Elementary school kids are in for a fun ride with Aliens in the Attic, a family-friendly action romp that is geared to get them riled up and dreaming of their own battle against an alien invasion. For all other audiences, the film is exactly what it is — a movie made for seven-year-olds. The checklist is as follows: Hits to the groin every 20 minutes? Check. A Jim Carrey-wannabe spaz acting like a clown anytime he’s onscreen? Yep, it’s got that, too. How about a possessed granny performing kung fu? Uh-huh. And a conceit that allows the kids to play while the parents are away? Oh yeah, the writers figured out a humdinger to explain that one. Indeed, those are cynical cheap shots — especially for a picture that will provide the goods to its target audience. However, one thing is for sure — a lot of time and energy was put into what will most likely be a forgotten bomb long after its days in the theatrical sun.

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As a director/writer/producer/guru, Judd Apatow has been the hallowed king of comedy movies for the last few years — it seems just about the only complaint people have about his work is that it’s too long. Funny People, his third directorial effort, won’t change anybody’s opinion on that matter. However, he’s taking his time for all the right reasons, and the result is a raucously funny and poignant love letter to standup comics.

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The central character of Ghosted, Sophie Schmitt (Inga Busch) is a lesbian conceptual artist and filmmaker in her late thirties or early forties, still reeling from the tragic loss of her young Taiwanese lover, Ai-ling (Ke Huan-Ru). For the first two thirds of the film, neither Sophie nor the audience is certain of the exact circumstances that led up to the young woman’s death, leaving it open-ended, elliptical. Sophie hosts a video installation tribute to Ai-ling, and at the tribute she spots another young Asian woman in the audience, reporter Wang Mei-li (Hu Ting-Ting), who unnerves Sophie on some level, with her transfixed stares and unflinching insistence on doing an interview with Sophie for the Taipei News. In time, Sophie begins to suspect that Mei-li may not be everything that she claims to be, and that she might have some strange connection to Ai-ling’s death, especially after Mei-li begins systematically visiting the couple’s old acquaintances without Sophie’s knowledge.

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The National Weather Service indicates that the odds of any one individual being struck by lightning are around 1 in 400,000. Unsurprisingly, those who wind up pinned to the ground for a millisecond with 40 kiloamps of raw electricity jolting through their veins — and live to tell about it — often feel privy to some sort of divine appointment or deliverance. That’s the fascinating conceit of Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary Act of God. Working in tandem with her husband, producer-cinematographer Nick de Pencier, Baichwal travels around the world interviewing survivors of lightning bolts and shell-shocked firsthand witnesses to lightning-related deaths.

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Often the most profound and gently moving dramas are the simplest. A complex, almost Byzantine backstory surrounds Lorna, the troubled central character of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s chamber drama Lorna’s Silence, and most surprising is that it neither weighs the film down nor interferes with its emotional magnetism, because the central arc remains so beautifully clean and concise.

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Evil kid movies are a staple of the horror genre, and they’re usually pretty predictable. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; seeing innocent little faces twist up with murderous rage is creepy to begin with — that’s why these movies exist. And to a large extent, Orphan is no different. However, this movie comes with a twist: a truly insane surprise ending that’s so bizarre it’s almost innovative. It will delight horror fans looking for something outlandishly weird, and induce vomiting for any casual, mild-mannered moviegoers, who assumed that a film starring Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard would be all pared down and modest.

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Warren Oates (1928-82) was arguably the greatest “Oh, that guy!” actor of all time. Oates was a character actor who starred in only a small handful of the dozens of movies and television shows in which he appeared over the course of a career that spanned four decades, but he was a gifted performer who knew how to make the most of his moments on screen, and if you saw Oates in one of his great roles, you weren’t likely to forget him – you might not know his name, but if you saw Oates, you’d think to yourself, “Oh, that guy! He’s great!” in the great tradition of the best journeyman actors. Whether he was playing a curiously neurotic braggart in Two Lane Blacktop, a father who knows a bad influence when he sees one in Badlands, a classically redneck Southern cop in In The Heat Of The Night, a deeply intense but silent trainer of fighting birds in Cockfighter, wild-hair cowboys in Ride The High Country and The Wild Bunch or even a no-nonsense drill instructor dealing with an insouciant Bill Murray in Stripes, Oates was an actor who brought something fresh and vividly real to every character he played. Oates never came especially close to becoming a star, but serious film buffs are still celebrating his work more than twenty-five years after he shot his last movie.

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In the Loop is a fast-paced, lancet-witted ensemble comedy from first-time film director Armando Iannucci, based on his satirical BBC sitcom The Thick of It. The film tracks the lies, misunderstandings, bad intel, and PR blunders within in a few corridors of British and American power that escalate into a full-blown (fictional) crisis in the Middle East over the course of a few days, during a few conversations and meetings. Though played for laughs, the movie demonstrates how the most incidental factors (leaked papers, hastily spoken sound bites) and players (aides, interns, and low-level government officials) can influence the course of history.

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