A director renowned for ornately crafted set decoration and meticulous framing, Wes Anderson didn’t surprise anybody by taking on a stop-motion animated project — where literally every shot could be composed of a zillion perfectly composed still photographs. And, indeed, Anderson’s 2009 opus Fantastic Mr. Fox (based on the children’s book by Roald Dahl) proves to be as perfect a fit for the auteur as fans were hoping.

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Gentlemen Broncos is one of those movies that would be totally awesome if they cut out the parts that suck. The third feature film from Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess, Broncos is about a 15-year-old aspiring sci-fi writer named Benjamin (Michael Angarano) from the same kind of middle-of-nowhere small town in Utah where Napoleon took place, and where Hess apparently hails from. Benjamin’s well-meaning mom sends him to a writer’s camp, where he gets to take a class taught by his hero, a prolific fantasy author named Ronald Chevalier (the awesomely ridiculous Jemaine Clement, of Flight of the Conchords fame), who speaks in a James Mason-style British accent and wears a lot of Native American-inspired flare. But when Chevalier comes under pressure from his publisher for his next book idea, the desperate bigwig steals Benjamin’s novel — a very weird story called “Yeast Lords.”

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Considering that director Richard Kelly’s 2001 film Donnie Darko inspired such a ravenous cult following, you’d think that his 2009 thriller The Box would at least have to be mildly entertaining. And, in fairness, it is sometimes. But the cool moments scattered throughout this masturbatory extended Twilight Zone episode are way too few and far between — especially considering how high Kelly aims in the movie’s second half.

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Hilary Swank’s performance as the extremely independent, extremely adorable aviatrix Amelia Earhart is pretty much as good as it gets. Straddling the line between full-body character acting and old-school stylization, Swank has a tough job, but she makes her portrayal look easy — even with a script that’s not necessarily the best.

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The plot of Astro Boy might sound a little dark for a kid’s movie — it’s got death, robots, and implied class warfare — but somehow, the end result is a rollicking good time. That kind of makes sense when you remember that this film is based on an anime. And in that peculiar way that Japanese animation has cornered the market on mixing seriously grave themes with super-dazzling cuteness, Astro Boy manages to glide past the implications of its own sometimes grim material and wow you with its wild action sequences alone.

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With a dream cast full of comedy heavyweights, Couples Retreat seems brimming with potential. But given those high hopes, the results are disappointingly flat. It’s not the biggest disaster in cinematic history and it certainly does have its fair share of serious laughs, but a lot of stuff in this movie just isn’t that funny — and even the funny stuff tends to drag on way longer than the laughs do. Also, it says a lot about a film when it can’t be saved by Vince Vaughn fending off a shark attack, or Kristen Bell in a bikini.

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Zombieland is downright delightful. Somewhat surprisingly, a movie about a post-apocalyptic cross-country road trip through an undead nation converted almost entirely into legions of the cannibalistic undead is really about the simple pleasures in life: stuff getting destroyed in balletic slow motion, cowboy heroes wielding John Woo-style double hand cannons, and of course, Twinkies. Pair these timeless themes with solid zombie-centric humor, and you’ve got comedy-horror gold.

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For her first directorial effort, actress Drew Barrymore picked a good project. Whip It is a ton of fun — a sweet coming-of-age film with lots of heart, and a benign girl-power vibe that never takes itself too seriously. You can tell that this is probably the kind of movie Barrymore herself would have liked to see when she was 17 — and probably for a lot of us, our inner 17-year-olds will be just as happy.    

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