Scratch the surface, and Amelie (written by Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant) is the same basic boy-meets-girl story Hollywood has been telling us for years — this may be the least French French movie I’ve ever seen. But it’s the style in which that ordinary story is presented — Jeunet’s wry, fantastical spirit tickles your intellectual funny bone; the film is breezy, witty, with a dose of snideness to save it from saccharine — that makes Amelie so very delightful.

Based on the best-selling Book of Revelation, 1976’s The Omen is one spooky flick. Preposterous, sure. But as Apocalyptic religious fantasy, it’s far more chills-inducing than, say, the hilariously earnest The Omega Coda or even the convoluted and incomprehensible source material itself. Yup, this is one example of the movie that turned out better than the book.

Lance would prefer that On the Line not be considered an ”N Sync movie.’ Just because it stars two members of the group (Joey Fatone is here, too) and features two ‘N Sync songs and relies purely on those two facts to entrance audiences doesn’t mean this is an ‘N Sync movie. Not at all.

They’re like TV advertisements for financial service companies with names you say in hushed, reverent whisper, movies like K-pax and Life as a House.

It works well except for the fact that the screenwriters and director Rod Lurie simplistically answer for us all the questions they raise — sure, even convicted killers can be good, honorable people, deep down, they tell us, even that one crazy guy who took a mallet to his CO’s skull.

The Hughes Brothers — adapting a graphic novel by Alan Moore — have gone to great lengths to re-personalize the Ripper’s victims for us, more than a century after the murders took place, to make the story as immediate as possible for us, to engender our sympathy. I can’t in all honesty say they’ve succeeded in doing that, and it just may be the nature of Jack’s story that makes such a mission nearly impossible.