One would like to think that they're only asking for so much when they opt to see a flick titled Transporter 3, and that fulfills our end of the bargain. We, the audience, provide the expectations, however modest, and they, the filmmakers, provide the execution. Frank Martin knows when he has to deliver; after all, it's his job.

Olivier Megaton, on the other hand... not so much.

Megaton has taken on the job after serving as second-unit director on Hitman. Given that both stories are about stoic bald dudes kicking butt across Europe with a native femme in tow, I'd guess that's as good a qualifier as any, though not good enough in hindsight. Our stoic bald dude is Frank Martin, natch, and he's once again played by Jason Statham with all the steely glares and ab crunches that come with the territory (and seemingly every role he takes).

Last November, Warner Bros. released Fred Claus, a Christmas-set comedy pairing up lead Vince Vaughn with Rachel Weisz.

This November, New Line released Four Christmases, a Christmas-set comedy pairing up lead Vince Vaughn with Reese Witherspoon.

Mere coincidence, you might ask, despite the fact that New Line is owned by Warner Brothers, not to mention the shared initials of both the titles and the actresses playing the love interests? Perhaps, but happenstance loses my vote when the best one can say for Four Christmases is that it's a marginally better holiday romp than the likes of Fred Claus.

Milk is a well-intentioned film, but it's also well-made, and it never confuses nobility of purpose with narrative direction. It's full of inspiration and aspiration, but at the same time, it never kids itself -- or us -- about the tricky, twisty ways of modern American urban politics. It's a sincere plea for equality that doesn't ignore the challenges of prejudice and fear. It celebrates past victories and speaks to current struggles; it mourns devastating losses and is still a hymn to hope. It commemorates a man and spotlights a movement; it avoids cliché feel-good moments but still wrings richness out of moments that feel good. It has a heart, and a brain; it's tender and loving while also being sexy and hot; it features a brilliant performance from Sean Penn but surrounds him with other talented actors doing superb work. Milk is adult and intelligent in ways many films are not, and it's rousing and enthralling in a way few films are. It's a minor miracle of sheer film making joy and determination, and one of the best American films of 2008.

Directed by Gus Van Sant (Elephant, My Own Private Idaho), Milk is radically conventional; it's also subtly, gracefully, innovative and sharp. Best of all, Milk shows us a man who may have been a martyr, but who was most assuredly not a saint -- and makes us respect his accomplishments all the more by showing us the public work and private deals it took to make them happen. Sean Penn stars as Harvey Milk, a New York white collar worker who, at 40, came out of the closet, moved to San Francisco in 1972 with his lover Scott Smith (James Franco) and opened a business and got active -- first as a community organizer, then as a political candidate and ultimately a San Francisco City Supervisor in 1977, the first openly gay elected official in California. Milk was killed in 1978, when his fellow Supervisor, Dan White (Josh Brolin) shot and killed San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Milk in the wake of White's resignation. It's hard to imagine an audience member not knowing this going into Milk, and yet Van Sant wisely puts it up front, to contextualize Milk's work and to let the film -- and the audience -- commemorate a life instead of merely chronicling a death.

With his previous feature film Australian director Baz Luhrmann came within tasting distance of a Best Picture Oscar, as well as several other awards. Moulin Rouge! (2001) did win two, for Costume Design and Art Direction, but all the glory that year went to other things. He must have taken notes; The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring cleaned up in the technical categories with four Oscars, and Black Hawk Down took two more. Two serious, disease-of-the-week dramas won in the "upper" categories: A Beautiful Mind and Iris. The following year, Luhrmann must have watched while the jaunty Chicago won Best Picture, and Roman Polanski won Best Director for his lengthy Holocaust drama, The Pianist.

So Luhrmann set out to work on his fourth film, Australia. Maybe it started out once, many years ago, as a 90-minute pop-Western about driving cattle and saving the farm. This entire section is bright and quick and exciting -- and lots of fun. But then perhaps he decided that that just wasn't enough, or at least it's not enough for anyone who wants to win a great big Best Director trophy. So at the 90-minute mark, Australia more or less stops, transforms itself into a giant-sized World War II drama, complete with grayness, dropping bombs and angel choruses, and keeps going for another interminable hour. But is it enough to fool Academy voters?

By Jette Kernion (originally published on 10/29/06 -- Austin Film Festival)

I wasn't sure what to expect from a movie called Special, "special" being a word that gets used snarkily and ironically these days. Fortunately, Special turned out to be a good narrative feature with elements of comedy and drama, giving character actor Michael Rapaport a chance to really shine in a complex lead role.

Rapaport plays Les, who works as a meter maid -- only of course, being a guy, he's a parking enforcement officer. He won't admit to feeling depressed, but his job is causing him problems, so he signs up for a pharmaceutical trial of a new antidepressant, Special (Specioprin Hydrochloride). The drug is supposed to remove self-doubt; in Les, this means that he believes he has developed superpowers. He can feel himself floating in midair, and he can hear other people's thoughts. Perhaps he can even walk through walls. Is he becoming a superhero or progressively insane? His friends who run a comic-book store aren't sure whether they believe him, and the doctor who gave Les the pills is acting extremely odd. But Les is determined to pursue a life of heroic crime fighting, and he's not going to stop taking his Special pills.

(We're re-posting this review from CineVegas now that the film is available to rent or buy through Amazon's VOD service. Check it out.)

By: Eric D. Snider

If a comedy troupe like Broken Lizard or The Whitest Kids U Know had made Lars and the Real Girl, it might have turned out like Happy Birthday Harris Malden, a sweet, funny, and very odd comedy about growing up and accepting reality. It's the work of a Philadelphia filmmaking quintet called Sweaty Robot, and the opening credits are no more specific than that: "Written and directed by Sweaty Robot." I like that. The film is about friendship, and it was made by a group of friends.

Granted, making a movie with a bunch of your friends isn't always a good idea -- Adam Sandler, I'm looking at you -- but Harris Malden benefits from Sweaty Robot's familiarity and camaraderie. While it has some jokes that probably only the guys themselves think are funny, the film is so good-natured and charming, almost innocent, that even when I wasn't laughing I was content. It's a movie that wants to be your pal, and hey, doggone it, what's not to like?

Look, I know the drill. If any element of the Twilight movie varies even slightly from the way you pictured it in your head, then it is the worst film ever made and you hate it and Catherine Hardwicke has ruined your childhood. Or, alternatively, you've built up so much anticipation for the movie that you're going to love love LOVE it no matter what, even if it's bad, you don't care, you refuse to listen to any criticisms LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU. I know how it goes.

The book's most devoted fans are seeing the film anyway, so I guess I'm talking to everyone else -- those who haven't read the book, or who (like me) read it, mostly enjoyed it, then didn't give it another thought. Is the Twilight movie of any use to those people? Or, as a friend asked me, does it work purely as a vampire movie?

Oh, heavens, no. Noooooo. This is not a vampire movie. This is a somber teen romance that happens to have some vampires in it. Little attempt is made to establish the mythology of the bloodsuckers, and the supernatural elements are downplayed -- a wise move, since the special effects, when they are necessary, are at about the level you'd expect from a movie that is more focused on romance than sci-fi action.

All of which is in keeping with the tone of Stephenie Meyer's book, which is eight parts romance and two parts action/fantasy. That's why it's been such a phenomenal success with women, and why the male-dominated geek industry -- the Nerderati, if you will -- has been so skeptical of that success. "What?" they scoff. "A super-popular vampire book that we, as men, AREN'T interested in? Inconceivable! It must be terrible, and its popularity is probably being over-reported!"

I'm trying to muster up some enthusiasm for Disney's latest animated film, Bolt. It's cute. It has funny pigeons. My eight-year-old niece is going to like it, especially since Miley Cyrus is involved. It's the first non-Pixar Disney feature produced by John Lasseter, who directed the Toy Story movies and Cars. It's got Hollywood jokes in it, including a director voiced by James Lipton, and a comically pushy agent. And yet I never thrilled to the story or the characters; I wasn't half as amused as I'd been by Kung Fu Panda, a film for kids I saw earlier this year.

The story should sound familiar to anyone who grew up with Lassie movies or other animal-road-trip films, but with a Hollywood twist. The title character, a cute dog called Bolt (John Travolta), is fiercely attached to "his person," teenage Penny (Miley Cyrus). Bolt saves Penny's life on a regular basis as she and her dad are pursued by the evil Dr. Calico and his nasty cats ... or so he thinks. The truth is that Bolt is the star of a TV series, but the cast and crew are very careful not to let him know that he's not in real-life situations. So he believes he's a genetically engineered dog with laser eyes and amazing strength and a supersonic bark. When Bolt is separated from Penny and ends up halfway across the country on his own, for the first time he's in a world that isn't a soundstage or his trailer. Now, how will he get back to Penny?

Remarkably faithful to the spirit of its source material, the film version of Twilight crams most of the key episodes from Stephenie Meyer's novel into its breathless, 122-minute running time. Under the direction of Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen), Twilight gallops along handsomely, showcasing the cloudy, misty beauty of its gorgeous Pacific Northwest forest locations; you can practically smell the pine trees and feel the crunch of fallen leaves beneath your feet. Using voice-over narration sparingly, screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg trots out all the major (and most of the minor) characters from the book, recounting the story in abbreviated fashion while demonstrating respect for Meyer's novel and its huge, faithful audience.

Twilight may not add up to much more than the sum of its parts, but those parts can be mighty entertaining, especially when handsome Edward (Robert Pattinson, oozing uncertain charm) is whooshing through the woods with plucky Bella (Kristen Stewart, self-assured and determined) on his back. Still, the romance at the heart of the book has been shorn of some of its heart in the translation to the big screen, sacrificed on the altar of a broader demographic. Readers of the book could feel somewhat shortchanged by the relentless emphasis on forward momentum rather than romantic fantasy; the flip side is that newcomers can enjoy the whirlwind pace and the brooding, ominous atmosphere, and everyone can revel in the spectacle of flying vampires playing a pinball version of sandlot baseball.

By Kim Voynar (reprinted from 05/16/2008 -- Cannes Film Festival)

Arnaud Desplechin's film Un Conte de Noel (A Christmas Tale), playing in competition here at Cannes, is a tragically comic tale of love, death, and familial strife and forgiveness. The film centers around Junon (Catherine Deneuve) and her husband Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon), whose oldest child, Joseph, is diagnosed at a young age with Burkitt's lymphoma.

The boy's disease is curable only with a bone marrow transplant, and neither the parents nor his younger sister, Elizabeth, are compatible. The couple conceives another child in the hopes of making a match to cure their son, but the third child, Henri, is also incompatible, and Joseph dies at the age of six. Eventually the grieving parents have a fourth child, Ivan, and in time the family's wounds over the death of the eldest son heal ... but not really.