The only problem with Humpday is that you sometimes get the impression that it’s supposed to be blowing your mind. It won’t — or at least it shouldn’t — but expectations aside, it’s a fairly clever, sometimes insightful dramedy, posing a lot of interesting questions about intimacy, adulthood, and the limits of bromance. Just don’t expect it to answer them.

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It’s hard to believe it’s taken 35 years for images this vibrant, this joyous, and this era-defining to reach the big screen. Yet that’s the gestation period for Soul Power, the concert film that finally brings to life the three-day music festival known as Zaire ‘74, which was intended to accompany the “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman (before a busted lip prompted Foreman to postpone by six weeks). The reason for the film’s delay is clear, however — its very existence was a direct response to how much footage wasn’t considered germane to When We Were Kings, Leon Gast’s 1996 documentary about the fight, which itself was delayed by legal disputes involving the project’s original Liberian financiers. Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, an editor on that Oscar-winning film, was inspired to rescue the hours of unused concert footage from the vaults, and the end result is Soul Power. Fans of both movies and music should be thankful he did.

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Bruce Springsteen asked the question “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true?” in his song “The River,” and while Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner, being serious metalheads, probably don’t spend much time listening to “The Boss,” a thought like this must have occurred to them sometime in the past three decades. Kudlow and Reiner are the founding members of Anvil, a Canadian heavy-metal band who were one of the pioneering acts in thrash metal, cranking up the tempo and intensity of heavy rock before Metallica, Anthrax, Megadeth, or Slayer could take the sound to the masses. While those bands went on to varying degrees of stardom, Anvil were in the wrong place at the wrong time; they were based in Toronto, never a big town for hard rock, and signed to a small independent label that didn’t have much promotional muscle, and when thrash began to climb out of the clubs and into arenas in the late ’80s, Anvil had gone into a creative slump. Most bands facing such circumstances would throw in the towel, but most bands are not Anvil. Filmmaker Sacha Gervasi is a longtime fan who used to roadie for Anvil, and his documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil is an alternately hilarious and poignant story of two guys who refuse to stop chasing their dream, even if it has been just out of reach for 25 years.

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If there were an Oscar for Weirdest Film, the award would almost certainly go to Big Man Japan, a mockumentary-style parody of the kaiju genre starring and directed by famed Japanese comic Hitoshi Matsumoto. See Big Man Japan with a crowd of otaku and the shockwaves of laughter may prove as powerful as Godzilla’s trademark atomic breath; check it out with a group of average movie nerds who know the tropes, and odds are you’ll be in hysterics by the time it winds to its inexplicable, yet sublimely bizarre, ending.

Masaru Daisatou (Matsumoto) is the last of his kind, a select breed of heroic giants charged with the task of keeping Japan safe from any manner of invading monsters.

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Somewhere along the line, it seems as if our common quest to seek out ideas that were fresh and original in cinema gave way to a deep-seated need to be comforted by the familiar. Sequels, prequels, spin-offs, adaptations, remakes, and reimaginings — all of these things feed into a cycle of creative malaise that, while fleetingly satisfying in the moment, often proves to be less than gratifying upon later reflection. Fortunately, there are still some filmmakers out there who are willing to take the risk and challenge us. Eden Log writer/director Franck Vestiel is just such a talent, following in the footsteps of such visionary filmmakers as Terry Gilliam and Chris Marker in delivering his debut feature, a dystopian nightmare that’s alternately terrifying, intriguing, and confrontational without ever losing sight that its primary function is to entertain.

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Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire is what type of film? a) an inspirational underdog story, b) a harrowing look at the life of a Mumbai street child, c) an epic romance punctuated by tragedy and victory, or d) an affecting crime drama centered upon bitter sibling rivalry.

Give up? Slumdog Millionaire is all of those things and more. It’s the reason we go to the movies in the first place, and by the time it reaches its climax, you’re likely to be yelling at the screen the same way that television viewers around the world did back when Who Wants to Be a Millionaire was at the peak of its popularity.

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Ah, fall. It’s a time of transition, crisp air, and distinctive colors; when we replace our cold lemonade and long, humid nights on the patio with hot cider, roaring fires, and violent deaths at the hands of cake obsessed corpses, vengeful totems, and a man eating lake creature resembling a poncho. I am speaking, of course, of the gruesome and markedly 1980s result of a collaboration between author Stephen King and filmmaker George A. Romero: Creepshow!

The first installment of this unlikely hit grossed $21 million domestically upon its release in 1982, and featured five short stories: “Father’s Day”, “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill”, “Something to Tide You Over”, “The Crate” and “They’re Creeping Up On You!”. While each story has its personal, if gruesome charms (not the least of which being the reanimated corpse of Nathan Grantham, whose incessant demands for cake drove his daughter Bedelia to bludgeoning him to death with an ashtray on Father’s Day), the standouts are “Something to Tide You Over”, in which a scorned, sadistic husband played with startling authenticity by Leslie Nielson plans a horrific death for his unfaithful wife and her lover, and They’re Creeping Up On You, featuring E.G. Marshall as a germ phobic businessman who finds himself up to his ears in cockroaches after a put upon employee had all he could take of his boss’s demands.

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Despite FOX’s disproportionately high success rate at killing the brain cells of primetime television devotees faster and more cost effectively than their competitors, the occasional clever bit of programming will quietly insert itself between Rob and Amber: Against the Odds and Celebrity Boxing. Inevitably, it is cancelled (see: Firefly, Wonderfalls), but the scrappier programs have a way of persevering.

Case in point: Futurama. We’ll never know whether it was due to the success of The Simpsons or if a FOX bigwig simply saw potential in drunken robots and the sexual tension generated by a one-eyed mutant pilot and a once cryogenically frozen pizza delivery boy, but Futurama was ultimately green lit. Slowly but surely, Futurama developed a vast fan following and a well-deserved reputation for being one of the most quotable shows to hit the small screen. Shortly thereafter, it was cancelled. Luckily, hope has been restored in the form of Bender’s Big Score, a straight-to-DVD full length film featuring the most awesome vocal talents of Al Gore, Mark Hamill, and Coolio. Bender’s Big Score and the three — yes, three — follow-up films will be split into a fifth season of Futurama to be aired on Comedy Central beginning in 2008.