Perhaps only the French, though, who suffered so grievously as a nation in the Great War, could get away with *A Very Long Engagement,* a labor of love for *Amelie* director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, based upon Sebastien Japrisot’s novel. Here we have a film that combines a particularly Gallic comic sensibility — replete with oddball characters among which even the fiercest, hardbitten soldiers and such, have a delicate but earthy charm — with the horrific nightmare of the trenches, a film about what is arguably the worst war ever that manages to leave you not despairing at the cruelty of humankind but inspired by the hopeless hope that allowed those caught up in it to survive.

As the Chinese say, Ai-ya! The Grudge and The Ring were but dainty appetizers to the cinematic feast that is this mercilessly disturbing film — director Kim Jee-Woon may just have cemented Asia’s position on the bleeding edge of horror. Shocking in more ways than you’ll ever anticipate, this story of two good sisters and … more…

*Flight of the Phoenix* opens with this big old ugly-beautiful C-119 cargo plane flying over the desolate-beautiful Gobi Desert, swooping and soaring and, frankly, showing off in its magnificent defiance of the harsh world below. And blasting on the soundtrack, while the titles flash, is Johnny Cash’s weary-exuberant anthem ‘I’ve Been Everywhere.’ The combined effect is hauntingly memorable — I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, can’t get the song out of my head — half audacious arrogance, half genuine love of traveling the world and seeing what there is to see out there.

If there’s a scarcely populated niche in the Hollywood ecosystem, it’s the one where popcorn movies for grownups roam lonely: you know, films without fart jokes or stuff blowing up real good starring actual adults that nevertheless are not about people dying of cancer or lying compulsively about sex or surviving against terrible odds in rubble-strewn war zones while Nazis hunt them down in a way that speaks metaphoric volumes about the human condition. Sometimes you just need a fun, diverting movie free of delusions of grandeur and Oscar clips but not free of lots of pretty people to look at.

Reason No. 143,854 why invading Iraq was a bad idea: It woke up the ‘patriarch’ of all vampires, who was slumbering in the desert, and boy is he pissed.