December 2
Aeon Flux
Summary: Charlize Theron stars in a live-action feature based on the cult-hit MTV cartoon about a sexy freedom fighter in a post-apocalyptic future.
Buzz: Production was delayed after Theron was injured, and the release date was up in the air for awhile, but the previews promise a stylish and exciting action movie, even if it's nothing like the cartoon.
Our Take: It's a disappointment that Theron declined to wear Aeon's barely-there outfit like her animated counterpart.
First Descent
Summary: Documentary of five top snowboarders who shred up some mountains in Alaska.
Buzz: The first movie produced by the marketing arm of Mountain Dew. Duude!
Our Take: Snowboarders are sure to flock to it, making directors Kemp Curly and Kevin Harrison into Gen-Y's Warren Miller.
December 9
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe
Summary: Long-awaited film version of C.S. Lewis' classic fantasy novel, the first in the seven-book Narnia series.
Buzz: Production company Walden Media is dedicated to providing a wholesome alternative to what they perceive as the depravity of mainstream Hollywood. Distributor Disney has hired the same firm that pushed The Passion of the Christ to promote Narnia, which Lewis wrote partly as a Christian allegory, to Christian audiences.
Our Take: We don't really care if the churchies like it or not, as long as the CGI lion looks cool.
The Squid and the Whale
Summary: A divorce drama featuring a screwed-up family headed by two writers—well, sheesh, no wonder—and their dysfunctional kids. Selling points include references to Dickens and masturbation.
Buzz: Roger Ebert: "The parents, Bernard and Joan Berkman, are played by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney, and if that's who it takes to play your parents, what are you complaining about?"
Our Take: Sounds intelligent, engaged, deep. Cheaper by the Dozen 2 will so kill it in the movies-about-families sweepstakes.
Syriana
Summary: Political thriller starring George Clooney as a CIA agent set in the world of Big Oil.
Buzz: A politicized Traffic about our addiction to fossil fuel.
Our Take: Clooney's own movie machine casts the far-left liberal as a spook, which makes this slightly less balanced than a Michael Moore film.
Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic
Summary: Caustic funnywoman Silverman, the hottest chick in comedy, is captured onstage. Sample gag: "I was raped by a doctor, which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl."
Buzz: On the good side of mixed. Silverman gets high marks for jaw-dropping barbs, but Entertainment Weekly complained that she stopped short of exploring taboo subjects in a truly meaningful way, getting caught up in her faux-narcissism instead.
Our Take: Anticipation. Funny is good, envelope-pushing funny is better, but EW is right—it oughta mean something.
December 14
King Kong
Summary: Lonely bachelor monkeys around in 1930s New York
Buzz: Bigger than the ape himself.
Our Take: Peter Jackson's first project after The Lord of the Rings, this is going to be the popcorn-munching hit of the season.
December 16
The Family Stone
Summary: A contentious family unites against their son's fiancée (Sara Jessica Parker) when he brings her home for the holidays.
Buzz: With a sprawling cast that includes everyone from Parker (in her first major post-Sex and the City role) to Rachel McAdams to Diane Keaton to Luke Wilson to Craig T. Nelson, this has the potential to become a Christmas classic.
Our Take: We wouldn't count on it, though.
December 21
Fun with Dick and Jane
Summary: Middle-class couple resorts to robbery to pay the bills.
Buzz: Starring Jim Carrey, Tea Leoni, Angie Harmon, Alec Baldwin, this has a chance of being as funny as the original George Segal-Jane Fonda vehicle.
Our Take: Hollywood is as creatively bankrupt as Dick and Jane are financially.
Cheaper by the Dozen 2
Summary: Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt are back as parents of 12. This time they're on summer vacation, where they get into a competition with a large family headed by Eugene Levy.
Buzz: "How about three tremendously funny people: Steve Martin, Bonnie Hunt and Eugene Levy?"—Yahoo Movies.
Our Take: We remember the days when someone besides Yahoo blurb-slingers thought Steve Martin was funny.
December 23
Memoirs of a Geisha
Summary: Director Rob Marshall (Chicago) adapts Arthur Golden's best-selling novel about a Japanese girl's rise from peasant to one of the country's most celebrated geishas.
Buzz: Clearly positioned for maximum Oscar-osity, Memoirs crams every prestigious Asian actor around into its Japan-set tale, whether they are actually Japanese or not.
Our Take: Who cares about cultural sensitivity when there are awards at stake?
The Ringer
Summary: Man tries to rig the Special Olympics by entering himself.
Buzz: With actual mentally handicapped actors getting the better of star Johnny Knoxville, the ADA and others are placated.
Our Take: Producers and writers the Farrelly brothers strike gold again.
Hoodwinked
Summary: Cross Little Red Riding Hood with Law & Order-style storytelling, take big liberties (Red's grandma turns out to be an extreme snowboarder), and you have this animated fairy tale/police procedural voiced by Anne Hathaway and Glenn Close.
Buzz: After a buzzy screening at Cannes, the film was picked up by the Weinstein brothers, on a buying spree after splitting from Disney.
Our Take: My, what big pretensions you have! But maybe that's what you need to take a piece off of Pixar.
December 25
Rumor Has It
Summary: This high-concept comedy features Jennifer Aniston as a woman who discovers her family may have been the basis for the classic film The Graduate.
Buzz: Original director Ted Griffin (who also wrote the screenplay) was fired two weeks into shooting and replaced by Rob Reiner. Rumor has it that Griffin didn't afford Aniston the proper star treatment. Hollywood veteran Reiner apparently had no trouble deferring to the glitterati.
Our Take: If anyone can take the off-the-wall premise and turn it into a middle-of-the-road Hollywood comedy, it's Reiner. Judging by the trailer, that's exactly what he's done.
Wolf Creek
Summary: Three typically clueless travelers run afoul of a murderous local in the Australian Outback.
Buzz: "Best bloody horror movie in decades," squeaked a fan on Internet Movie Database. Aussie officials asked the film's distributor to hold the film until after the trial of a local charged with murdering a foreign backpacker.
Our Take: Between this and Hostel (January 13), the message is clear: Good-looking, young American road-trippers, stay in the U.S.! Except Texas, of course.
January 6
Brokeback Mountain
Summary: Two cowboys in '60s Montana fall in love.
Buzz: Directed by art-house fave Ang Lee, it's expected to do as well as My Own Private Idaho.
Our Take: Isn't this the indie film the kids from South Park watched at Sundance?
Casanova
Summary: The legendary lover gets a new cinematic treatment, courtesy of director Lasse Hallstrom and star Heath Ledger.
Buzz: Hallstrom has built a reputation recently for classy, soporific dramas, but word at the Venice International Film Festival earlier this year was that Casanova was sexy, fun and entertaining.
Our Take: We're sure it'll be a fine film, but we'd be more inclined to see a movie about co-star Sienna Miller's real life sexual misadventures.
Munich
Summary: Steven Spielberg directs the story of a Mossad agent who tracks down and kills Arab terrorists who slaughtered Israeli Olympic athletes.
Buzz: Rushed for holiday release, look for Academy acclaim and plenty of controversy from both Jews and Muslims.
Our Take: It won't be another Schindler's List.
Grandma's Boy
Summary: A 35-year-old video-game tester moves in with his grandmother and her two friends.
Buzz: An Adam Sandler movie.
Our Take: But without Adam Sandler.
BloodRayne
Summary: Despite the expectations set up by the title, BloodRayne is not a tender coming-of-age romance. Based on the video game of the same name, it's about vampires in 18th-century Romania. Kristanna Loken stars as a half-vamp, half-human who seeks revenge on her father, king of the vampires, played by Ben "Remember Me? I Was Ghandi" Kingsley.
Buzz: Not good. The phrase "cinematic turd" appears.
Our Take: We're not seeing any vampire movie that doesn't star Kate Beckinsale in form-fitting leather. (See Underworld: Evolution.)
January 13
Breakfast on Pluto
Summary: A transvestite runs away to become a performer in '60s London.
Buzz: Critics are as torn as a closeted transvestite.
Our Take: Director Neil Jordan scored a hit in 1992 with The Crying Game but times have changed, as has our capacity for shock and sympathy.
The Producers
Summary: It's the movie of the play of the movie! The hit Broadway musical based on Mel Brooks' demented comedy gets its own screen version.
Buzz: The stars (Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick) and director (Susan Stroman) of the stage version show up for the movie, so if they screw it up, they only have themselves to blame.
Our Take: Personally, we're waiting for the restaged version of this film in 2010.
Glory Road
Summary: Another inspirational true sports story, this one about the first college basketball team with an all-black starting lineup.
Buzz: After Remember the Titans, The Rookie, Miracle and The Greatest Game Ever Played, Disney has certainly run this bit into the ground, but audiences can't get enough of it.
Our Take: Basketball is great and all, but where is the inspirational timber-sports movie?
Last Holiday
Summary: A shy woman with a fatal disease goes to Europe and cuts loose.
Buzz: Queen Latifah stars in the remake of a '50s Alec Guiness film, but is a wacky black woman in Europe really that funny?
Our Take: This might be why Gerard Depardieu retired.
The Libertine
Summary: Johnny Depp plays the legendary 17th-century Earl of Rochester, whose famous debauchery made Courtney Love look like Celine Dion.
Buzz: Although part of the great Miramax dump of 2005 (movies rushed into theaters before the departure of Miramax founders Bob and Harvey Weinstein), The Libertine has been receiving positive early reviews and even some Oscar talk for Depp.
Our Take: Johnny Depp having nasty, period-accurate sex? Where does the line form?
The New World
Summary: What better way to shake off your dismal outing as a destiny-driven Greek conqueror in a historical epic than by playing a destiny-driven English soldier in a completely different historical epic? Colin Farrell tries to put Alexander behind him with this Colonial-era tale of John Smith and Indian princess Pocahontas (Q'Orianka Kilcher), two lovers pulled apart by their cultural differences.
Buzz: Because it's directed by Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line, Badlands), expectations are high. It's also the first film in a decade shot in the wider, detail-capturing 68 mm format.
Our take: Wow, 68 mm!
Hostel
Summary: Three backpackers played by actors you've never heard of look for the good life in an Eastern European city, unaware—damn guidebooks!—of the hellish nightmare—no, wait, make that nightmarish hell—that awaits them.
Buzz: "Everything you've heard about the level of violence in this movie is true," writes a Canadian poster on Internet Movie Database. "It is ultragraphic and very disturbing stuff. ... I'd definitely not recommend this as a date movie."
Our Take: Canadian dating rituals are so different from ours.
January 20
Match Point
Summary: Ex-tennis pro Bryan Cox falls for femme fatale Scarlett Johansson dating his soon-to-be brother-in-law, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers.
Buzz: Moving from Manhattan to London gives director Woody Allen a fresh feel.
Our Take: Allen switches New York neuroses for British eccentricities—so basically just the actors' accents are different.
Underworld: Evolution
Summary: The sequel to 2003's vampires vs. werewolves flick Underworld. Presumably, the vampires and werewolves have it out again.
Buzz: Apparently some people liked the first movie.
Our Take: We'd rather not meet them, though.
The Matador
Summary: Pierce Brosnan and his cheesy mustache star as a hitman with a midlife crisis who meets a traveling salesman (Greg Kinnear) in Mexico City. They bond over drinks and their mutual unhappiness. Dark comedy ensues.
Buzz: This was a Sundance fave.
Our take: It's always entertaining to watch Brosnan try to subvert his Bond legacy. Well, except for The Thomas Crown Affair. And Laws of Attraction. And After the Sunset.
Las Vegas release dates TBA
Mrs. Henderson Presents
Summary: Judi Dench plays a saucy London theater owner who stages all-nude revues during the London blitz of World War II.
Buzz: Is it possible for there to be a period film starring Judi Dench that doesn't get Oscar buzz? It is not.
Our Take: As long as Dench and co-stars Bob Hoskins and Christopher Guest remain fully clothed, we're there.
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Summary: Tommy Lee Jones directs and stars in this story about a ranch hand trying to fufill a friend's wish to be buried in Mexico.
Buzz: A winner at Cannes and Toronto, it could be the season's surprise hit.
Our Take: The basic plot might sound as dry as the Mojave but look for sophisticated storytelling and a quixotic tale.
The White Countess
Summary: The latest classy period drama from director James Ivory follows an American diplomat to 1930s Shanghai, where he meets a mysterious Russian woman.
Buzz: Ivory's longtime producing partner, Ismail Merchant, died earlier this year, and this is one of the last projects he had a hand in creating.
Our Take: The Merchant-Ivory team has a solid history of well-crafted films, and this looks to be no exception.
Transamerica
Summary: A pre-op transsexual (Felicity Huffman) about to have his/her final plumbing adjustment learns he/she has a teen son (Kevin Zegers). Poignant cross-country road trip ensues. "The movie is in no way about transsexuality," says director Duncan Tucker. "It's about family."
Buzz: Huffman shows chops she's not called upon to use in Desperate Housewives.
Our Take: Cross this with Cheaper by the Dozen 2 and there's a family movie we'd see.
The World's Fastest Indian
Summary: Anthony Hopkins stars in the true story of New Zealander Burt Munro, who, back in the '60s, when such things seemed more worth doing, set a land-speed record on a rebuilt motorcycle.
Buzz: "Anthony Hopkins isn't your average biker, but he's always convincing as a man on a mission."—Yahoo Movies.
Our Take: Portly, British, a knight—who says he's not your average biker? This will be good when it appears on Starz six months from now.