Sadly, this week's Chosen One, the high school comedy Charlie Bartlett (MGM), starring Anton Yelchin and Robert Downey Jr., is also this week's weakest link, since it may have trouble finding audiences since neither actor is enough of a draw despite their upcoming genre/FX movies. Still, its appeal to a younger audience could help it do slightly better than Larry's movie especially among young women, but both of these movies will have trouble getting into the top 10.

The one thing holding all of the movies back this weekend, especially Vantage Point, is that most ardent moviegoers will likely stay home on Sunday night to watch the Oscars, as they proceed as planned.

This Week's Predictions -

1. Vantage Point (Sony) - $21.3 million N/A

2. Jumper (20th Century Fox) - $14.1 million -48%

3. The Spiderwick Chronicles (Paramount/Nickelodeon) - $11.8 million -38%

4. Step Up 2 the Streets (Touchstone/Disney) - $9.7 million -51%

5. Fool's Gold (Warner Bros.) - $7.7 million -41%

6. Definitely, Maybe (Universal) - $6.0 million -38%

7. Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins (Universal) - $4.9 million -45%

8. Be Kind Rewind (New Line) - $3.8 million N/A

9. Juno (Fox Searchlight) - $3.2 million -30%

11. (?) Charlie Bartlett (MGM) - $2.5 million N/A

12. (?) Witless Protection (Lionsgate) - $2.3 million N/A

Last year, Nicolas Cage's Ghost Rider (Sony) remained in the #1 spot with $20 million due to the disappointing showing by the Jim Carrey psychological thriller The Number 23 (New Line), which reunited the comic with Joel Schumacher to the tune of $14.6 million in 2,759 theaters, which is not very good at all. Comedy Central mainstay Reno 911!: Miami (20th Century Fox) arrived in theaters to the tune of $10.3 million, enough for fourth place, while the other two new movies ended up in 9th and 10th place with less then $5 million each. Billy Bob Thornton's The Astronaut Farmer (Warner Bros.) crashed and burned, averaging $2,000 per theatre, while the historic drama Amazing Grace (Samuel Goldwyn) had a more impressive showing of $4 million in just 850 theaters. The Top 10 grossed nearly $96 million and like last week, this weekend is going to be hard-pressed to match that with just one strong new movie in wide release.

Vantage Point (Sony)
Starring Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker, Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt, Edgar Ramirez, Ayelet Zurer, Eduardo Noriega, Saïd Taghmaoui, Zoe Saldana
Directed by Peter Travis (TV movies "Omagh" and "Henry VIII"); Written by Barry Levy (upcoming Kung Fu)
Genre: Thriller, Drama
Rated PG-13
Tagline: "8 Strangers. 8 Points of View. 1 Truth."
Plot Summary: When the President of the United States (William Hurt) is shot at an anti-terrorism rally in Spain, the assassination attempt is seen by various people, all of whom offer another side to the story, whether it's his two Secret Service agents (Matthew Fox, Dennis Quaid), a cable news producer (Sigourney Weaver) or a tourist filming from the crowd (Forrest Whitaker).

Review (Coming Soon!)

Last year, we were inundated with political thrillers mostly taking place in the Middle East and few of them did particularly well. Vantage Point, the genre's first offering for 2008, takes a different route by being more in the vein of old school thrillers like Three Days of the Condor and The Day of the Jackal but with more modern influences like Clint Eastwood's In the Line of Fire, and an intriguing premise that tells the same story of a presidential assassination from a number of different perspectives.

The film has been in the works for some time, having had its release delayed from the fall—possibly to put some distance with all those other movies—but it has the benefits of amazing ensemble cast with the promise of a quality that will appeal to older moviegoers. It's headlined by two actors playing secret service agents, Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox, and while Quaid has a much vaster filmography, Fox is a lot hotter right now thanks to the recent return of his hit ABC show "Lost." Even though Fox first had success with the '90s drama "Party of Five," he never really spent much time on his film career until recent years when he starred in the football drama We Are Marshall with Matthew McConaughey, which only did fair, and later this year, Fox plays Racer X in the highly-anticipated live action Speed Racer movie from the Wachowskis, which should continue to build his fanbase beyond the show.

It might come as a surprise that Vantage Point is Dennis Quaid's first movie in nearly two years, and in his last movie, Paul Weitz's mega-bomb American Dreamz, he actually played the President himself. He's had sporadic success in recent years, most notably in 2004 when he starred in four movies, The Day After Tomorrow and Weitz's In Good Company were both hits, while The Alamo and The Flight of the Phoenix bombed badly. Vantage Point is more in line with Quaid's appearance in Steven Soderbergh's award-winning ensemble piece Traffic and Oliver Stone's football drama Any Given Sunday although in this case, he's the strongest star of the cast in terms of having any sort of box office track record with a number of $50 million movies under his belt.

This also marks the first high-profile movie for Forrest Whitaker since winning the Oscar last year for The Last King of Scotland, though he recently appeared in the indie The Air I Breathe, which came and went last month. The president himself is played by the well-respected William Hurt, a multiple Oscar nominee, who has continually surprised people with his choices. The rest of the cast includes the ubiquitous Sigourney Weaver, up 'n' coming Venezuela-born actor Edgar Ramirez (The Bourne Ultimatum), Spanish actor Eduardo Noriega, Saïd Taghmaoui from The Kite Runner and next year's G. I. Joe movie, and Zoe Saldano, who'll be seen next year as Uhuru in J.J. Abrams' Star Trek. Even with Fox, Quaid and Whitaker, the movie doesn't really have a big box office draw name, but collectively, it promises a higher quality film, not that it will matter because the premise of the President being shot will be a big selling point as will the unique storytelling style promised by the ads.

There are elements of this movie that are eerily similar to movies like The Kingdom, which only grossed $47.5 million based on a $72 million production budget, and Rendition, which did even worse despite a star-studded cast including Reese Witherspoon and Meryl Streep, and while American moviegoers haven't been too accepting of movies about the Middle East and the war last fall, the movie's suitably disguised to be more of an assassination thriller along the lines of Mark Wahlberg's Shooter, although that didn't do that much better than the other movies either.

Fortunately, Sony has been marketing the heck out of the movie based on its intriguing premise of telling the same story from different view points and some might be surprised how much action there is in the movie because that's being downplayed, maybe since they know that an older audience might not be as interested in that kind of movie. That said, the movie certainly falls closer to "Bourne" territory with the amount of action, something which should help the movie find a younger audience from word-of-mouth.

Originally supposed to come out in the fall, presumably for awards consideration, Sony decided to move it to the winter, which might end up being a smart move, because it's not often where a movie opening in the busy winter/spring season is guaranteed a #1 slot, but that seems to be the luck of Sony this week by having virtually no competition for the top spot either from the other new movies or from the returning ones. They should go into the weekend with strong reviews since this is a far more intelligent action movie than one normally gets. Also working in favor of the film is its short running time of roughly 90 minutes, which means that theaters will be able to show the movie more times per screen than they normally would and being a movie for older adults, it should do a fair amount of business all day on Friday and Saturday. It's also the most likely movie of the weekend to be affected by the Oscars on Sunday night.

Why I Should See It: A great cast, an intriguing premise and lots of cool action adds up to a strong political action-thriller that should find a varied audience by being different from everything else in theatres.
Why Not: This should have been the case with movies like The Kingdom and Rendition, but apparently, American moviegoers believe that politics should remain on CNN, not at the movies.
Projections: $20 to 22 million opening weekend and $68 to 70 million total.

COMPARISONS

Be Kind Rewind (New Line)
Starring Jack Black, Mos Def, Danny Glover, Mia Farrow, Melonie Diaz, Arjay Smith, Paul Dinello, Sigourney Weaver
Written and directed by Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep, Human Nature)
Genre: Comedy
Rated PG-13
Tagline: "You name it, we shoot it."
Plot Summary: Mike, a New Jersey video store clerk (Mos Def), and his troublemaking friend Jerry (Jack Black) find themselves having to create their own home-made versions of movies like "Ghostbusters" and "Rush Hour 2" when Jerry gets magnetized and accidentally erases all the videos in the store. Their "sweded" tapes prove popular and soon the entire neighborhood is getting into the act.

Review

The weekend's only real anomaly in terms of being a movie that could go either way is the latest movie from eccentric video director Michel Gondry, a movie that's highly anticipated by avid movie lovers but could possibly leave others scratching their heads. Gondry has had a surprising amount of mainstream success despite his uniquely bizarre filmmaking esthetics, and Be Kind Rewind might be his most mainstream offering to date, driven by the premise of bumbling video store clerks played by Jack Black and Mos Def, who have to make their own home-made versions of popular movies.

Michel Gondry is still somewhat of a curiosity among filmmakers, having teamed with eccentric screenwriter Charlie Kaufman for his first two feature films, Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the latter being a pyrrhic success in terms of finding critical success and fans on DVD even though it wasn't a big theatrical hit despite starring Jim Carrey. Gondry then directed the concert movie Dave Chappelle's Block Party where he met rapper Mos Def, and that too did disappointing business. The nearly $5 million that Gondry's Science of Sleep made in limited release later that year must have seemed like a miracle in comparison.

The good thing going for Gondry's latest comedy is that he has a lot of known actors in the movie, most notably comedian Jack Black, returning to more mainstream humor after starring in Noah Baumbach's disappointing Margot at the Wedding last year, but this is more along the lines of High Fidelity, in which Black played a record store clerk, in terms of scale than some of his bigger comedies like 2006's Nacho Libre ($28 million opening), but it's also getting back to him bringing his schtick to the work of an indie filmmaker, much like he did with Richard Linklater in their early hit School of Rock. Black has proven himself to be a draw for comedies and his presence certainly will help this movie find an audience.

It's interesting to see him paired with Mos Def, who has made a fairly seamless transition to movies, having acted for many years even before he got into rap music. His big break came with his role as Left Ear in the summer hit The Italian Job, followed soon after by Garth Jennings' movie based on Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Richard Donner's action-thriller 16 Blocks, which teamed Def with Bruce Willis, neither which did particularly stellar business, the latter opening the same week as Dave Chappelle's Block Party, a concert film by Gondry in which Def performed. Otherwise, the rapper has mainly been appearing in indie fare.

Danny Glover will forever be known for his role in the action franchise Lethal Weapon, which surprisingly is not "sweded" in this movie, but it's been nearly ten years since the last movie, and in the time since he's been working with more cutting-edge indie filmmakers like Lars von Trier and John Sayles, not to mention starring in the first "Saw" movie and taking small roles in bigger movies like last year's Shooter. He's certainly become more of an ensemble player in recent years rather than a star in his own right, and this movie's ensemble is completed by veteran actress Mia Farrow, last seen in Luc Besson's Arthur and the Invisibles, and Melonie Diaz, a hot young Latina actress who will be appearing in a number of movies this year.

Much of the humor in the movie comes from Black and Def's make-shift versions of famous movies, many of which can be seen online at the official website, and it's very much along the lines of Gondry's do-it-yourself ethos with props made out of paper and cardboard in his previous movies and music videos. It's combined with more high-brow madcap comedy in the vein of Kevin Smith's movies like Clerks and Clerks II, which also have found a niche audience.

Clearly, the primary audience for the movie will be college-age kids from 18 – 25 year-olds, especially in college towns, and this probably will be more of interest than something like Vantage Point, although this will generally be a harder sell for others who aren't familiar with Gondry's work. Discerning moviegovers will know his work but others will either be going for Black or the humor inherent in the premise.

Unlike Gondry's artier previous film, Be Kind Rewind is getting a wider release right out of the gate, though not quite as wide as the 2004 Jim Carrey comedy Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. After original plans of giving this a platform release right after the film's premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January, New Line decided to delay it a month and do more promotion to hopefully raise awareness enough to go wide, and it's hard to tell if that plan succeeded. Not that it will matter too much to New Line since they'll be more concerned with getting that same audience to know about the new Will Ferrell sports comedy Semi-Pro next week, since that's the most important movie this season for the studio. While Gondry's latest movie should find an audience this weekend, it might be somewhat ironic if it finds most of its audience later on video… or rather, DVD.

Why I Should See It: Michel Gondry enters the world of mainstream comedy with the help of Jack Black and Mos Def in an odd but funny film.
Why Not: It probably will be too odd for Jack Black's younger fans and completely silly for anyone over 30.
Projections: $3 to 5 million opening weekend and $11 to 12 million total.

COMPARISONS

Witless Protection (Lionsgate)
Starring Larry The Cable Guy, Ivana Milicevic, Yaphet Kotto, Peter Stormare, Eric Roberts, Joe Mantegna, Jenny McCarthy
Written and directed by Charles Robert Carner (lots of TV stuff)
Genre: Comedy
Rated PG-13
Tagline: "Protecting America's assets"
Plot Summary: A small town sheriff (Larry) gets involved with a high-profile FBI case when he sees a pretty woman (Jenny McCarthy) being held against her will by four men in black suits, so he saves her, only to learn that she's the main witness in a Chicago crime case and he's just taken her from the FBI men protecting her. Convinced she's safer with him, the two of them go back to Chicago to try to solve the case themselves.

ComingSoon.net's Exclusive Clip

There isn't really much to say about the latest film venture from Larry the Cable Guy, except that this one comes from out of nowhere and isn't getting nearly as much of a marketing push from Lionsgate as his previous two movies, Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector and Delta Farce, maybe because the last one bombed so badly. Chances are that this movie cost so little money that it won't really matter, and it'll make more money in DVD rentals later, because that's the kind of movie it is, but we may as well examine if it has any chance of sparing Larry's film career from the downwards trajectory it's been taking.

Larry the Cable Guy's transition from stand-up comic to film star was a slow but smooth transition, first with his voicing of the popular character Mater in Pixar's Cars followed by his first feature film Health Inspector, which did well enough for Lionsgate to add Larry to their roster along with Tyler Perry and the "Saw" movies. Up until that point, Larry had been a mainstay on Comedy Central and one must suspect he's somewhat popular or else why would they continuously show his stand-up comedy shows and the various "Blue Collar Comedy Tour" movies? Then again, his last movie Delta Farce bombed in theaters and it has an amazingly bad 2.7/10 rating from IMDb Users, which ironically is the exact same thing given to Larry's LAST movie, so his fans must already be getting sick of his bad movies. It's bad news for the stand-up comic if people are already tiring of his schtick, something that eventually hit the likes of Pauly Shore, while other comics like Carrot Top were never able to find the success Larry had with his first movie.

Oddly, Larry is joined by one of the most star-studded casts of his career starting with former Playboy playmate and MTV regular Jenny McCarthy, who has not had a strong film career, as well as veteran character actor Peter Stormare and the likes of Ivana Milicevic (Casino Royale), Eric Roberts and Joe Mantegna, and the surprising inclusion of a respected actor like Yaphet Kotto (Alien, "Homicide").

Larry's primary audience is older guys in the South and Midwest, some of whom may be just as interested in something like Vantage Point, even if that might be too intelligent for Larry's normal fans. The good thing is that no one who might go see this movie will give a crap about quality filmmaking, so it won't be affected in the slightest by the Oscars on Sunday night. (Okay, I'm just kidding about most of this, so please don't write in if you happen to be one of the Larry the Cable Guy fans that I've insulted!) Still, this looks like it will be a huge bomb in every sense of the word, and most people won't even know it's opening nor will any theater owner miss it when it's on DVD in less than three months.

Why I Should See It: If you're a fan of Larry the Cable Guy, you'll be there opening weekend…
Why Not: …but even Larry's fans who paid to see his last two movies will be smart enough to wait for DVD on this one, too.
Projections: $2 to 3 million opening weekend and $5 million total, if that.

COMPARISONS

THE CHOSEN ONE:

Charlie Bartlett (MGM)
Starring Anton Yelchin, Robert Downey Jr., Hope Davis, Kat Dennings, Tyler Hilton, Jake Epstein, Lauren Collins, Dylan Taylor, Mark Rendall, Derek McGrath
Directed by Jon Poll (debut of the editor of movies like Meet the Fockers) ; Written by Gustin Nash (upcoming Missed Connections, Youth in Revolt)
Genre: Drama, Comedy, Teen
Rated R
Tagline: "Popularity is a state of mind."
Plot Summary: After being kicked out of every prestigious private school, Charlie Bartlett (Anton Yelchin) sets up shop at a private school, offering therapy and prescription meds to his fellow students, making him very popular very quickly, except with the school principal (Robert Downey Jr.) whose daughter Charlie starts dating.

Review

There's not much that I can say about this movie that I haven't said in the review above or when I saw it at the Tribeca Film Festival last year, as it's a solid teen dramedy set in high school like some of the most memorable movies of the '80s… The Breakfast Club, Heathers, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Pump Up the Volume and my personal favorite Three O'Clock High. Obviously, there's an attempt to revive the genre following the success of Tina Fey's Mean Girls in 2004 and other hits that have followed like Napoleon Dynamite. This one is very funny and not quite as obvious as the normal studio-produced high school movies, but because it's being given a wide release by distributor MGM, after being delayed for over seven months, we need to look at its box office prospects.

The film's title character is played by Anton Yelchin, whose early movies were opposite Morgan Freeman (Along Came a Spider) and Anthony Hopkins (Hearts in Atlantis) before starring in David Duchovny's directorial debut House of D a few years back and in the recent indie Fierce People, both which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. He also played the kidnapped teen in Nick Cassevete's crime-drama Alpha Dog and played a recurring role on the cable show "Huff," but he still hasn't really broken out as a popular or known star.

Fortunately, he's paired with Robert Downey Jr., a highly respected teen actor who went onto a prolific career, which included an Oscar nomination for his 1993 portrayal of Charlie Chaplin in Chaplin. He was out of commission for a few years due to drug problems, but he returned with a vengeance a few years ago for the horror film Gothika and he's been doing two to three movies a year since then, basically bouncing between indies and bigger studio movies like The Shaggy Dog in 2006. Last year, he starred in David Fincher's Zodiac, a critically well-received role that didn't fare that well at the box office, and he's yet to prove himself at the box office. Oddly, both Downey and Yelchin will be much bigger stars once their respective summer blockbusters come out, Downey Jr.'s turn as Tony Stark in this May's Iron Man and next year, when Yelchin stars in J.J. Abrams' Star Trek. While Downey Jr. appeared in a couple '80s school movies, most notably Back to School opposite Rodney Dangerfield, this is the first time he's playing the principal, which is a starting departure.

They're joined by another respected actress, Hope Davis, who tends to appear in quirkier indie movies like Alexander Payne's About Schmidt, the Harvey Pekar biopic American Splendor, the crime comedy The Matador and last year in The Hoax opposite Richard Gere. (This is her second time playing Yelchin's mother having had that honor nearly seven years ago in Hearts in Atlantis.) Yelchin's love interest is played by Kat Dennings from The 40-Year-Old Virgin and his main foil is played by singer/songwriter Tyler Hilton in his second major film role after playing Elvis Presley in Walk the Line and after his recurring role on the popular show "One Tree Hill."

Unfortunately, no amount of star power will help this movie find an audience, because most people won't be able to get any sort of idea what it's about from the title, and MGM's decision to release it into over 1,000 theatres might be too ambitious. This is the kind of movie that would do best by opening in a few regions, specifically college towns, and then expanding based on word-of-mouth, something that studios like Fox Searchlight have done so well with movies like Napoleon Dynamite and Juno. The movie's R-rating also won't help bring in the teen audience that might get the most out of the movie.

Either way, if you like any of the '80s high school movies mentioned above, you'll definitely want to give this a shot, both for the performance by Robert Downey Jr. and to see the continuing growth of Anton Yelchin before he joins his Alpha Dog co-star Emile Hirsch among the ranks of the next level of stardom. This is very different from other high school movies in that it deals with real issues in a funny and a poignant way, a testament to the writing of Gustin Nash and Jon Poll's casting, and regardless of how well or poorly this does over the weekend, one can expect word-of-mouth to be good and for it to find fans on cable much like some of the classic teen movies of the '80s.

Projections: $2 to 3 million opening weekend and $6 to 7 million total.

Also in Limited Release:

The Counterfeiters (Sony Classics) - This Austrian Oscar nominee from Stefan Ruzowitzky stars Karl Markovics as Salomon Sorowitsch, a counterfeiter sent to a concentration camp during WWII where he's forced to run "Operation Bernhard," a plan to counterfeit American and British currency in hopes of throwing their economy into chaos. Thought to be the frontrunner in the Foreign Language category at the Oscars on Sunday, this will open in 6 theaters in New York and L.A. on Friday and will probably expand into more cities next week if it does indeed win.

Mini-Review There are many interesting things to admire about this film's look at the art of counterfeiting being done in concentration camps and Karl Markovics' performance is top-notch, but when it comes down to it, there's little else about this film that separates it from all the other Holocaust films that have come before it. It mostly follows the same dramatic beats and rhythms we've seen so many times before with the main different being the unique premise of the Nazis using concentration camp counterfeiters to help their campaign. Considering my own background and hereditary, it's hard to admit that seeing these things over and over in films does tend to desensitize viewers to the atrocities, but having seen much of this before, it certainly takes away from the effectiveness of the film's horrors. "The Counterfeiters" is also marred by not being a particularly good-looking movie, shot very dark and almost monochromatic with unimpressive camerawork and cinematography that makes the film look far uglier than it should be even if it's done intentionally. Trying to compare this visually to previous Holocaust films like "The Pianist" or Lajos Koltai's "Fateless"—both better films—this one is left wanting. While it's evident this will win the Oscar based on its subject matter alone, this isn't even close to the best movie set during the Holocaust, nor does it seem nearly as deserving of the accolades as many of the foreign language films that were ignored by the Academy. This one is mainly interesting for its premise and noteworthy for the main performance, but it has little else to offer beyond that. Rating: 6.5/10

Cover (American Cinema International) - Actor/filmmaker Bill Duke tackles a story about Atlanta couple Valerie and Dutch (Aunjanue Ellis, Raz Adoti) whose relationship is thrown into disarray when they move to Philadelphia, and she believes that he's cheating on her, leading to a murder where Valerie is the primary suspect. Also starring Vivica A. Fox, Paula Jai Parker (Hustle 'n' Flow) and Louis Gossett, Jr. as the detective assigned to the case, Duke's movie opens in select cities on Friday.

Mini-Review: From the cheesy cheap-ass title sequence, you might as well steel yourself for what could at the end of the day be one of the worst movies ever made, though few will be able to prepare themselves for the twist that happens nearly an hour into the movie when it transforms from a crime mystery into a diatribe against gay black men on the "down lo" and how they screw up their families by having unprotected sex and spreading HIV, giving everyone in the movie to freely spout homophobic rhetoric. Before we get to the point where things start getting so offensive, we're put off our guard by the film's pretense that we're watching a crime-drama ala "Law & Order" which quickly cuts to a flashback told by Valerie, a woman accused of murder, as her interrogating detective played by Louis Gossett Jr. tries to find out why she committed her crime of passion. That's all fine, except that the film keeps forgetting that this being Valerie's testimony, she can't possibly know what's going on in scenes with other characters unless she's omni-present and there are similar issues like the videotape evidence that turns up, a document of the shooting apparently edited together from a number of cameras with better production values than the rest of the movie. Aunjanue Ellis isn't bad, coming off better than some of the more experienced actresses, but most of the male actors except the underused Gossett Jr. are terrible, particularly an "actor" simply named "Leon" who plays the philandering rapper/singer Ryan Chambers, at the center of some of the most laughably bad scenes. Otherwise, it seems like Duke is throwing every possible idea on the wall to see what sticks, creating a film that's so erratic in tone as it goes from overly melodramatic scenes like a month's worth of soap operas compressed into one movie to complete silliness like a scene involving a church womens' group being infiltrated by the gay friend of one of the women, something that seems like a strange tangent until later when the filmmaker's true intentions are revealed. The presence of the church--they show up just in time to try and save the day--seems forced, almost as an afterthought to try to keep the film's target church-going audience from being infuriated by the repulsiveness of the film's message. Whether this was meant as a primer on being a gay black man or an edict against same, Bill Duke sets new standards in filmmaking incompetence with some of the worst camerawork and slipshod editing, even considering the film's low-budget indie nature. This reprehensible effort is not only an embarrassment to Duke, but to everyone involved, as it allows Tyler Perry to revel in the fact that he's no longer the worst black filmmaker making movies. If this isn't the worst movie of the year, then I feel bad for whomever makes anything worse, because the offensively homophobic message behind this movie is not the only thing that makes it truly awful. Rating: 2/10

The Duchess of Langeais (IFC) - In Jacques Rivette's period drama based on the short story "Ne Touchez Pas La Hache" (Don't Touch the Axe) by Honoré de Balzac, Jeanne Balibar plays Antoinette, the title character, a party girl in 19th century Paris who meets a handsome general (Guillaume Depardieu) and plays games with his affection when he falls for her, causing him to seek revenge for his humiliation. It opens in New York at the IFC Center and the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.

The Signal (Magnolia) - Filmmakers David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry and Dan Bush split up this tale of a mysterious electronic transmission that jams all signals in the city of Terminus causing half the population to go crazy and randomly attack and kill the other half. Amidst the carnage, a young guy named Ben needs to try to save the woman he loves as they encounter the crazies and try to remain sane themselves. After premiering at last year's Sundance Film Festival, it opens in select cities on Friday.

Mini-Review: Decent performances and intriguing ideas drive this ultra low budget high concept thriller which is far too erratic due to its concept of splitting up the story among three very different filmmakers. There's something to be said about the central premise of throwing a small group of people into a horrifying and cataclysmic event and seeing how they react and behave that makes this intriguing, at least on paper. After the fake-out of its torture porn intro, the premise of the transmission that drives people crazy is slowly introduced through the troubled relationship of married couple Lewis and Mya Denton, the latter who has been having an affair, making their interaction even more tense once Lewis is affected by the signal that is turning sane people into "crazies." The first "transmission" by David Bruckner makes the non-existent budget far too obvious as it sets things up with a poorly shot sub-"Blair Witch" esthetic, leading to the next chapter directed by Jacob Gentry, clearly the strongest of the bunch as it stops taking itself so seriously, allowing the viewer to appreciate the humorous side of this terrible situation as it surprises and shocks you at every turn. Unfortunately, things go downhill from there with Dan Bush's third "transmission", which loses its way, turning into a dark and dreary finale that offers very little hope, even as it tries to make things seem more romantic. (Sadly, having this at Sundance last year when the movie originally closed with Lou Reed's "Perfect Day", it's obvious that it was far more effective than with the song that replaced it.) Despite an interesting premise and some cool kills, this isn't the definitive post-apocalyptic gore-fest some might hope for, and is more memorable for its cast of talented Atlanta-based theater actors including Anessa Ramsey, A.J. Bowden and Justin Wellborn, all of whom we should be seeing more of in the future, than the talent of the three filmmakers. Rating: 6 /10

Next week, the month of February comes to a close with Will Ferrell's new comedy Semi-Pro (New Line), the costume drama The Other Boleyn Girl (Sony) starring Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, while Christina Ricci stars in the long-delayed fantasy Penelope.

Copyright 2008 Edward Douglas