I have mixed feelings about Where the Wild Things Are, the big-screen adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s beloved children’s book (a childhood favorite of mine). On the one hand, I agree with many of the critics who are calling it way too gloomy and whiny. But on the other, I’m fascinated by the big creatures, of course (Carol, Judith, Ira and all the others exist on the screen, thanks to giant puppets), but also by the uncondescending attention to the feelings of a child. Max (played very nicely by Max Records) is a young misfit, a 9-year-old loner who creates his own worlds, like snow castles in his own backyard. When his sister’s friends destroy the castle in the middle of a playful tussle, he tearfully thrashes her room, to the chagrin of her mother (Catherine Keener). Later that night, he’s sent to bed because of bad behavior, and ends up instead as the king of a magical island full of giant beasts. Instead of going for the loud, garish Cat in the Hat movie approach, director Spike Jonze (from Jackass and Being John Malkovich) creates a grave, melancholy mood. Much of the movie is shot in earth colors, sometimes looking up at things, as if taking a child’s point-of-view. It’s fascinating stuff, but I wish there was some fun to go along with the sadness. Even when the characters get into a pretend-war, somebody ends up getting hurt. So it’s a mixed bag, but one worth seeing, even though I’m sure kids would prefer watching “Up” on DVD instead.

An actually scary movie coming out just in time for Halloween. What a concept! The story behind Oren Peli’s 2007 zero-budget chiller, only now making its way into theaters, is almost as interesting as the movie itself. The whole thing started as a short extended to feature length and shown at the Sundance Film Festival, and then brought to the attention of Steven Spielberg, who was freak out by it. So now it hits the big screen, and audiences looking for a scare will wanna check it out. It’s presented as found footage of a mysterious case involving a young couple in San Diego with a bit of a supernatural problem. Katie (Katie Featherston) is plagued by frightening visions of a demon trying to, er, drag her to hell, while her boyfriend Micah (Micah Sloat), who is documenting the events with his new camera, is at first skeptical. But then doors start opening and shutting by themselves, heavy footsteps are heard in the middle of the night, and growling sounds start talking back to the characters. Given the very low budget, no special effects were available, which meant the filmmakers had to rely on their creativity to creep us out. And oh boy, do they succeed. The audience I saw it with (at a midnight show, the ideal time) screamed right when they were supposed to scream. It’s been predictably compared to The Blair Witch Project, but Paranormal Activity deserves its own place in the realm of do-it-yourself horror.

I guess I must be a glutton for punishment, because not long after suffering through Zombieland I voluntarily went to see Sorority Row. What can I say, I’m a sucker for horror flicks and this one looked so-cheesy-it’s-enjoyable from the trailer. Of course, trailers are deceiving things, and the movie doesn’t get any more imaginative than what you see in those couple of minutes. There is a plot, and a pretty promising one: a bunch of bitchy sorority girls cause a death when an initiation prank goes awry, and, after getting rid of the body, they all promise to never speak of it again. But there wouldn’t be any scares if the matter didn’t come up again and people started turning up slashed and diced in gruesome ways. Come to think of it, there aren’t any scares even when these things happen. It’s a pretty dismal affair, with plenty of gore and nudity but no suspense or characters to speak of. I can’t even remember any of the actors in it; I vaguely recall Demi Moore’s daughter being in there (as attractive as her mom, and as humorless an actress), and I wish I could forget Carrie Fisher’s embarrassing cameo as the obligatory wacky authority figure. (She’s no Piper Laurie in Carrie, that’s for sure.) It could have been an interesting film (a bit of Mean Girls here, a dollop of Black Christmas there), but it seems like nobody takes teen horror movies seriously since Scream. It makes Jennifer’s Body look like Psycho by comparison.

Zombieland insists that it is America’s Shaun of the Dead. I know Shaun of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead is a good friend, and you, Zombieland, are no Shaun of the Dead. I’m a sucker for zombie movies, but this one’s the pits. It’s set in an unspecified future where the world is overrun by flesh-craving undead, and the sole survivors are a Michael Cera-like nerd (Jesse Eisenberg), a redneck ass-kicker (Woody Harrelson), and a pair of flimflamming sisters (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin). The only sanctuary is a Disneyland-like amusement park on the Pacific coast, but getting there is half the fun. Or would be, if this were any fun. It’s full of elements, like Harrelson’s strenuous performance, which should be fun but for some weird reason aren’t. Seriously, you can’t make a cult movie on purpose—they just happen after they’re made, whether or not that was the intention. And this one just about breaks its back straining for cultish coolness. So you have “hilarious” gore effects, random humor involving clowns and twinkies that doesn’t build to anything, snarky references to 1997, and even a cameo by a hipster icon (which I won’t spoil, because the movie needs whatever surprise it’s got). The audience I saw it with was so primed for it that they would have burst their sides laughing at the drop of a hat. Afterwards, the mood was vaguely irritated, as if they had been taken in by P.T. Barnum. This George Romero fan was not amused.

I’ve had just about enough of folks waxing nostalgic about how groovy Woodstock was back in the Sixties, maaaan. Still, I rather liked Taking Woodstock, director Ang Lee’s portrayal of the legendary 1969 concert as seen through the eyes of a young man. Elliott Teichberg (Demetri Martin) is the teenage son of a Jewish-Russian couple (Imelda Staunton, Henry Goodman), and the dilapidated family hotel is in danger of being taken away due to unpaid bills. Things look bleak, until Elliott hears about hippies getting kicked out of the original site for their music concert, and, seizing the opportunity, gets the event organizers to relocate to the land around his hotel. In no time, there’s an army of far-out folks camping out all over the place, running around naked, making love in the bushes, and otherwise expanding the young protagonist’s worldview. Lee (who won an Oscar for Brokeback Mountain) is a very perceptive director of drama and character, and here he displays a sensitive, gentle touch that captures Woodstock’s transient feeling of hope. Weirdly enough, there are almost no glimpses of the festival’s musical numbers, and only one psychedelic drug trip. Instead of focusing on these clichés, Lee instead gets to the heart of Martin’s character, a still unformed gay man who over the course of the event learns more about his own identity. It’s much closer to Lee’s excellent 1997 drama The Ice Storm than to the famous 1971 documentary Woodstock, and it should be seen even if you can’t tell a Sha-Na-Na from a Grateful Dead.

I’ve been catching up with recent movies recently, and Julie & Julia was not one I was particularly looking forward to. Now hold on, don’t assume that I have chick flicks, because some of my best friends are chick flicks. But seriously, a comedy about culinary doyenne Julia Child and success-greedy blogger Julie Powell directed by the terrible Nora Ephron (I still have my welts from her remake of Bewitched)? So it was an act of bravery for me to delay my second viewing of Inglourious Basterds and march into the theater without a girlfriend by my side to provide me with an excuse. But I was pleasantly surprised. Or half-pleasantly surprised, to be exact. The parts of the movie dealing with Child in the 1950s learning about the joys of cooking, dealing with snobs and laying the ground for her famous TV show are pretty delightful. Praise goes to Meryl Streep, tons of it. I don’t worship her as the greatest actress alive like several of my colleagues do, but there’s something contagious about a consummate dramatic diva kicking up her heels and having a fun, and Streep has a blast here. Unfortunately, the modern-day sequences with Powell are flat in that unmistakably too-cute Ephron way. Amy Adams, who plays Powell with her usual charm, softens the pain, but she can’t change the fact that the character is pretty much a bitch more interested in her own rising status than in her supposed “tribute” to Julia Child. So there’s half a good movie here, and, since I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy, I say check it out.

This is it, fellas, the flick of the year. I’ve always loved Quentin Tarantino, but I wondered if he could find his way back after the debacle that was Grindhouse a couple of years ago. Well, with Inglourious Basterds not only does he come back, he roars back. Everybody by now knows the plot from TV spots and trailers: a WWII military renegade named Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) puts together a bunch of Jewish-American soldiers to terrorize Nazis by shooting them, scalping them, and, in the case of one “Bear Jew” (Eli Roth), bashing their heads in with baseball bats. What many audiences don’t know is that Raine’s “basterds” only make up a part of the movie, with the two main characters actually being Shoshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), a young Jewish Frenchwoman whose family was slaughtered in a Nazi raid, and Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), the ignoble German officer responsible for said raid. There are other characters as well, like a British movie-critic-turned-spy (Michael Fassbender) and a German starlet working with the Allies (Diane Kruger), but the different plots are neatly brought together in a fiery plan to bring down Hitler, Goebbels, and the rest of the Third Reich gang. This movie had me at “hello.” The dialogue is funny, tense and masterful (another heads up, people: about two-thirds of the movie is subtitled), excruciating suspense leads to bursts of ferocious violence, and the cast is brilliant down to the last actor. Pitt is very funny and commanding, Laurent has moments worthy of Kill Bill, and Waltz (whom I hope we will be seeing in lots of movies from now on) deserves all the kudos he’s been getting. And then there’s the music, ranging from Ennio Morricone to David Bowie, and the Rod Taylor cameo, and the tavern shootout, and the exhilarating finale, and… Seriously, the riches go on and on. I’m dying to watch it again.