

Opens Aug. 28

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9
The Scoop: Miniature sack people must journey through post-apocalyptic landscapes when their futures are threatened by creepy villains.
Why Care? The first trailer looks amazing, the voice cast (with Elijah Wood in the lead) is perfect and it’s being produced by Tim Burton, no newcomer to nightmarish visions.

Opens Sept. 9

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Shutter Island
The Scoop: A US marshal looks for a murderer who may have escaped to a remote island.
Why Care? It’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s fourth film with Martin Scorsese. Expect greatness, as alawys.

Opens Oct. 2

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Where the Wild Things Are
The Scoop: A hell-raising little boy in his pajamas disappears into a make-believe world inhabited by friendly monsters and bizarre vistas.
Why Care? Creative genius Spike Jonze has toiled on this for years, which either means it’s brilliant or a disaster. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Opens Oct. 16

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Amelia
The Scoop: A look into the life of pilot Amelia Earhart, who is still missing to this day.
Why Care? Hilary Swank, one of the most graceful acting forces of the modern age, plays Amelia, who was probably a lesbian. Not that lesbian pilots is a problem or anything. It's the lesbian men that worry me.

Opens Oct. 23

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A Christmas Carol
The Scoop: An animated version of Ebenezer Scrooge’s nighttime journey into his past, present and future. Based on the book by Charles Dickens, that author people quote to 100-percent guarantee to make you feel like an idiot for not reading. The 87-percent guarantee is typically Dostoyevsky. The 3-percent guarantee is the author of those Clifford books.
Why Care? Robert Zemeckis (Polar Express) has animated stars Jim Carrey and Gary Oldman for nearly every role. Zemeckis' motion-capture methods are improving, but are still kinda creepy.

Opens Nov. 6

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The Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Scoop: After stealing from three greedy farmers, a rambunctious fox and his friends are set upon by all sorts of traps and torture devices that are sure to ruin a fox’s day. Sly as a you-know-what, this canid won’t be undone. It’s based on a Roald Dahl book.
Why Care? It’s director Wes Anderson’s first foray into animation. And Anderson is a genius.

Opens Nov. 6

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The Wolf Man
The Scoop: A shaggy American turns into an even shaggier werewolf.
Why Care? Benicio Del Toro could be a werewolf without any makeup.

Opens Nov. 6

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New Moon
The Scoop: More emo teen angst with Bella and vampire Edward.
Why Care? Because Stephenie Meyers’ books have captivated the fans no longer captivated by Harry Potter.

Opens Nov. 20

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Sherlock Holmes
The Scoop: Detective Sherlock Holmes, with his sidekick Watson, pokes around a murder that threatens all of England. No word on the hounds or the the baskervilles.
Why Care? Holmes is based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous character, directed by Guy Ritchie and stars Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr. And because Guy Ritchie needs our support now that he’s Madge-free.

Opens Nov. 20

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The Lovely Bones
The Scoop: A murdered teen watches over her family and murderer from beyond this world.
Why Care? Peter Jackson, still fresh off King Kong and Lord of the Rings, tries out a softer, although still dark, story.

Opens Dec. 11

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Avatar
The Scoop: A war veteran joins in the salvation, or is it exploitation, of an exotic world on the brink of war. It’s being billed as a new kind of science fiction film.
Why Care? After years of documentaries and IMAX films, James Cameron directs an honest-to-goodness real movie.

Opens Dec. 18

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Killing Pablo
The Scoop: American intelligence and Columbian military hunt down and kill cocaine profiteer Pablo Escobar.
Why Care? For starters, Christian Bale has a role in director Joe Carnahan’s drug flick. And also because this is a bona fide film version of Medellin, the movie-within-a-show on HBO’s Entourage.

Opens late 2009

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