Oh, One True Thing could so easily have been Stepmom II. On the surface, there are lots of similarities. We’ve got cancer, we’ve got one woman giving up her career when a man should have made that sacrifice, and we’ve got it all taking place during the schmaltziest of holidays: Christmas.

The medical industry could not have been happy with Patch Adams. It makes doctors look bad. It makes hospitals look bad. It makes med schools look bad. On the other hand, it’s so painfully awful that doctors may have been pleased when the number of ER visits shot up as people ran straight from movie theaters to hospitals in diabetic shock over this sugary, gooey, treacly excuse for a film.

I’ve had my eye on Loren Dean since I first noticed him in GATTACA. Yeah, he’s cute, and I’m a sucker for that, but even more to my liking, he’s smart. He’s one of those actors who seems to fly under the radar, his talent sort of sneaking up on the viewer. His delivery is assured without being arrogant, intelligent without being showy.

Written and directed by Bruce McCulloch, Dog Park isn’t a perfect film. Some scenes have a sketch-comedy feel to them (not surprising, considering McCulloch’s comedic roots), with dialogue a bit too contrived in a few spots, and the plot suffers from a tad too many coincidences. But on the whole, Dog Park cheerfully touches on realities of love and romance that movies all too often ignore, and makes us laugh at the fears and insecurities that plague us all. I’d much rather see more films like this than the candy-coated ‘romantic comedy’ sap that Hollywood cranks out.

Are we seeing the birth of a whole new genre of suspense films? The “I see dead people” genre? I suppose it’s merely a coincidence that Stir of Echoes arrived in theaters only a month after The Sixth Sense. Unfortunately for Stir of Echoes, the scant temporal distance from Haley Joel Osment’s sad terror only serve to highlight how mediocre this film is.

Director Rupert Wainwright’s chief weapon is a bad script. A bad script and predictable– His two chief weapons are a bad script and predictable pacing… and an almost fanatical devotion– Amongst his weaponry: a bad script, predictable pacing, and an almost fanatical devotion to MTV-style filmmaking.

Good-naturedly ironic and delightfully self-referential, Case uses Terry to playfully toy with our expectations of a crime story by overtly acknowledging the conventions of the genre, and of movies on the whole, to keep us guessing — and amused — until the very end.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call this the Indian Holocaust, and I don’t think it’s unfair to liken Earth to Schindler’s List. Deepa Mehta, the Indian-Canadian writer/director of Earth, has created a deeply moving, immensely powerful film that looks at the events of 1947 from a child’s point of view, offering us a tiny but clear perspective on how tribal hatreds separate people once close, and how a child’s innocence can be used and betrayed.

‘I know this looks bad,’ Bryce says, and he’s right. The potential for Best Laid Plans to take an offensively bad turn at this point is enormous. While the title does take on precisely the kind of sleazy double entendre you’d expect from a movie the features a sex act going as wrong as it possibly could (though not quite in the way were initially led to believe), the characters end up coming across as nothing more unsavory that merely sad and desperate.

The Hunt for Red October is one of those rare perfect movies. From director John McTiernan’s clever disposal of subtitles for the Russian-speaking characters to Basil Poledouris’s terrifically martial score to DP Jan de Bont’s beautifully eerie underwater photography, nothing could be better.