Movies

Cameron Diaz and James Marsden have a terrible moral dilemma in Richard Kelly’s “The Box”: Press a button on a mysterious container, they’ll get $1 million, and someone they don’t know will die.

LOS ANGELES – Technology finally has caught up with Charles Dickens' imagination.

Leaving aside for a few moments the technology behind Robert Zemeckis’ animated “A Christmas Carol,” this is the most satisfying version of Charles Dickens' oft-told tale in years.

“The Men Who Stare at Goats” pokes fun at the U.S. military for trying to create a team of psychic warriors, but you at least have to give the military credit for keeping an open mind.

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin will co-host the Oscars.

Here’s what’s debuting on DVD today.

“Gentlemen Broncos” is a comedy so weird, so off, so simply wrong that even freakish hero Napoleon Dynamite would have a hard time lending it his catch word, “Sweet.”

Low-rental 1980s horror returns with filmmaker Ti West’s “The House of the Devil,” which scores points for restraint and attention to detail but defaults when the mortgage comes due with a bloody, pointless, uninspired climax.

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Michael Jackson fans around the world readied for the singer’s last bow Tuesday in a film that captures rehearsals for his aborted concert stand last summer.

LOS ANGELES – Vampires have been an eternal force in Hollywood horror since silent-movie days, yet they have risen to new heights as the "Twilight" franchise, TV's "True Blood" and other incarnations put the bite on viewers.

Bela Lugosi is burned into most movie lovers’ brains as THE Dracula, but he’s hardly the only guy to portray the legendary bloodsucker. Christopher Lee played the Count seven times in the course of 15 years, Leslie Nielsen hammed it up in Mel Brooks’ vampire send-up, and John Carradine got to portray Dracula in a battle against, of all people, Billy the Kid. Ah, the ’60s ...

Considering the risks Amelia Earhart took, losing her life in the call of aviation, Hilary Swank and director Mira Nair don’t put much on the line in their film biography “Amelia.”

“Astro Boy” is one of those happy moviegoing surprises.

It’s getting downright batty trying to keep all these vampires straight.

New releases on DVD this week:

The real mystery of "Law Abiding Citizen" isn't how Gerard Butler's character manages to wreak explosive, bloody havoc on Philadelphia while confined behind the walls of his jail cell.

The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.

Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” is only 10 sentences long and takes less than five minutes to read, if you don’t linger over the pictures.

NEW YORK – About the hoopla surrounding the film adaptation of “Where the Wild Things Are,” Maurice Sendak is characteristically gruff.

New movies available today on DVD:

BUSAN, South Korea (AP) – The director of the anticipated adaptation of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s hit novel “Norwegian Wood” said the movie would be loyal to the original story.

TORONTO (AP) – Michael Sheen never felt he was playing second fiddle as British leader Tony Blair or TV interviewer David Frost.

“A Serious Man”

"Coco Before Chanel"

In the 25 years since Joel and Ethan Coen broke cinematic ground with the very dark but oddly funny “Blood Simple,” journalists assigned to interview them have found that the brothers would much rather be making movies than talking about them. Questions were often answered with one or two words, followed by long silences.

"Couples Retreat" suggests what life might have been like if the guys from "Swingers" had grown up, moved to the suburbs and turned into lame, sitcommy cliches.

LOS ANGELES – "Toy Story" has always been a 3D film, even if moviegoers never saw it that way.

"Capitalism: A Love Story"

Ricky Gervais may be best known for his British situation comedies “The Office” and “Extras,” but his background in sketch comedy surfaces in “The Invention of Lying.”

Drew Barrymore jams all the indie film adorability she can into her directing debut, “Whip It,” even though few would consider women’s roller derby an adorable sport. “Whip It” is nonetheless an easy movie to like.