What do you get when you cross the best parts of Footloose with your favorite Australian popcorn flick, a slightly startling aural aesthetic, and several engaging performances? Well, I don’t know what you’d get, or what I’d get, but second-generation writer/director Dagen Merrill gets Broken Hill, one of the most engaging teen melodramas I’ve seen in a long, long time. In a wondrous treat for the audience, Merrill’s script brings us into Tommy McAlpine’s conductor-wannabe mind through creative orchestration and unexpected visuals. I won’t say more than that… but sometimes cinematic magic is just about connecting certain familiar dots in ways that are engagingly fresh and off-beat—leveraging and exploiting expectations, rather than defeating them outright.

Although it seems like she gets more attention for her off-camera life than her movie career, Angelina Jolie has managed to secure her place at the top when it comes to female movie stars. Not even Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock can match her ability to bounce between blockbuster and award-bait. She’s already been called the female Indiana Jones thanks to the Tomb Raider movies, but she has said that she wants to be James Bond and her latest film, Salt, may make her just that.

I enjoyed Rain not so much for its creativity, “freshness,” or daring (of which you may find plenty), but simply because it took me—in a convincing and non-distracting fashion—into a different and interesting world. Better, Govan opts for subtlety in many of the plot details (such as the backstory behind Coach Adams’ rift with her own father, or putting the story in the proper sub-tourist context) rather than a sledgehammer. The information you’re after, in just about every case, is there if you care to pay attention, but Govan isn’t going to lead you by your nose. If Hustle & Flow, as just one example, left you feeling like you’d been conned a little bit—like the “hard life” didn’t seem as hard as it should have—here’s the slice of life you might be looking for… sans the hype.

Upon hearing that Inception was director Christopher Nolan’s first original project since his 2001 breakout hit Memento, I was struck by a feeling of surprise. Even though the four films he made in between—Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige and The Dark Knight—were adaptations of previously produced works, Nolan managed to make them his own. Reportedly, Nolan actually pitched Inception immediately following the completion of 2002’s Insomnia, but the writing of the script he intended to take “a couple of months,” ultimately took eight years. Having seen the movie, the reason for this is clear. Inception is one of the most complex scripts I’ve ever seen brought to the big screen.

For most people, the title “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” surely recalls images of Mickey Mouse in a blue wizard cap naively attempting to magically control an army of brooms to do his chores. It’s the feature sequence in Disney’s 1940 classic Fantasia and arguably the most famous image of the animated mascot. Now, Disney has made a live-action, feature-length version. It may seem like a stretch, but so did the idea of a feature-length movie based on a theme park ride called “Pirates of the Caribbean” and that seemed to work out okay for Disney. The house that Mickey built can’t quite duplicate that success with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but it does provide for a couple hours of fun escapist entertainment.

Thematically, the subject is survivor’s guilt. Both Marie and Maurice really can’t get over the fact that one boy had to die—in much the same way the whole town can’t get over the fact that most of the male populace won’t be coming home from some unspecified war. The moral seems to be: if you can’t find a way to reconcile yourself with your past, and insist on reclaiming it, it’s like living with the dead… and it will kill you. What’s done is done, and trying to answer the question “Why?” is most often futile. Stylistically, The Shadow Within is unlike just about anything else out there that you’re likely to see.

For the most part, the script makes all the right moves, and the direction strikes the proper tone in emulation of The Princess Bride. The visuals are also appealing. But The Princess Bride also succeeded because it was refreshingly original—and because it was directed by Rob Reiner. Instead, clever as it is, Jack and Beanstalk often feels like a retread. Ten minutes in, I was thinking Jack might be turn out to be a minor low-budget classic—and my wife and I enjoyed it well enough. But the film simply doesn’t sustain that level of ingenuity. As Jack and Jillian, however, Colin Ford and Chloe Moretz turn in very solid performances. (The latter will soon be a household name, I expect.)

If you were to read the back of the eventual DVD case for Cyrus, you might think it was a big-budget comedy product of Judd Apatow or even Will Ferrell. After all, it stars frequent Ferrell collaborator John C. Reilly opposite Apatow regular Jonah Hill, battling comically for the affection of a woman. Instead, it’s a low-budget product of directing brothers Jay and Mark Duplass, makers of festival favorites The Puffy Chair and Baghead. Cyrus has also been a favorite on the film festival circuit and about half of the praise is deserved.

Director M. Night Shyamalan’s name is all over the promotional materials for The Last Airbender. It’s appropriate. After all, he is the film’s director and, despite his last few flops, he is still a very popular director. Still, promoting this movie using his name is a felonious case of false advertising. The quality of the film does accurately reflect the quality of half of the director’s previous movies. Unfortunately, it’s not the good half. Still, there is one question about this movie that I just can’t answer: will its target audience be satisfied? My guess is yes.

After recently viewing Pixar’s brilliant Toy Story 3, I began racking my brain to come up with third movies in a series that stand out as the best. It’s a rare feat, but arguments could probably be made for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Goldfinger, Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban and a few others. Azkaban, certainly, stood out above its two predecessors and the same can be said for the third chapter in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. While I struggled to find reasons for the following the first two films received, I actually enjoyed—or, at least tolerated—Eclipse, a vast improvement over Twilight and New Moon.