Sony's entry in the crowded animation field this holiday season is Planet 51, a perky though not terribly imaginative feature aimed primarily at youngsters. Created by a Spanish company, Ilion Animation Studios, this digital cartoon is a jokey reimagining of 1950s science-fiction flicks where Earth faced extinction by alien space invaders seemingly on a monthly basis. The twist in this movie is that it has an alien planet terrified of…a human astronaut.

Kids will enjoy the swift action and slapstick gags, and adult minders can chuckle at a few more suggestive jokes, so the film should enjoy a solid opening before Thanksgiving. After that, Disney's The Princess and the Frog hits theatres, so Planet 51's box office could suffer a steep drop-off.

The cartoon's planet is populated with little green people that have antennas, four-fingered hands and webbed feet. Their thinking and culture is pure ’50s, including the music, comic books and movies that exploit a fear of monsters and aliens. They even know to call these creatures from outer space "humanoids." Then one arrives.

Chuck (voiced by Dwayne Johnson) isn't particularly bright—his spacecraft is run by autopilot—but he certainly is friendly. Yet the green people see an "ugly" monster in a space suit, so they flee in terror. Only Lem (Justin Long), a model student and aspiring astronomer, can see his friendly side. Soon he, his pal Skiff (Seann William Scott) and his not-quite-girlfriend Neera (Jessica Biel) must hide Chuck from the likes of gruff General Grawl (Gary Oldman) and crackpot Professor Kipple (who else—John Cleese), a scientist who wants to perform a brain extraction on every strange creature he encounters.

There are chases and comical misunderstandings that extend this single-note idea for 90 minutes. When in doubt, the film cuts to Chuck's robot companion, "Rover," a doglike machine that collects every rock it finds.

Director Jorge Blanco and writer Joe Stillman not only don't mind if you associate their derivative images and ideas with other movies, they encourage it. The film references E.T. and Close Encounters, plays "Singin' in the Rain" on the soundtrack and makes certain that Rover and several music cues remind you of Star Wars.

So Planet 51 is Sci-Fi Lite, running through the clichés—no, let's make that the memories—of old sci-fi classics with gentle jokes and cornball battles. It doesn't measure up to what's best in current animation—say, Coraline, Up, Fantastic Mr. Fox or A Town Called Panic, to name a few other films the Academy recently announced as eligible for this year's animation nomination. Those films demonstrate you can make animation that entertains the entire family. Planet 51 is not that ambitious.

By Kirk Honeycutt

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.

It's a smart move, since much of "Paranormal" is as exciting as the outtakes from a particularly dull episode of "Big Brother." Careful handling is a must for the picture to capitalize on its strength -- an incremental sense of dread that leads to some genuine jolts in the final half-hour. Those shocks should generate an avid cult following, but writer-director Oren Peli's housebound horror tale is unlikely to cast a massive boxoffice spell like the "Blair Witch" phenomenon.

The setup is as elemental as can be. Young middle-class San Diego couple Micah (Micah Sloat) and Katie (Katie Featherston) are being spooked by strange noises in their new home. Eager for answers, Micah decides to set up night-vision camera equipment in their bedroom, in addition to his own roving camcorder. (As in "Blair Witch," all the action is purportedly found footage from this amateur shoot.)

We soon learn that Katie has a history of otherworldly encounters, dating to a tragic incident from her childhood. The couple calls in an ineffectual psychic, and Micah tempts the spirit world with an Ouija board, but their after-dark visitations just get louder and more terrifying, culminating in one particularly momentous night.

The most effective sequences stem from the time-coded bedroom surveillance footage (always speeded up to the moments when doors open by themselves and shadows climb the walls). The banality of the couple's day-to-day existence when they're not hearing unwelcome guests enhances the sense of realism, but it can be awfully trying for viewers who just want to get to the good stuff already.

Sloat and Featherston have a laid-back naturalism that serves the premise well. Sloat is just smug enough that we kind of welcome the hell that awaits him.

"Paranormal" ultimately does deliver in a way that "Blair Witch" never did, but its achingly slow buildup is a test not just of an audience's patience but the power of hype surrounding the latest alternative scary movie.

By Kevin Lally

It’s basically Saw with Gerard Butler as Jigsaw, which means he’s as righteous of body as he is of mind. His character, Clyde Shelton, goes on a ten-years-in-the-planning revenge spree after a Philadelphia lawman (Foxx) cuts a deal with one of the psychos who murdered his family. But how can this piety-spouting killer be stopped…when he’s already in jail? You could truly get high off the concept, but at least director F. Gary Gray casts an appreciably artistic eye over the sanctimonious bloodletting.

Reviewed by Keith Uhlich

This has to be one of the most disturbing films I’ve seen since Blair Witch. The reason being the inclusion of actual video and audio footage from Dr Abby Tyler’s interviews with her patients, plus her encounters of the Fourth Kind. Set in Nome, Alaska, you are told at the start that it’s based on true events. Are there any scarier words than that?! This quiet idyllic town has a terrible secret that no one is willing to talk about. People go missing and no one knows why.

I wasn’t overly aware of what the film was about before I went to see it. I had seen the adverts on TV, it looked scary and that was enough for me. There weren’t many more scary bits in the film, but I found I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen. The video footage of interviews and interventions were captivating, even before alien abduction was highlighted as a possibility. I didn’t want to believe that aliens were abducting and testing on people, but the video footage from police cameras etc was undeniable.

The outcome of the film is pretty miserable for all the characters, so don’t expect to leave feeling all warm and fuzzy. It sent chills down my spine. Put it this way, I’ll never be heading to Nome.

I would recommend it to anyone whoever watched and enjoyed The X-Files, but if you have no interest in abduction theories, then give this a wide berth, as you won’t be able to bear it.

Reviewed by Cateca - follow Cateca on twitter

The Coen brothers may just have made their masterpiece with this, their 14th feature and yet another hairpin-bend change of direction, which has been their trademark for their entire career.

Two films back they were prowling the Texas badlands in a gruesome tale of blood and revenge in No Country for Old Men; then they turned to weightless farce in the entertaining Burn After Reading.

Here they are heading to the suburbia of 1960s midwestern America for an elaborate, slippery, fable that feels, strange as it may sound, like a novel that Saul Bellow or Bernard Malamud never quite got around to writing.

A Serious Man starts off odd, and gets odder. The first five minutes is entirely in Yiddish, a Coen-ised version of a shtetl folk-horror tale featuring a bearded old man who may or may not be a dybbuk (wandering spirit). Suffice to say, the Coens don't muck about when it comes to the use of stabbing weapons.

Then we flip forward from the old country to the new world, to where our protagonist, Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg) is your archetypal harassed and neurotic Jewish-American college professor.

His apparently unimpeachable lifestyle is crumbling rapidly: one of his students is trying to bribe his way through exams, his application for tenure is being undermined by anonymous threatening letters, his deadbeat brother is sleeping on the sofa and attracting the attention of the police, and – this is the killer – his wife is planning to leave him for another man, one of those swinging middle-aged types who embraced the permissive culture with desperate fervency.

To offset this Gopnik goes looking for answers from his religion, but unlike Judah Rosenthal in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, he does not come up against the blank wall of a Godless universe; what he encounters are perplexing rabbis telling him baffling parables that just leave him feeling more and more confused.

It's this refusal to neatly resolve their narrative that gives A Serious Man its distinctive flavour; it has the same open-ended spirit of The Graduate, an authentic classic of late 60s Jewish-American culture. (A Serious Man could easily have been conceived as a sequel to that film, with Gopnik as a grown-up Benjamin Braddock.)

The Coens, though, don't quite do deeply felt alienation like anyone else. Despite the opaque story line, their film is a glittering, perfectly honed artifice; but what pushes it into the Coen premier league is the sense that, as with Fargo, there's something very personal going on here.

It's not autobiographical exactly, but the Minnesota setting is the Coens' own childhood universe, and they revved up for their barmitzvahs at pretty much the same time as Gopnik's son, Danny. The Coens, so normally elusive, have let the mask slip a bit. It's paid wonderful dividends.

by Andrew Pulver

That exclamation point in "The Informant!" is a tipoff to what director Steven Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns have in mind.

Without that punctuation, this tale of corporate skullduggery, embezzlement, wiretaps, a whistle-blower and mental illness would be either a sweaty-palm thriller or a gritty character study about matters of conscience in corporate America. But that exclamation point changes everything. It's a comedy! And Matt Damon is playing a Tom Ripley without any smarts -- or at least without any instinct for self-preservation.

Perhaps the only way to tell the bizarre yet (mostly) true account of Mark Whitacre is as a comedy. It's somewhat akin to Steven Spielberg's "Catch Me If You Can," about a fabulous con artist who fakes out so many people that even he can't sort out truth from fiction. This is tricky stuff: a comedy about things that aren't really funny. With the right tone, you can maybe pull this off, but Soderbergh chooses to throw all subtlety aside.

Marvin Hamlisch's jaunty score, like something out of a 1960s Doris Day movie, and the protagonist's inner monologue, rambling the length of the movie and throwing off extremely weird fragments from a disordered mind, all but beg an audience to laugh. And, here and there, no doubt they will.

But how many people are going to care terribly about a protagonist, a compulsive liar, who keeps pulling the rug out from under himself? The movie insists that all this is hilarious, but it feels like desperate pleading. Which lies are you supposed to laugh at exactly?

Burns' script is based on the book "Informant" -- notice the lack of an exclamation point -- by Kurt Eichenwald, a former New York Times reporter. It centers on a complex individual, a top executive at agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, who helped the FBI expose price fixing at that company in the 1990s. Eventually, he also was prosecuted for embezzling huge amounts of money.

In the movie, a running monologue by Whitacre makes it clear this is not a normal guy. He obsesses over trivia while ignoring major problems. And he plays a blame game in which his errors in judgment can always be laid off on someone else.

His view of the world is skewered and, yes, at times funny. The youngest divisional president in the company's history, pressure falls heavily on him when a lab problem puts the division into the red. It proves much easier to blame corporate sabotage than to admit failure.

That brings the FBI into his world, and soon his wife, Ginger (Melanie Lynskey), demands he tell the agents about the crimes ADM forces him to commit. And soon, his FBI handlers, agents Shepard (Scott Bakula) and Herndon (Joel McHale), are asking him to "wear a wire." Just like in the movies.

Suddenly, the mousy corporate suit sees himself in a white hat. He's a spy! He calls himself agent 0014 since he's "twice as smart as 007."

Soderbergh's whimsical direction conditions a viewer not to trust this protagonist. So you feel no surprise that the sabotage allegation proves false. Then again, some wild tales prove to be true: The ADM vice chair (Tom Papa) and other suits do get into surreptitiously recorded conversations with foreign competitors about price fixing. Whitacre only has to coach them a little bit to say the right words.

Then the fictional house of cards slowly tumbles around the FBI, bewildered DOJ lawyers and his own attorneys. Each lie leads to a more elaborate lie. The movie hints that much of this erratic behavior is explained by a bipolar disorder, but there is never a clear diagnosis.

Damon's master liar is no smooth customer. You can sense the sweat on his lips. His answers come too fast, and his hands and feet are in constant motion. It's a body trying to keep up with an overactive mind.

Everyone else in the movie mostly reacts in bewilderment. Except for Lynskey's Ginger, the one calm person amid chaos. Is she on to her husband or is she clueless? That answer never comes.

Soderbergh, acting as his own cinematographer under the name Peter Andrews, is in love with the HD digital camera Red Cam, so light levels are low and natural. Which is somewhat at odds with the comic mode of the film. But then again, the whole film, a comedy about crime and mental illness, seems at war with itself.

By Kirk Honeycutt

The new bio-pic Amelia about female aviator and historic icon Amelia Earhart, flies under the radar and falls short of anything spectacular.

The film tells the iconic story of Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank, P.S. I Love You), known during the 1920s and early-to-mid 1930s, as “Lady Lindy” and “America’s Sweetheart of the Skies.”

Earhart was a very independent, free-spirited and amicable woman. She was competitive with the boys and celebrated women in aviation. She single-handedly got women more prominently involved in aviation.

The film also illustrates a facet of Earhart’s life that isn’t often discussed – her husband and love life. Earhart falls in love with her publicist, George P. Putnam (Richard Gere, Nights in Rodanthe) and also has an affair with a fellow pilot, Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor, Angels & Demons).

The film ends with Earhart’s infamous disappearance over the Pacific Ocean, a heartbreaking and climatic ending befitting Earhart’s mysterious disappearance.

Amelia Earhart was a huge celebrity, breaking records and representing women in history. Her legend casts a large shadow, and this film doesn’t do her much justice. The film moves slowly and is boring at times, which is very disappointing.

Swank is moving as the independent and headstrong Earhart, making Earhart realistic, something our generation will never be able to experience. Swank’s co-star Gere still has his Pretty Woman suaveness as Earhart’s loving husband. Unfortunately, the two powerhouse actors combined could not save this film.

If it weren’t for the plot, the film may have been a hit; the costuming, locations, camera work and cast were incredible and right on the money. But as a whole, the film fails, crashing and burning like Earhart’s first attempt to fly around the world.

By Summer Rogers

Cancel the London Summer Olympic Games!

Our time on the third rock from the sun will come to a dramatic end on December 21, 2012, when planets align as decreed by the Mayan calendar.

Thus no-one is going to care a jot about whether our stadia are finished on time, or which member of the cycling team breaks an individual pursuit world record.

Let's call the whole thing off, stop pouring countless billions into the event and instead channel all of that money into endless parties.

If the end of days is truly upon us, we may as well go out with a bang.

And that's certainly what director Roland Emmerich does in his gloriously overblown and knowingly trashy disaster epic.

Having previously destroyed all the major cities during an alien invasion (Independence Day) and plunged the globe back into the Ice Age (The Day After Tomorrow), the Germany-born film-maker goes one better in 2012 by attempting to wipe out the entire human race.

Every nickel and dime of the reported $260 million (£155m) budget is up there on the screen as he wreaks carnage on a jaw-dropping, logic-defying, grand scale.

It's unabashedly silly, yet exhilarating, as Emmerich follows one dazzling special-effects sequence with another, upping the ante as he gleefully references all of the disaster movie cliches.

Limousine driver Jackson Curtis (Cusack) is one of the heroes of the hour, joining estranged wife Kate (Peet), her new boyfriend Gordon (McCarthy) and the children Noah (James) and Lilly (Lily) as they flee the US West Coast.

The survivors head for Yellowstone Park in search of a conspiracy theorist (Harrelson), who claims to know about a secret government plot to save mankind from disaster.

Meanwhile, President Thomas Wilson (Glover) pushes ahead with a covert plan to build giant arks in China that will save those with the biggest wallets from catastrophe.

His daughter Laura (Newton), slippery Chief of Staff Carl Anheuser (Platt) and scientific advisor Adrian Helmsley (Ejiofor) join the thrill ride.

2012 is two hours and 37 minutes of pure, adrenaline-fuelled entertainment.

There's nothing sophisticated or remotely plausible about Emmerich's apocalyptic vision: for the first special effects-laden sequence, Jackson manages to outrun a giant earthquake in his limo and even drives through a skyscraper as it collapses around the vehicle.

Co-screenwriter Harald Kloser introduces a dog in distress, a greedy Russian billionaire who shot-puts his son to safety, and a glimpse of our Queen arriving at one of the arks, clutching two corgis. God bless you, Ma'am.

Cusack and his co-stars constantly seem to be a smirk away from showing how much they are enjoying this big-budget extravaganza, striking a final note of wistful self-reflection with a rallying cry from Ejiofor's man with a conscience that leaves you feeling all warm and fuzzy.

Reviewed by Damon Smith

"Good Night, and Good Luck" director George Clooney and screenwriter Grant Heslov again team up for Heslov's feature-directing bow, a wild spoof on the U.S. Army research's into psychic phenomena and attempts to use same in its wars from Vietnam to Iraq.

An anti-Army comedy toplining Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey should have been funnier than this, but even if "The Men Who Stare at Goats" is not worth comparing to "Dr. Strangelove," it should satisfy audiences with its great cast and patent absurdities, coated in quaint nostalgia for the happy hippie days of yore.

Bob Wilton (McGregor) is a young, not-very-bright reporter from Ann Arbor, Mich., who signs on to cover the Iraq War. In Kuwait City, he meets the enigmatic Lyn Cassady (an attractively aged Clooney), who surprisingly confides that he was once part of a select Army team of warrior monks called the Jedi, psychic spies trained to use paranormal powers against the country's enemies.

Flash back to 1972 Vietnam, where we meet Bill Django (Bridges), founder of the New Earth Army, a special Army unit trained to dance, express their feelings and let it all hang out. Their experiments yield dubious results, apart from revealing the young Lyn's extraordinary gifts for "remote viewing," aka ESP. His psychic abilities rouse the envy of Larry Hooper (Spacey), an ambitious newcomer to the group who eventually takes over after he gets Django kicked out in disgrace.

Back to 2003: Reporter Bob and psychic Lyn set off together across the Kuwait border into Iraq, where they are kidnapped immediately and sold to another group. After various adventures, they end up in a secret training camp in the middle of the desert, where Hooper is running a lab of even more loopy experiments, aided by his former boss, Django, now a spaced-out alcoholic. A delirious finale closes the film on an upbeat note.

Peter Straughan's screenplay is based on a nonfiction book by Jon Ronson about the government and the paranormal. With material like this, one would have liked a more incisive comedy to materialize around the decline and fall of the New Age movement. "None of it was real," says one character, citing the cliche. "The dark side took the dream and twisted it." Lyn blames it all on a "curse" he inadvertently acquired during an experiment in which he stared at a goat until its heart stopped beating. The scene in which he does this -- like numerous other gags in the film -- is quick, funny and gets a good laugh without going beyond.

The unflappable Clooney and Bridges, wearing waist-length hair and hippie garb, show a cool aplomb that gives some kind of limited dignity to their ridiculous characters and antiquated beliefs; as he watches them rise into the sky in a helicopter, high on LSD, straight man and narrator McGregor respectfully calls them "shaman." Spacey, who appears in a handful of scenes, has but to bat his eyes balefully to convince as a walk-on villain.

By Deborah Young

Didn't Charles Dickens use to be the author of "A Christmas Carol?" Well, now it's "Disney's A Christmas Carol" that opens later this week. Even that's a misnomer. It should be "Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol." This is not nitpicking, for authorship goes to the heart of what's good and what's not good about this latest cinematic installment of the classic Christmas story.

When it comes to name recognition, you cannot ask for more at the holiday season than Disney and "A Christmas Carol," so a potent boxoffice is assured. Putting Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman and Colin Firth on the marquee only adds to the window dressing.

Now, about who's the author here: In one sense, this is a most faithful interpretation of Dickens' 1843 novella. Indeed, nearly all the dialogue is lifted from the original text. But this also is writer-producer-director Zemeckis' third motion-capture film following "Beowulf" and "The Polar Express." It has been shot and, on accommodating screens, will be projected in Disney's trademarked Digital 3D.

So, taking a few cues from Dickens and with the latest in digital technology at the creators' disposal, this movie version revels in effects: Ethereal, menacing spirits burst through locked doors; frightening visions terrify Scrooge; and images of wild horses, twisted human forms and coal-black dwellings rife with crime, filth and misery are linked by flights through London's cityscape and over countrysides that lift from "Harry Potter" movies as much as from Dickens.

Initially, all this serves to invigorate an old war horse. One is reminded that what Ebenezer Scrooge experiences -- when the chained ghost of his long-dead partner and then three spirits assault him in his own bedroom -- is horror in the true sense. So this is a very dark tale, a tour of a miserly, misanthropic man's soul, and Zemeckis' film does reclaim this aspect of a story that has become more of a cheery cartoon in modern retellings.

But as the spirits escort Scrooge through his sorry life, Zemeckis gradually makes this "Christmas Carol" his own. But as he does, with his intense reliance and belief in movie technology, this auteur shuns the beating heart of Dickens' story.

Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" is about emotions. It's about how emotions can get stunted and tramped down, how they can be revived and how empathy and affection can bring joy to the human soul. One will find none of that here.

Zemeckis' "A Christmas Carol" is, in its essence, a product reel, a showy, exuberant demonstration of the glories of motion capture, computer animation and 3D technology. On that level, it's a wow. On any emotional level, it's as cold as Marley's Ghost.

Motion capture allows an impressive cast -- along with Carrey, Oldman and Firth, there's Cary Elwes, Robin Wright Penn, Bob Hoskins and Fionnula Flanagan -- to play multiple roles. For instance, Carrey is not only Scrooge at every age, he is the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, and Oldman plays Scrooge's meek but cheerful clerk, Bob Cratchit, as well as his sickly son, Tiny Tim.

You certainly can justify this. The ghosts are aspects and extensions of Scrooge's personality, and a son should mirror his father. But gimmick casting leads to gimmick acting. With vocal tricks and accents, CGI-distorted faces and figures and exaggerated body language, the movie robs Dickens' vivid, prototypical characters of any sense of being living, breathing flesh. They become caricatures in a Christmas pageant.

The worst offense to the spirit of Dickens comes with Tiny Tim. He, more than any other character in this tale, represents its true spirit. In the Zemeckis version, he's a dress extra who tiresomely exclaims, "God bless us, everyone!"

So deck the halls with praise for the crew -- cinematographer Robert Presley, designer Doug Chiang, animation supervisor Jenn Emberly, visual effects supervisor George Murphy and Alan Silvestri for his robust score. But a rousing humbug to those who confuse the media for the message.

By Kirk Honeycutt