So this is the one, after *The Lord of the Rings,* that, if you’re any kind of proper geek at all, you’ve been looking forward to with a mixture of glee and dread, counting the ways it could all go wrong and dreaming of the ways it could all go right. I mean, they gave it to the guy who made the *Shrek* flicks, and the *Shrek*s are great but they’re *goofy* and Narnia isn’t, and then there were rumors that the allegory would be removed from the film, which is of course not only wrong but impractical: How do you remove the allegory, the unspoken symbolic stuff lurking behind a story, without completely changing the story beyond recognition?

Look, I’m stretching to find something positive to say about *Aeon Flux* cuz I really wanted to like it. Even after the very bad sign of it not being screened in advance for critics. Cuz Charlize keeps growing on me, and you can see that she approached this babe from the world of animation with the right mix of seriousness and silliness, like she wants to do the character justice but recognizes at the same time how silly she really is. Cuz director Karyn Kusama clearly has a flair for cinematic style and visual elan. Cuz I’ve finally pretty much decided, after a lot of vacillating through a lot of movies, that I *like* Marton Csokas, and he doesn’t sneer so much here as he usually does, which is a good thing — he’s got a great and genuine *smile,* it turns out.

I have a sneaking suspicion that *First Descent* is a huge put-on, the latest jape from Christopher Guest and his merry band of mockumentary tricksters. Oh, sure, ‘Kemp Curley and Kevin Harrison’ are credited as the producers and directors, but come on: everyone knows that Kemp Curley was the missing Stooge. It’s a joke.

It’s almost like theater, these nine short, interconnected one-act plays that unfold in real time in long, uncut single takes: writer-director Rodrigo Garcia, who’s mostly directed for TV, adopts the urgency and the immediacy of the stage by eschewing the tricks of film and setting his extraordinary cast free in front of the camera. Nine … more…

You know how, in My Best Friend’s Wedding, the pals promised to marry each other if they were both still single at 30? Well, this is just like that, except it’s five heavy-metal fans who vowed, as teenagers, that if any of them died before he turned forty, the others would bury him next to … more…