The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Picking up shortly after Twilight left off, New Moon finds Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) enjoying a seemingly perfect life with her vampire boyfriend Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). But when his brother Jasper (Jackson Rathbone) nearly murders Bella, Edward comes to a painful conclusion: The only way to protect Bella will be to move far away. Crushed by the breakup, Bella falls into the arms of her old friend Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner). As with the novel, New Moon sometimes feels a little lopsided: The hero, Edward, disappears for most of the proceedings. But director Chris Weitz serves up a couple of nicely executed action sequences. He also knows on which side of this franchise the bread is buttered -- namely with teen and tweenage girls who fantasize about angel-faced young men and their rippling eight-pack abs.
The Princess and the Frog finds Disney returning to hand-drawn animation, with visually dazzling results. This charming fairy tale -- about an African-American girl in New Orleans, a Middle Eastern prince and a dastardly voodoo practitioner -- didn't catch fire at the box office, but it deserves a long afterlife on DVD.
Did You Hear About the Morgans? is a rote fish-out-of-water comedy made unexpectedly charming by Hugh Grant, who is typically inspired as a New York lawyer hiding with his bickering wife (Sarah Jessica Parker) in rural Wyoming.
Broken Embraces is a twisty melodrama from Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar about a writer (Lluis Homar) and his muse (Penélope Cruz). Like the director's great Bad Education, it's an absorbing meditation on the artistic process, but it lacks that earlier film's bite and erotic charge.
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