Have I mentioned recently how much I love Pixar? When you have a company creating film after film, and the worst thing that you can say about its weakest (Cars) is that it was “just good,” then you have a once in a lifetime company to be treasured -- and those who run it should be thanked endlessly for their work.

Some people raised an eyebrow when Toy Story 3 was announced. Was Pixar being strong-armed by Disney just to squeeze more money out of a brand consisting of two excellent movies? Were they running out of original ideas (snicker… RIGHT). Well now that it’s done, let’s be supremely thankful that Pixar veterans Lee Unkrich, John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton brought the now familiar gang back together for a final film.

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The long-distance relationship is a fact of life for many couples, especially at a time of high unemployment and economic anxiety.
“Going the Distance,” which unites its young lovers briefly in New York City before sending one of them out to San Francisco, acknowledges both the difficulty and the comic potential of the arrangement, and does so with enough insight and charm to make you wonder why frequent-flier love is not a more popular theme in romantic comedies.

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Well folks, this is one of the big ones: One Missed Call has been named number 2 on Rotten Tomatoes’ Worst Movies of All Time list, and I’ve been putting this review off for too long. Right from the get go, I see the first thing wrong with this horror film about people receiving killer missed calls on their cells – nobody would ever call these people. They’re far too bland and characterless to ever receive any willing phone calls. But then, I guess that’s why they’re getting killed off. Let’s dive right into One Missed Call.

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There are two kinds of fantasy adventures—those that take place in another world (The Lord of the Rings, The Golden Compass), and those in which the fantasy world exists parallel to and often spills into our own (The Chronicles of Narnia, Pan's Labyrinth). The Spiderwick Chronicles, which embeds spiritual truth in the guise of mythology, belongs in the latter category. Much more fantastical and far more handsome than the trailers reveal, The Spiderwick Chronicles is a thrilling adventure for children of all ages.

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This may sound silly, but there's no way that The Day The Earth Stood Still would exist today in any sort of proverbial vacuum. To get the most obvious reason out of the way, we wouldn't have the 1951 original to lift from, in which an extraterrestrial visitor advises Earthlings to knock off their paranoid Cold War aggression, or else. Secondly, this incarnation is so transparently indebted to the likes of Twentieth Century Fox's other PG-13 sci-fi actioners, Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, that it's hard to imagine the same studio putting out this film first. Better yet, try seeing this particular re-imagining come about without the success of Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds bolstering the profile of other '50s sci-fi efforts (new variations on Forbidden Planet and When Worlds Collide loom still on the horizon).

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Bottom Line: Effective jolts await in this ultra-low-budget haunted-house tale, but audiences will need extraordinary patience.
Hoping to catch lightning in a bottle (or the ghost in the machine), Paramount Pictures has been treading carefully with its release of "Paranormal Activity," a pickup from Slamdance 2008 whose ridiculously low budget of $15,000 and cinema-verite approach to the supernatural evoke that ultimate sleeper success, "The Blair Witch Project." The movie's utter lack of production value has mandated an unconventional word-of-mouth strategy that incorporates midnight debut screenings in 13 college towns and a website competition to determine which parts of the country will get it next.

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Why do bad movies happen to good people? Eddie Murphy gives a very warm, very funny performance as a stressed-out financial executive trying to be a better parent to his seven-year-old daughter in Imagine That, which opened wide today. Evan Danielson is a gentler variation on the wholesome paternal figures he's previously played in Doctor Dolittle, Daddy Day Care, and The Haunted Mansion. In those roles, he's portrayed successful workaholics who've neglected their families to varying degrees.

He was beset by talking animals in Doctor Dolittle and its sequel, by a flock of other people's children in Daddy Day Care, and by ghosts in The Haunted Mansion. In contrast, Imagine That is much more intimate. Evan is beset by only two people: his daughter Olivia (Yara Shahidi), resentful of his neglect, puts a baby blue blanket on her head and talks to a group of imaginary friends; meanwhile, his fellow financial executive Johnny Whitefeather (Thomas Haden Church) trades on his Native American heritage to compete with Evan and steal his clients.


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Madeline Matheson (Jordan Ladd) is a vegan, baby-sling-wearing, animal-loving mom who wouldn’t hurt a fly. That is, until flies start gathering around her baby, Grace, who’s awfully pale and emits an odor even a mother can’t love.

“Grace” is also the title of this chilly and slow-moving horror film, which plays with ideas of mother love, obsessive child rearing and liberal spinelessness, adding a helping of trendy vampirism.

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It’s almost impossible to imagine a film doing total justice to the book it’s based on. Similarly, it’s nearly unfathomable that one piece of fiction translated into the language of film can pierce through the flesh with surgical precision to expose the beating heart, raw human emotions – yet this is precisely what Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go” does.

The film is based on the best-selling novel of Kazuo Ishiguro, a harrowing science fiction novel in which science fiction actually comes second to the portrayal of human emotions, most of them internalized.

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In rural Mississippi, Lazarus, a former blues musician who survives by truck farming, finds a young girl nearly beaten to death near his home. Shes the white-trash town tramp, molded by a life of sexual abuse at the hands of her father and verbal abuse from her mother, who seems to delight in reminding Rae of her mistake in not aborting her. Lazarus, who is also facing personal crisis at the dissolution of his marriage, nurses Rae back to health, providing her with gentle, fatherly advice as well as an education in blues music. Raes boyfriend, Ronnie, goaded by the man who nearly beat Rae to death, misunderstands the relationship between Lazarus and Rae, and vows to kill him. Lazarus, exhibiting a street-smart understanding of violence and its motives, calls Ronnies bluff, senses that he is as troubled as Rae, and becomes a guiding force in the young couples resurrection.

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