Entertainment journalists are very often the last line of defense between movies/movie stars and the general public. We work for the public and are available to disentangle cinematic takes on baseball, superheroes, various wars, Elizabethan times, romantic conquests, car chases, or what have you. But when the material is more or less about us, it's much harder to find some perspective. Based on a memoir by British journalist Toby Young, the very funny new film How to Lose Friends & Alienate People is tough going at first, but it ultimately avoids relieving itself where it eats. And it has an underlying sweetness that should appeal to a large cross section of movie people and people who like movies.

Simon Pegg stars as Sidney Young, an anarchic British journalist who runs his own tiny, gutsy rag, the Post Modern Review. He measures himself against the kinds of celebrities he can get close to, but also despises them and loves to poke holes in their images. When he runs a nasty story on a powerful New York publisher, he receives a phone call and a job offer. Soon he finds himself standing in the office of Sharps magazine and its editor-in-chief, Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges). Sidney idolizes Clayton for a more hardcore magazine he used to publish, and considers Sharps a sellout, but also loves the power and the paycheck it can bring. With his outsider attitude, he immediately begins screwing up and alienating all his co-workers, including powerful publicist ("I don't like that word") Eleanor Johnson (Gillian Anderson) and co-worker Alison Olsen (Kirsten Dunst). But he's so persistent (and they had such a good, solid "meet-cute") that Alison eventually tolerates him and then warms up to him.

In Miracle at St. Anna, four African-American soldiers are trapped behind enemy lines in Italy near the end of World War II; caught between indifferent leadership and hostile troops, the four fight to survive -- and protect the Italian villagers they've come to know during their exile. Director Spike Lee spoke with Cinematical from New York about the challenges of film financing in modern Hollywood ("it's hard to get stuff made today that's not superhero, comic-book, TV show, sequel stuff. ..."), shooting in an 800-year-old Italian town (" ... all we had to do was take down the satellite dishes ...") and the challenges his new film faces (" ... historically, women do not run to see, or even walk to see, or even crawl to see World War II films ..."), The Wire ("'Omar's Coming!'"), sequel possibilities for Inside Man and more.

Lee even touched on politics and race in the here-and-now: "I'm optimistic. We're going to have a Black president. The 44th President of the United States is going to be a Black man ... I think this is a definite indication of how far America has moved in how it views race. ..."

Cinematical: I was very curious if you could talk a little bit about the genesis of what brought you specifically to Miracle at St. Anna as a film?

Spike Lee: I needed something to read; I went into my wife's office; looked up on her shelf upon shelf of books (laughs) and the spirit told me to go to this one book -- all the time my head is twisted to the side, trying to read the titles -- read this title, Miracle at St. Anna; that sounds interesting; take the book off the shelf, see the cover of a Black soldier with a young Italian kid, World War II, said "Let me read this. ..." After the first chapter, I said "I want to make this into a film, called up James McBride, we met ... and here we are. That's the abbreviated version. ...

Movies like Nights in Rodanthe are beyond reviewing, because intellectually analyzing them cancels out their intended effect. This is a weepie, pure and simple. If you're the type that likes crying at the movies, you'll love it. If you loved Richard Gere and Diane Lane together in a thriller like Unfaithful (2002) but you don't like to cry, you probably won't like it. Me, I found a few things to like and much to loathe.

Diane Lane stars in Nights in Rodanthe as Adrienne Willis, a frazzled single mother with a young son and a teenage daughter; the latter has just begun talking back and expressing her universal disdain for everything her mother does. Adrienne's no-good husband (Christopher Meloni), who, we learn, has had an affair, arrives to pick up the kids so that Adrienne can go help her happy-go-lucky pal Jean (Viola Davis, playing a typical movie "best friend") look after a sexy, beach-side North Carolina hotel during its off-season. Unfortunately, the husband now wants to get back together.

Confused Adrienne arrives at the hotel, which is decorated head-to-foot in all kinds of colored, tinkly bric-a-brac and prepares for its one and only guest. Dr. Paul Flanner (Richard Gere) is a doctor struggling with a dark secret, and who has arrived for an equally mysterious errand. The attractive duo eventually warm up to one another and talk, but their dark secrets get in the way. Meanwhile, a huge storm threatens to blow away everything that isn't nailed down. I guess it's not too hard to guess what happens next. (Trivia hounds: this is Gere and Lane's third movie together. Besides Unfaithful, they were in Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club together way back in 1984.)

Kids are fascinated with monsters and scary stuff, so why aren't there more good kid-friendly horror movies? With the exception of TV, I only found a handful, including such gems as Ernest Scared Stupid (1991), Hocus Pocus (1993) and The Haunted Mansion (2003). On the plus side, there's The Watcher in the Woods (1980), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) and The Witches (1990). The problem is pretty obvious: these movies are either too scary or too stupid, and the middle ground is a very thin line. So if nothing else, writer Chris McKenna and director Anthony Leondis, both making their big-screen debut with Igor, have conjured an uneasy way to pull it off, even if the experience will be radically different for both parents and kids.

Igor is set in a perpetually cloudy kingdom where mad scientists compete in the annual "evil science fair." The winner's diabolical creation will be used to blackmail the rest of the world so that the kingdom can continue to support itself. John Cusack voices the hunchbacked title hero, an assistant who dreams of inventing his own creations. When his master (voiced by John Cleese) meets with an accident, he gets his chance. The first thing off his workbench is a giant monster called Eva (voiced by Molly Shannon), who accidentally turns out to be good. There's a whole subplot about another evil scientist Dr. Schadenfreude (voiced by Eddie Izzard) who wants to steal Eva so that he can win the competition and overthrow the king (voiced by, of all people, Jay Leno!).

By chance, two Takashi Miike movies, Dead or Alive and Audition, opened in my town with in a week of one another in 2001. It was pretty eye opening seeing the huge difference between them, the speedy carnage of the former and the slow suspense of the latter, and I became an instant fan. Since then I've managed to track down just six more Miike movies, and in that same time he has made over forty (including videos and TV shows). The speed of his production fits perfectly with the personality of his movies. They're often nonsensical; I couldn't make heads or tails of two of his more recent pictures, Gozu and The Great Yokai War. And they're very definitely energetic, verging on crazy. He reminds me of the great German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who cranked out over 40 movies and TV shows in less than 15 years and died at the age of 37. Miike is now 48 and one wonders how much longer he can keep going before he combusts.

Miike's new movie, Sukiyaki Western Django, finds him making a slight change of pace. No, the movie is still crazy and fast and nearly unintelligible, but he has stopped for a moment to consider the work of other filmmakers. The movie is a tribute to Spaghetti Westerns, and especially Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964), which in turn was based on Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961). Remember Bono's taunt at the beginning of U2's cover version of "Helter Skelter"? ("This song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. We're stealing it back.") This movie feels as if Miike is doing some stealing back of his own.

Imagine you're a filmmaker and you've got this cockamamie story about astronaut chimps that just won't go away. You don't have much money, but the story involves lots of technology and outer space effects. What do you do? You could use your imagination and shoot in darkness with lots of odd angles and perspectives, like Mario Bava's sci-fi masterpiece Planet of the Vampires (1965). But that would raise all kinds of questions about how to present the chimps. You could do a hand-drawn animated cartoon, something like Persepolis, for comparatively little money. But that would expose the fact that you really don't have much of an idea. So you decide to make a big, computer-animated film, make it fast, fill it with annoying jokes and hope no one notices how cheap and unfinished it looks. But what you don't do is open it three weeks after the astonishing WALL-E so that everyone notices the difference.

Space Chimps comes from the folks who brought you the universally despised animated film Happily N'Ever After (2006), and although I didn't see the earlier film, I'm told Space Chimps represents something of an improvement. Regardless, everything here has a kind of mechanical sheen rather than organic textures, and it feels like something closer to Tron than a cartoon about monkeys. Then comes the story: Ham (voiced by Andy Samberg) is the grandson of a famous chimp astronaut, who actually went into space. The younger Ham works at the circus, getting himself shot out of cannons. In the film's opening scene, he rockets toward the moon and reaches out for it, disappointed when gravity's pull inevitably begins dragging him back toward Earth.

"While waiting in line for the screening of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, I overhead someone say that Guillermo del Toro's latest is being seen as his audition tape for The Hobbit," observed Jonathan Pacheco in his review for The House Next Door. Of course, Del Toro already had the directing gigs for the two Hobbit films before Hellboy II hit theaters, but that won't stop audiences from evaluating the current parade of fairies, demons and evil elves with Del Toro's Middle-Earth-to-be in mind.
Needless to say, it's a narrow perspective.

It would make more sense to expect that these upcoming features will negotiate between the gothic horror of Pan's Labryinth and the blockbuster approach of Hellboy II. In the latter work, it's clear that Del Toro has more interest in placing these loony supernatural beings in relatively conventional action sequences, allowing the specificity of the characters to create a sense of ingenuity. Pan's Labryinth, on the other hand, offers a single package of storytelling: The art direction, special effects and even the violence directly relate to the drama. The best case scenario for the Hobbit films would be a happy medium: Glorious visuals that reflect Tolkien's deeply involving mythology.

Jason Freeland's Garden Party plays a bit like Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), taking a look at a cross-section of Los Angeles characters, though it runs less than half the length and, conversely, half the depth. The movie also reminded me a little of that early scene in Billy Wilder's Sabrina (1954), wherein the titular heroine secretly watches a swank Los Angeles party from a safe distance, imagining what it must be like to be there. Likewise, sophomore writer/director Freeland (Brown's Requiem) doesn't quite feel like the host of this particular "garden party," but rather like the party's Sabrina, secretly spying from the sidelines. The film feels a bit removed, unwilling or unable to muster the courage to party crash, to really engage its characters.

Garden Party starts with April (Willa Holland), a beautiful 15 year-old with an Avril Lavigne look, who tries to escape from her lascivious stepfather by acquiring a fake ID and posing for nude internet photos for cash. Then we meet Sally St. Clair (Vinessa Shaw, who played the prostitute "Domino" in Eyes Wide Shut), a successful, controlling and backstabbing realtor. She keeps a greenhouse full of prime pot that she uses to close deals, and her assistant Nathan (Alexander Cendese) is at her beck and call 24/7. Nathan drives her car, stays in her house and looks after her garden. He smokes too much pot, is confused about his sexuality and seems to have forgotten why he came to the City of Angels in the first place. Todd (Richard Gunn) is an independently wealthy artist who lives in the house he grew up in. He's obsessed with Sally, whose old, nude photos he has admired on the Internet. By chance he meets her in a parking lot and endears himself to her by removing gum from her expensive shoe.

If you have a girl between the ages of 4 and 12 in your life, chances are pretty good you've heard of American Girl. The wildly successful franchise has spawned a whole series of high-end dolls, doll clothes, doll furniture and accessories, books, cookbooks ... and, of course, movies. American Girls are enormously popular with both girls and parents seeking a wholesome alternative to the freakishly-thin Barbie doll image or the hooker-in-training look of those wretched Bratz dolls. As an added bonus, they encourage girls to learn a little history, without even realizing it .

The whole thing with American Girl is that each of the dolls comes from a different time period: there's Kristen, an immigrant girl from Sweden; Felicity, an American Revolution girl whose father is a Patriot, while her best friend's father is a Loyalist; Samantha, being raised by her wealthy grandmother in the 1920s, when women's suffrage and class difference were big issues; Molly, a girl whose father, a doctor, is off serving in the Second World War; Addy, who escapes slavery with her mother to search for her father and brother, and so on. Each doll has her own set of books: there's the intro book, the birthday book, the book where so-and-so learns a lesson, the Christmas book, and even a line of mystery books.

I wanted to go into Hancock knowing as little as possible, so I deliberately avoided reading anything about it -- at least, as much as that was possible given the amount of movie blog reading I do on a daily basis. Nonetheless, it was hard to miss that early reviews trickling in from places like Variety and Hollywood Reporter were not, shall we say, overly positive. On the other hand, several of those reviews were written by people who often seem to have cinematic tastes directly opposite mine, so I wasn't too dissuaded.

And I'm glad I wasn't, because I'm here to tell you Hancock is both an enjoyable film and one of Will Smith's best performances ever, even if it is a bit schizophrenic in its execution. The film starts out as one thing -- all we know is we're getting a film about a grumpy, alcoholic guy with super powers who's awfully deficient in the social skills department. The film opens on a scene right out of COPS: three bad guys leading police on a chase down an LA freeway, firing away on police and other cars. In between shots of the action, we see a disheveled guy snoozing drunkenly on a park bench.