Few films, documentary or fiction, possess the power to pick the viewer apart piece by piece emotionally, and then put them back together again. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father accomplishes that rare feat with incredible skill and candor — not once, but twice, during its fleeting 95-minute run-time.

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Like a Halloween episode of 90210 or The Omen IV crossed with The O.C., The Haunting of Molly Hartley is horror of the glossiest, safest kind. It’s a boring bubblegum shocker that loses its flavor faster than Fruit Stripes, and few horror fans will want anything to do with this over-polished, under-baked tale of a high-school girl attempting to discover whether she’s the “devil’s daughter,” or her dangerously unstable mother is just another religious wacko.

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An elegant but tragic example of how a film can be beautifully acted and gorgeously photographed yet still fall victim to a fundamentally flawed screenplay, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling has everything going for it as the riveting story builds steam, only to falter at the precise point that it should be winding down to a satisfying conclusion. By the time the long-awaited coda does come, the audience’s patience (and trust) has been eroded, and the one scene that could have had the most emotional impact of all is rendered hopelessly ineffective.

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On paper, Kevin Smith’s Zack & Miri Make a Porno would appear to be a perfect project for his particular comedic style — a blend of R-rated talk and a G-rated mushiness. The premise is a perfect high-concept pitch — platonic BFFs Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) are struggling twentysomethings who decide to make the titular adult film after their financial situation turns dire, and they meet a surprise guest at their high school reunion (a scene-stealing Justin Long) with an unusual career history. The catch, of course, is that they have no idea how doin’ it will alter their close friendship.

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Nearly a decade after proving that lightning could indeed strike twice with Snatch – his giddy, reputation-cementing follow-up to the landmark Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels — it would seem that Guy Ritchie is finally starting to grow up. Sure, he’s still got a good pint of piss in him, but in the wake of such box-office disasters as Swept Away and Revolver, he seems to finally understand that sometimes it pays to exercise a bit of restraint.

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As Halloween Eve 2008 hits, I’m reminded of one of my own favorite pieces of cinematic horror – a film that shaped and defined my early adolescence so dramatically that it eventually took on iconic status for me: John Landis’s cult classic An American Werewolf in London. It’s been exactly 27 years since Polygram and Universal issued this horror comedy, and that all-too-narrow subgenre feels, in retrospect, rarely equaled. And rarely have we seen a horror film quite as eccentric or as offbeat (with its mostly British cast and location settings) emerge from a director as commercial as Landis under the thumb of a major Hollywood studio.

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When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Louisiana in the late summer of 2005, it was a disaster that seemed to have no end. A Category Five storm would be enough to level most neighborhoods all by itself, but after the city’s levee system failed most of the Crescent City went under water, and the dangerous incompetence of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to the crisis led to a tragedy that’s still slowly unfolding three years later. Many of the neighborhoods hardest hit by Katrina are still waiting to be rebuilt, and many families that called New Orleans home for generations have left the city, never to return. It’s a story that covers a huge canvas, and when Spike Lee set out to make a documentary about New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, When the Levees Broke clocked in at a whopping four hours. Filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal have taken a very different approach to the same story, working on a much smaller scale with their documentary Trouble the Water, and they’ve created something nearly as affecting as Lee’s superb film by allowing us – at times forcing us – to see the devastation of Katrina through the eyes of one couple living in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward.

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It’s that time of year in movies. No, not Halloween horror season, the pre-Christmas dumping ground, or the mid-Diwali Bollywood rush, — it’s the end of Q3! I’m sure you have blissful sepia-toned memories of gathering around the TV with the family on chilly autumn nights, running down the best of the movies released on home video between the months of July and September, such that their commensurate cost/profit analysis could be calculated within that fiscal period, in accordance with federal regulatory laws.

Me too! And no doubt, so do our coffers, as they really enthusiastically insisted that we come up with a list of the best Third Quarter titles. So pull out your scrapbook and get ready to wax nostalgic about the best accounting reference period since the last one.

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