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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(2009)
Directed by: Stewart Hendler.

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

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

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

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

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

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Less a remake than a wholesale re-imagining of the original Halloween II, directed by Rick Rosenthal and written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill, Rob Zombie's sequel to his reboot is driven by the kind of questions that plague every doom-haunted horror buff. It may be fun to groove on the kick-ass pluck of uber-final girls like Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode, but when you really think about it, it's hard to imagine Laurie — or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre's Sally Hardesty or Scream's Sidney Barrows — ever forging a normal life from the bloody shreds left after her ordeal with a psychopath.

Death's a bitch and then you die. Period. End of story. OK, now let's elaborate: Take one part workplace-safety PSA, one part Appointment in Samarra and one part Rube Goldberg machine and you've got The Final Destination franchise: The takeaway message is that it's not nice to fool the grim reaper, and that if you try, you'll lose in the end. So how does it manifest this time around?

In Paul Solet's Grace, Madeline Matheson (Ladd) desperately wants a baby, but when she finally gets pregnant she's hurled headlong into a battle of wills with her steely mother-in-law, Vivian (Rose). Vivian dotes on her milquetoast son, Michael (Park), and alternately patronizes and belittles Madeline, whose gentle, neo-hippie inclinations strike the predatory Vivian as childishly naive. But Madeline stands by her naturopathic guns, and not only refuses to see the doctor Vivian recommends but insists on entrusting her care to feminist midwife Patricia Lang (Ferris). To read more, click here.

Shocking revelation du jour: History is written by the victors and rewritten by movies. And frankly, a whole lot of history could do with some rewriting: It's full of downbeat endings, dubious moral lessons and the kind of soul-numbing despair people pay good money to escape. That said, the brazenness of Quentin Tarantino's revisionism is in a class all its own… and speaking of class, woe betide the slacker who regards movies as cheat sheets and ignores Inglourious Basterds' opening words: "Once upon a time… in Nazi-occupied France."

1941: Colonel Hans Landa (Waltz), Hitler's notorious "Jew Hunter," descends on the small farmhouse of widower Perrier LaPadite (Menochet) in a swirl of smiles and disingenuous pleasantries. By the time Landa's done, he's cruelly coerced LaPadite into trading the Jewish neighbors he's been sheltering for the lives of his own daughters. Only teenager Shoshanna Dreyfus (Laurent) survives the subsequent slaughter of her family.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Pitt), a straight-talking cracker from the Tennessee mountains, has assembled a very special squad for a very special mission: His eight-man squad will parachute into France and put the fear of God into those Nat-zi bastards. Or more correctly, the fear of God's Chosen: Raine charges his G.I. Jews with killing, maiming and generally terrorizing the Master Race's foot soldiers, and the man who fails to accumulate 100 German scalps had better die trying. Raine's right hand, Sergeant Donny Donowitz (Hostel director Roth), whom the Nazis have nicknamed "the Bear Jew," hammers men to death with a baseball bat, while Raines carefully carves swastikas into the foreheads of the occasional soldier they set free to serve as an example to the rest.

Three years later, Shoshanna has acquired a new identity — Mlle Emmanuelle Mimieux — along with a small Parisian cinema called Le Gamaar and a devoted boyfriend (Ido) with whom she runs it. Her troubles resume when she acquires a persistent suitor, boyish movie buff and war hero Fredrick Zoller (Bruhl), whom propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels (Groth) is grooming to be Germany's very own Audie Murphy. In fact, Zoller is in Paris for the upcoming premiere of his first film, a morale-stoking account of his battlefield exploits, and everyone who's anyone in party circles will be there.

The high-powered guest list hasn't escaped the attention of the OSS, whose preposterous plot to kill the Fuhrer — endorsed by Winston Churchill (an unrecognizable Taylor) himself — is put into play, a plot that hinges on the German-language skills of a supercilious film critic-turned-spy (Fassbender) and the wiles of dazzling double agent Bridget von Hammersmark (Kruger), darling of the silver screen. Once the smitten Zoller persuades Goebbels to move the glittering event to Le Gamaar, the individual plotlines begin their inevitable dovetailing.

Contrary to received opinion, Inglourious Basterds is not a remake of Eurotrash auteur Enzo G. Castellari's 1978 Dirty Dozen knock-off; Tarantino just borrowed its English-language title and parked it atop his delirious pastiche of WWII movie tropes as seen through a very particular filter: the naughty Nazi pictures that briefly hijacked the Italian film industry in the wake of The Night Porter, Liliana Caviani's 1974 success de scandale. Italian producers smelled money in stripping the kinky hijinks of Caviani's artsy angst, but the sheer gorgeousness of Salon Kitty and company speaks to Italy's eternal affair with style, which the Nazis had in spades. Kitschy, fetishistic style, to be sure, but oh, those billowing, blood-red swastika banners and impeccably tailored uniforms — all that leather, all those silver skulls!

To call Inglourious Basterds Nazi porn is to ignore Tarantino's self-awareness — he knows exactly how vulgar it is to spin pulp entertainment from the iconography of mass murderers (which is more than can be said for, say Frank Miller, if The Spirit is anything by which to judge), and he also knows how bracingly provocative vulgarity can be.

Basterds is crammed with Tarantino's trademarks: in-jokes, exploitation shout-outs (Donowitz calls himself Antonio Marghereti when he's pretending to be an Italian cinematographer), cameo appearances (including uncredited voice roles for Samuel L. Jackson and Harvey Keitel), slyly allusive dialogue ("There is no Dietrich! There is No Riefenstahl! There is only Bridget von Hammersmark," declares a smitten fan, anticipating/paraphrasing Henri Langlois' famous declaration), throwaway movie allusions (of course Le Gamaar is playing Le Corbeau — keep a sharp eye on those posters and marquees) and brashly thrilling anachronisms. And who but Tarantino would have scored Shoshanna's final preparations for her apocalyptic revenge with David Bowie's lushly sinister "Putting out Fire With Gasoline" (the theme from Paul Schrader's Cat People remake) and dared that tight, Sergio Leone-like close up of her feline eyes?

You wouldn't think a single performance could begin to overshadow such a cornucopia of film-geek delights, but you'd be wrong: Viennese actor Waltz just about walks away with the whole shebang. Tarantino handed him the role of a lifetime, and he doesn't waste it: Waltz imbues Colonel Landa with such malicious charisma that the lights seem to dim whenever he's offscreen. What Waltz doesn't do is play the sympathy-for-the-Devil card: Landa is a great character, but Waltz never lets you forget that he's a hideous person, a preening, opportunistic sadist in love with the sound of his own voice. If pulp nihilist Jim Thompson had written Nazis, he'd have invented Hans Landa instead of Pop. 1280's Sheriff Nick Corey. Pitt's strutting, good-old-boy performance can't compare: Raine is a rip, but Landa is the carny geek show you can neither take your eyes off and nor forgive yourself for enjoying.

The notion of alienation takes on new dimensions in Peter Jackson-protégé Neill Blomkamp's first feature, a lean, take-no-prisoners tale of first contact and its disillusioning aftermath.

Twenty-eight years ago, the aliens came to Johannesburg, South Africa. Or more correctly, they came to the sky above Johannesburg, and hovered, doing nothing, for months as the world watched and waited with bated breath. When South African military finally board the ship, they found a hoard of giant, bug-eyed… well, not monsters exactly. More like starving, none-too-bright crustaceans groveling in their own filth. On the whole, the aliens are a big fat letdown.

But with the eyes of the world upon them, the South African government institutes humanitarian measures, temporarily settling the aliens in a refugee camp that becomes a squalid, permanent ghetto, administered by a privately held company called Multi-National United. It soon became clear that the aliens woiuld never be integrated into mainstream society, which contemptuously nicknames them "prawns." They're too buggy — who wants to live or work next to a seven-foot crawfish with icky, wiggly mouthparts? — quarrelsome, dirty and gross (they eat cat food!), though how much of this is their nature and how much is the result of living under cramped, filthy, isolated conditions would be a matter for debate if anyone cared enough to argue about it. The prawns may be the only matter on which the black and white South African man on the street has agreed: They're a drain on resources and the best thing would be for them to go back where they came from. Except, of course, that they can't.

This background, efficiently established in mockumentary interviews and archival footage, brings us up to the story's starting point: The squalor and lawlessness of District 9 — which, like all poverty zones abandoned by legitimate authorities, is being run with an iron hand by thugs, in this case Nigerian gangsters who do a thriving business in trading cat food for alien weapons and dreaming of somehow acquiring the creatures' superior physical strength — has become an embarrassment. So, the government builds a new facility, considerably farther from greater Johannesburg area, and charges M.N.U. with handling the resettlement.

The man in charge of obtaining signed consent from each and every resident of District 9 is Wikus van der Merwe (Copley), a born bureaucrat who dotes on his pretty wife, Tania (Haywood) and owes his career to his father-in-law, M.N.U. bigwig Piet Smith (Minnaar). Wikas doesn't think of himself as prejudiced — doesn't he work side-by-side with a black man (Nkosi) whom he's the first to praise as a clever fellow — but the prawns aren't human, are they? South Africa has laws and Wikas is going to follow them, but the prawns make it tough to treat them decently, what with their insistence on creating weapons tailored to their own biochemistry, living like pigs and clinging to their fetid shacks as though they were real homes when everyone knows that wherever their home is, it's not Johannesburg.

Naturally, the resettlement gets off to a rocky start and Wikas is accidentally sprayed with some alien substance while raiding the shack of one "Christopher Johnson" (Cope, whose motion-captured work provided the foundation for all the aliens), a prawn who seems to have more going on between the ears (or where any decent creature would have ears), than the average alien. The aftermath of Wikas' little accident plunges him into a world of vicious medical experiments, totalitarian cruelty and ironic desperation: As Wikas begins to undergo a grotesque metamorphosis, he's forced to take refuge in District 9 and rely on Johnson's help to avoid hit squads dispatched by his own father-in-law.

District 9's allegorical nature isn't especially subtle; what makes it so effective is its matter-of-factness, which is hard not to ascribe to the fact that Blomkamp was born and raised in the shadow of apartheid and its aftermath. District 9 unfolds in a world where aliens are just one more unwanted minority, and Blomkamp gets the details so right that they almost slip by unnoticed, like the fact that Johnson clearly understands English perfectly while Wikas and others forced to have regular contact with the aliens have picked up a smattering of their language (a series of subtitled clicks and damp whirring sounds) without bothering to learn more because, well, why would they?

Jackson's proud claims that District 9 is the summer of 2009's only original genre film are a little exaggerated, but wholly understandable: In a summer dominated by prefabricated, merchandise-driven sci-fi and action movies like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, District 9 is a bracing breath of fresh air. Sure, it owes a debt of imagination to predecessors as diverse as The Quatermass Xperiment, Aliens, Blade Runner, David Cronenberg's The Fly and the TV series Alien Nation, but it wears its influences well, integrating them into a well-thought-out drama about what it means to be human and whether or not humans have a proprietary hold on those qualities.

A drama with big guns, car chases and exploding cars, to be sure, it is at heart a drama nonetheless, because what drives District 9 is Wikas' awakening to the truth of his life. Call it his Matrix moment, his road-to-Damascus revelation or his rendezvous with naked lunch, and make what you will of the fact that one letter turns a pawn into a prawn, but Wikas' transformation from blinkered cog to reluctant rebel is genuinely moving. It's fair to point out that it verges on the inspirational-movie stereotype of ethic minorities as agents of change for white folks, in part because no matter how carefully Blomkamp draws the relationship between Johnson and his son, Little CJ, they're too, well, prawn-like for the average viewer to identify with. But at the same time, that speaks to one of District 9's most pointed underlying conceits. As to complaints about the not-so-happy happy ending, they're thoroughly misguided: Raging against the machine may be liberating, but liberty comes at a price, a price Wikas pays.