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Writer-director David Lynch's bizarre adaptation of Barry Gifford's novel is a modern horror-romance, a surrealist excursion down the rabbit hole of the Deep South. Nicolas Cage stars as the Elvis-inspired Sailor and Laura Dern is Lula, his hot pink-wearing, bubble gum-popping paramour. As the film opens, they attend a party in Cape Fear, and Sailor is attacked by a black man who claims that Lula's mother has hired him to kill Sailor. Sailor fights back, bludgeoning the man's head against the marble floor in "self-defense." Sailor is sent to prison for over two years, and when he gets out Lula is waiting for him. They will take to the road and travel down their own twisted path to freedom, paved with freaks, geeks and murder. Standing in their way is Lula's psychotically jealous and controlling mother Mariette Fortune (Diane Ladd, Dern's real-life mom). She hires first a private eye named Johnny Farragut (Harry Dean Stanton), then is revealed to have connections to mob killer Marcelles Santos (JE Freeman) and his improbably named-employer Mr. Reindeer (W. Morgan Sheppard), and a frightening New Orleans woman named Juana Durango (Grace Zabriskie), who may or may not be connected with voodoo. The road trip is periodically interrupted with sex scenes of raw power, which play more like an exorcising of Sailor and Lula's demons than an expression of physical love. During these sequences, Lynch bathes his frame in lurid greens, blues and yellows, as if their sensuality threatens to set the screen aflame. The pair finally makes it to Big Tuna, Texas, a rust bucket of a town in which we have Jack Nance in a bit part as a half-crazy, wild-eyed man with white hair who rambles about his dog in typical Lynchian fashion, and Willem Dafoe appears as the latest villain for the duration of the film's second half. Dafoe is Bobby Peru, a rotting-toothed sociopath with an eye on Lula and a desire to ensnare Sailor in a hair-brained bank robbery scheme. The film comes full circle, and we are spit back out of Lynch's universe shaken, stirred, a little dazed, and more than a bit confused. It's unclear, but the many "Wizard of Oz" references, some blatant and obvious, others just this side of subtle, may be Gifford's doing, or could likely be Lynch's way of telling his fractured version of a fairy tale (Gifford went on to co-write Lynch's "Lost Highway" in 1997). Lynch has always been possessed of a sense of satire and surreality in his work, ranging from the above-the-surface antics of the small town in "Blue Velvet" (1986) to the soap operatics of TV's "Twin Peaks" (1990-91). Above all, he's a filmmaker who is willing to experiment. Here, Lynch throws these seemingly disparate and conflicting elements onto the canvas with manic zeal like a Jackson Pollack painting. The film is romantic, funny, strange, disturbing and violent, but it's also an original vision of America.

Two young teenage girls lay across a bed reading "The Joy of Sex." They giggle and are grossed out, and are unaware of how joyous sex (and all that comes with it) may or may not be in the future. And so begins writer-director Nicole Holofcener's delightful, if semi-aimless, comedy about a small group of thirty-somethings in love and life in modern New York, and it's as just plain nice as can be. Catherine Keener (a Holofcener staple, turns out) stars as Amelia, an intelligent and good-looking gal who works in the Classifieds at a newspaper. Her best friend is Laura (Anne Heche), a "terrible therapist" whose boyfriend Frank (Todd Field) proposes to her, which leads them to realize just how ready for marriage they might be. Amelia once had a relationship with Andrew (Liev Schreiber), who spends perhaps more time having phone-sex with some strange woman he met in LA than he does reconnecting with his Alzheimers-afflicted father. Nowadays, Amelia is happy to go on a date to a vomitorium of a horror film with the nice, sweet movie geek (Kevin Corrigan) who asks her out. Laura and Frank have troubles, while Amelia and Andrew spend a great deal of afternoons together, recalling how they were once in love, or something like it. Meanwhile, Laura is distracted by a dorky waiter/actor who hits on her, and a sex-addict patient she'd like to take advantage of, all the while Amelia's cat Big Jeans is dying of cancer. This might sound like more plot than it really is. In her first film, Nicole Holofcener, who would go on to write and direct the wonderful "Lovely & Amazing" (2002) and the slightly less wonderful "Friends with Money" (2006), here shows a sure hand with her actors, a sweet touch with her characters and dialogue, and just enough teasings of a plot to keep you interested. I was surprised at the end, and in some sense relieved, to discover how little had really happened. Relationships are threatened and reconciled, and everyone gets what they may or may not deserve. You'll laugh right along and enjoy these people's company for the quite short 90-minute running time, and maybe that's the point.

Writer-director Peter Greenaway's film is a bizarre, cold, dry absurdist comedy, an almost surrealistic portrait of a father and son and their (how shall we say?) "unique" coping mechanisms in the aftermath of losing their wife and mother. John Standing is Philip, a 55-year-old businessman, and Matthew Delamere is Storey, who runs the family pachinco parlors in Kyoto, Japan. Storey is mildly obsessive-compulsive, taking stock of his limbs before going to bed. Philip calls one night to tell Storey that his mother has died. Storey arrives at the family estate in Geneva to discover that she is, indeed, dead, and their collective reaction could be described as emotionally detached, at best. One night, Storey tries to comfort his father by sleeping naked next to him (the implication of incestuous homosexual intercourse is made, however subtly). Storey drags his father to a cinema, showing Fellini's "8 1/2" (1963), that masterpiece of directorial flights-of-fancy in which Mastroianni imagines a mansion in which all of the women in his life co-exist to obey him, and occasionally he tames them with a whip. Father and son devise a plan - they will turn their estate into a brothel catering only to their sexual fantasies and urges, and they will populate it with 8 1/2 women (counting a poor soul in a wheelchair). There's an Austrian who the men hit with their car that ends up in various braces (Amanda Plummer), a petulant Japanese pachinco addict (Shizuka Inoh), a would-be nun (Toni Collette), an accountant (Vivian Wu) who works for their pachinco company, and a former romantic prospect (Polly Walker, later of TV's "Rome") who asserts her standing in the pecking order, and is soon dictating terms for her own "employment." To describe all of this "plot" is merely to give some impression of what happens, but it is far from the experience of watching it. Peter Greenaway is a sly, sardonic Brit, known for his fascination with the creative sexual arrangements of his characters in such films as "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover" (1989) or "The Draughtsman's Contract" (1982). In that one, a man agreed to draw 12 pictures of different angles of a vast country estate in exchange for making use of the lady of the house whenever and however he saw fit. His characters never say what you might expect, and always in a deadpan funny sort of way. Greenaway employs distancing devices, such as the titles which are obsessed with the cataloguing of characters, like items on a shelf rather than flesh-and-blood people. He separates his film into five "acts," each preceded by a superimposition of the first pages of that section of the film's screenplay over the images on-screen. This isn't the sort of film you "like," per say (though I enjoyed the first half quite a bit), but it is the kind of film you admire for the nerve it took to make it. "How many film directors make films to satisfy their sexual fantasies," one of the men asks while watching "8 1/2." Greenaway may be one.

Writer-director Amy Berg's chilling, heartbreaking documentary is a portrait of the (apparent) banality of evil like few ever portrayed in the documentary forum. Oliver O'Grady was a Catholic priest from Ireland who migrated to northern California in the mid-1970s. There, his modus operandi became to befriend family after family, and be the trust of seemingly unlimited access to their children. The Church's "solution" was to enable his pattern by simply moving him about 50 miles away to a parish after each "incident" was reported, allowing his crimes to spread further up the coastline. This resulted in perhaps the most shameful child-sex abuse scandal in the history of the Catholic Church. Berg interviews "Father Ollie" who, though never diagnosed, appears to have a disassociative disorder of some sort or another as he never seems to fully grasp the level of wrong he has perpetrated, and in appears flippant about it on occasion. She interviews his victims, their families, a Catholic Church official who wants justice for O'Grady's victims, and others involved in the case. The film appears to reach a climax with O'Grady exiled to Ireland (without having to identify himself as a child rapist!), where he attempts to contact his victims by letter in order to get them to come and visit with him so he can "apologize" in person. They don't take too kindly to his suggestions. The film then takes a different course, tracking the victims' remarkable courage as they set out to demand an admission of guilt and apology from the Vatican, only to be ignored. Superficially resembling such powerful documentaries as "Capturing the Friedmans" and "Stevie," Berg's film is psychologically fascinating as it watches and listens to an appalling, sick human being, and bears witness to the tragic fallout from his despicable actions. A remarkable film.

This one is essentially one hyperkinetic trailer squeezed out of a slow, never laugh-out-loud funny, but all-around likable 92-minute farce. Frances McDormand is the title character, Guinevere Pettigrew, a starving governess in London on the precipice of World War II, who is out of yet another job. At the employment agency one day, she snags the chance to poach a new gig from some poor woman (a success story, I gather) and absconds to her new place of employment. She arrives at the home of Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams of "Junebug" and "Enchanted"), a starry-eyed aspiring actress; if you've seen any of the good hits of the past few years, she was probably in the background! Miss Pettigrew demonstrates remarkable improvisational skills and the ability to keep the wolves at bay from poor Delysia. You see, Delysia has three (3!) boyfriends: there's the potentially violent nightclub owner Nick (Mark Strong), whose flat Delysia's staying at. Then there's the burgeoning young theater director Phil (Tom Payne), who Delysia is sleeping with on the side; she's seeking a leading role in his new stage production. Finally, there's sad-eyed Michael (Lee Pace of TV's "Pushing Daisies") who loves Delysia but will not be played for a fool; he's the only one who truly sees her for who she is. Factor in a fashion magnate (Ciaran Hinds, formerly of TV's "Rome") with his eye on Miss Pettigrew, and his on-again/off-again engagement to the cold, adulterous Edythe (Shirley Henderson), and you have the makings of a screwball comedy (like the one the trailer promises). Unfortunately, this film somehow never manages to really take off in that direction. It's nice and funny in a chuckle-every-couple-minutes sorta way, and perfectly watchable, but it's nothing to get all hot and bothered over. McDormand and Adams are the sole lives of this party, and Hinds is a likable potential love interest for Miss Pettigrew. The direction by Bharat Nalluri ("Tsunami: The Aftermath") is fairly mundane early on, picking up a bit once Miss Pettigrew and Delysia are removed from Nick's flat, and actually taking on just the briefest dash of poignancy and would-be screwball comedy toward the end; it's all something of a mixed-bag. Still: the characters all get what they deserve in the end (was there any doubt) and you'll have a passable hour-and-a-half getting there with them. Not a necessity, but more of a pleasant diversion should you find yourself in its general vicinity. Neat bit of trivia: Mark Strong, who plays Nick, was in two completely unrelated films by the name of "Sunshine": Istvan Szabo's 1999 Hungarian epic, and Danny Boyle's 2007 sci-fi/horror film!

The second film in the astronomically popular and universally acclaimed "Harry Potter" series, based on the books by J.K. Rowling, is yet another mystery set in the Hogwarts School of Wizardry, in some bizarre alternate universe of England, to which the title character (Daniel Radcliffe) returns. The gang's all here: the carrot-topped scaredy cat Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), the indispensable and lovely Hermione (Emma Watson), the kind Haggrid the Giant (Robbie Coltrane), and professors who vary from the decent(Maggie Smith) to the creepy (Alan Rickman), as well as the egotistical (new cast member Kenneth Branagh) and potentially evil (Jason Isaacs). The plot: Someone is writing bloody messages on the walls of the school, threatening that the "heir of Slitherin" will return and take revenge, or something, on the students and faculty - kids and pets alike are being petrified and rendered comatose and it's up to Harry and his friends to solve the mystery and stop it before it's too late. Of the new characters, I particularly enjoyed Kenneth Branagh as the new Teacher of Defense Against the Dark Arts, an egomaniacal fraud who has a winning smile and a nose for a good photo-op. I also enjoyed Shirley Henderson as Moaning Mertyl, the mysterious ghost of a student that died on campus and who haunts the halls of Hogwarts. Dobby, the servant that first comes to try to keep Harry out of attending a second year, reminded me a bit of Smeagol from "The Lord of the Rings," with his odd speech and masochistic slave mentality. Chris Columbus ("Home Alone," "Mrs. Doubtfire") returns to direct this magical second installment, again refusing to edit too much of Rowling's book (per her contract). As a result, we have an enjoyable family entertainment that kids who read the book and (I guess) their parents will enjoy. It is also 161 minutes long, which is a bit longer than i personally care for my family-friendly fantasy films to take to get to the end. A confession: I am not one of those who automatically buys into the wonder and enjoyability of "Harry Potter." Sadly, I think my ability to be entertained by this sort of thing is a bit lacking. Still, this is surprisingly engaging and often fun stuff.