In a way, I wish 9 was more weird. On first blush, Shane Acker’s animated film is quite unusual—a post-apocalyptic universe where rag dolls imbued with souls fight man-made machines run amok. But once you get past the whole “whoah, our heroes are rag dolls” thing, it’s pretty conventional stuff. Sometimes it reminded me of Wall-E (a good thing, I suppose) and sometimes it reminded me of The Transformers (very definitely a bad thing) and sometimes it reminded me of Coraline, which also featured a a creepy doll universe and was also (not coincidentally) executive produced by Tim Burton.

The post-apocalyptic world, for example, while beautifully animated, resembles pretty much every other post-apocalyptic world I’ve seen in films—blown out windows, dusty streets, eerily abandoned monuments. The rag doll heroes—instead of names, their scientist creator (now dead) has given them numbers—are archetypes. Our hero 9 (the voice of Elijah Wood), is brave, curious, and naïve. His best friend 5...

It takes a lot of chutzpah to do a film about the most famous concert ever and have the action go near Woodstock, along the outskirts of Woodstock, behind the scenes at Woodstock, but never show us the concert itself. It could lead to a vague sense that there’s a better movie to be seen, off screen.

And to a certain extent, I admire Ang Lee for doing it (I'm actually a huge Lee fan and even liked his much-maligned Lust, Caution). After all, the Woodstock story has been told many times before. However, the story of the small innkeepers in the Catskills who unwittingly become the host to half a million hippie guests? Now that story has not been told.

And Lee almost pulls it off.

As the film starts, we meet the dutiful son, Elliot Teichberg (newcomer Demetri Martin) and his crotchety innkeeper parents, Jake (Henry Goodman) and Sonya (Imelda Staunton). The Teichberg’s have owned their hotel for years now, and it has fallen into disrepair—Sonya barks at the customers and rations...

Bandslam is better than it has any right to be. After all, its premise is strictly out of the Disney playbook: Geeky teen loner becomes the manager of a band, and finds himself torn between two girls, the band’s (gorgeous) rebellious lead singer and the (equally gorgeous) bookish outsider he’s partnered with in his human studies class.

And yet . . . I sensed something was up with Bandslam right out of the gate, when our hero Will (Gaelen Connell) wrote a letter to David Bowie. (Had his letter been to Nickelback, I would've known I was in for a long night.) Turns out, Will has been writing letters to Bowie for a while now, undeterred by the fact that Bowie never writes back.

My second clue that Bandslam had a few tricks up its sleeve was when I saw that Lisa Kudrow was cast as Will’s mother. You simply don’t hire an actress as wonderfully offbeat and vivid as Kudrow unless you’ve got a good reason. And Kudrow gets to do some fine work as the protective mother—yes, she smothers a bit, but we...

We like to think that if a spaceship filled with aliens arrived on earth, it would be a chance for enlightenment, a moment of grace.
More likely, the scenario envisioned in the ingenious District 9 would come to pass. And it ain’t pretty.

It’s 1984 in Johannesburg and a space ship has hovered over the city and stalled. On board are aliens—almost a million of them, scared and hungry—who are rounded up into a ghetto-like area (District 9), where they’re monitored by a paramilitary group, the MNU. (The MNU is particularly interested in the alien's sophisticated weaponry, which can only be fired by those with alien DNA.)

The public’s initial curiosity about the aliens, nicknamed “Prawns” because of their resemblance to the shell fish, eventually turns to suspicion, revulsion, and cries of “send the Prawns home.” Nigerian gangsters have descended upon District 9 to search for weapons and provide black market cat food (an alien favorite) and interspecies prostitution.

Now, 20 years have passed and the residents of Johannesburg want the Prawns out...