A gorgeous collage of human details, The Safety of Objects intertwines the stories of four families living as neighbors in a pleasant suburb, all of them grappling in various ways with the aftermath of a car accident that left a teenager in a coma. That may sound histrionic, but the movie is carefully composed of little things, some ordinary--a law[Read More]

An effective exercise in "confined cinema," Panic Room is a finely crafted thriller that ultimately transcends the thinness of its premise. David Koepp's screenplay is basically Wait Until Dark on steroids, so director David Fincher (Seven, The Game) compensates with elaborate CGI-assisted camera moves, jazzing up his visuals while a relocated New [Read More]

Studio: Uni Dist Corp. (mca) Release Date: 03/24/2009 Run time: 86 minutes Rating: R

Lithe and tomboyish Kristen Stewart (Panic Room, The Safety of Objects) anchors the derivative but potently atmospheric horror movie The Messengers. The story--a troubled family moves into one of those creepy farmhouses that scream "serial murder site" and find their lives disturbed by unearthly occurrences--is a puree of plot elements from The Six[Read More]

Turn off your brain and Cold Creek Manor just might turn into an entertaining thriller. Taking an uncharacteristic detour into nonsensical plot mechanics, director Mike Figgis expertly pushes buttons with this nerve-jangling but ultimately hackneyed story (by Richard Jeffries) about a documentary filmmaker (Dennis Quaid) who moves his wife (Sharon [Read More]

A superb cast and an even-handed treatment of a true story buoy Into the Wild, Sean Penn's screen adaptation of Jon Krakauer's bestselling book. Emile Hirsch stars as Christopher McCandless, scion of a prosperous but troubled family who, after graduating from Atlanta's Emory University in the early 1990s, decides to chuck it all and become a self-s[Read More]

A sweet and slap-happy mix of indie coming-of-age drama and Judd Apatow’s scatological but heartfelt manchild comedies, Greg Mottola’s Adventureland is a winning look at the pleasures and frustrations of dead-end jobs and teenage kicks as viewed through a filter of mid-‘80s pop culture. The underutilized and always watchable Jesse Eisenberg ([Read More]

As preposterous action movies go, Jumper is pleasantly unpretentious and breezily entertaining. A young man named David (Hayden Christensen) discovers he has the power to teleport (or "jump") anywhere he can visualize. After using this power to steal and make a comfortable life for himself, he pursues the girl he longed for in school (Rachel Bilson[Read More]