Albert Brooks' character was once a movie producer. He describes his films as action-filled and sexy. Once a critic described them as European, he says. I'd call this intense actioner European as well, but not for the same reasons. The action is precisely planned in bursts in an otherwise quiet film. The tone never shifts but depending on what is going on it can be ominous or romantic. It's artful and bloody. It's visceral and elegant.

In an existential move harkening back to car movies of the 1970s like TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, the protagonist is simply known as Driver (Ryan Gosling, CRAZY. STUPID. LOVE.). He works for Shannon (Bryan Cranston, TV's BREAKING BAD) as a mechanic at his auto shop and part time as a stunt driver for the movies. Shannon wants to start racing cars and asks shady business man Bernie Rose (Brooks, DEFENDING YOUR LIFE) and Nino (Ron Perlman, HELLBOY) to invest in the young man. Moonlighting, Driver drives get away cars for criminals. He gives the thieves the same deal. A five-minute window, he doesn't carry a gun and he doesn't get involved.

What could a 3-D family film from Martin Scorsese be like? With HUGO now as an example, the answer is magical. And it's a magic that Scorsese is best suited to bring to life — the magic of the movies. At one point, a young boy visits a movie studio and the director leans down to him and tells him if he's ever wondered where his dreams come from this is where they are made.

Based on Brian Selznick's celebrated illustrated novel THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET, the story follows its title character (Asa Butterfield, THE BOY WITH THE STRIPED PAJAMAS) as he survives as an orphan in the clockworks of a Paris train station. After his father (Jude Law, A.I.), a clock maker, died, he has been trying to finish a project they were working on together — fixing an automaton. This mechanical human is a complex one that seems to be designed to write something and Hugo believes it will give him a message from his dad. But the boy loses his notebook filled with calculations to Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley, GANDHI) after the toyshop owner catches him trying to steal. What Hugo doesn't know is that Georges is Georges Melies, the once famed filmmaker who is best known for A TRIP TO THE MOON, where a rocket sticks into the eye of the man on the moon.

SUPERMAN, LORD OF THE RINGS, STAR TREK, STAR WARS, AVATAR and dozens of other sci-fi and fantasy tales owe their origins to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series. This new film is based on Burroughs' A PRINCESS OF MARS, a classic of pulp fiction. Now Andrew Stanton, who won Oscars for FINDING NEMO and WALL*E, has brought the world to the screen.

John Carter (Taylor Kitsch, WOLVERINE) is your Han Solo-esque reluctant hero type. A Civil War vet who refuses to get pulled back into a cause (Indian Wars) because he is only seeking gold. But fate has other plans and like Frodo, he gets thrust into a world he couldn't imagine when he gets teleported to Mars. In a reverse of Superman's tale, he, the Earthling, travels to another planet and gains superpowers because of the alien world's environment. Like the worlds of STAR TREK and STAR WARS, various alien races are warring and the good guys must stop the superior weaponry of the villains. Like in AVATAR, Carter is a human who establishes himself as a leader in an alien culture. In this world of Mars, aka Barsoom, the giant, four-armed alien race is led by Tars Tarkas (Willem Dafoe, SPIDER-MAN).

Best videogame adaptation ever! Wait, but it's adapted from Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novel. This send-up of videogame culture is frantic and funny. It uses videogames as a style with wit and ingenuity. Director Edgar Wright, the maker of SHAUN OF THE DEAD and HOT FUZZ, has taken a simple, quirky love story and blown it out into a grand cinematic spectacle that had me smiling form the moment the 8-bit version of the Universal logo came up on the screen.

It is announced right from the start that Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera, JUNO) is dating a high school girl. Now you might be thinking that a 22 year old dating a 17 year old is one year short of being right, but Scott seems too innocent to expect anything more than a kiss. Scott just likes the adulation of Knives Chau (Ellen Wong) even though his sister Stacey (Anna Kendrick, UP IN THE AIR) thinks there's twisted fantasy fulfillment going on in him dating a Chinese Catholic school girl with the uniform and all. But he seems satisfied with her simply being amazed at his knowledge of the origin of Pac-Man's name. She of course thinks he's awesome because he plays bass in a band called Sex Bob Omb.

Sensual is not a word often thought of when one thinks of a Disney animated film. But this Disney short flows with it. But this isn't just any Disney short, it originated as a collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. A seemingly unlikely pair of artists to work together. Disney wanted to experiment with the animation form and Dali saw animation as a perfect way to explore surrealism on film. The project started in the 1940s with Dali drawing dozens of images, but the film never came to be. Following the production of FANTASIA/2000, Roy E. Disney championed its completion using original storyboards and journals.

Like a Dali painting, the film is a dance through an absurd dreamscape. The film begins with a beautiful naked woman walking across the desert. Naked woman in a Disney film?! Gasp! Trust me, the real naughty bits are unseen. The images are driven by an original 1940s recording from Mexican composer Armando Dominguez and singer Dora Luz, which gives the blend of 2D and CG animation another level of surrealism. The animation style does so as well. The strobe-like movement of the woman is like watching flashes from a dream.

This 1080p/AVC-encoded disc is a handsome effort by Warner Premiere. One problem plagues the release though and that is color banding. Sadly the issue doesn’t just appear in backgrounds and lighting. Some can be seen on characters as well. But as is the case with these DC Direct titles, the colors are spectacularly vibrant. The balance is perfect and the blacks are inky. Outside of the banding, the Blu-ray doesn’t display any other digital anomalies.

The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track has the solid treatment that has come to signify these DC Direct titles. In the sound effects department, the film is first rate. From the rings powering up to the booming bass during fight sequences the soundscape erupts with action. For the most part the elements are balanced nicely and the directionality is well done. Once or twice I did notice the sounds lagging behind the fast images, but it was minor. The dialogue scenes are simply just that clear front heavy speech.

Here is a unique use of sci-fi. For the most part this film is a drama regarding recovering from a tragic event that fundamentally transforms one's life over night. The concept of a doppelganger planet is used as metaphor for how decisions we make create new lives and even selves.

Rhoda Williams (Brit Marling, upcoming THE COMPANY YOU KEEP) is a high school student who has just gotten into MIT. After a night of drinking, she makes the mistake of driving home and along the way hits another car putting college professor John Burroughs (William Mapother, TV's LOST) into a coma and killing his pregnant wife and young son. In an instant, she transforms from a promising future astrophysicist into a convict who must serve four years in prison.

In the most overtly allegorical of C.S. Lewis' NARNIA series, the heroes battle the demons inside rather than white witches or evil kings. While director Michael Apted never mentions any one religion, the Christian undertones of this installment are more apparent than any of the other films. Vanity, jealousy, greed and pride are the villains here.

Lucy (Georgie Henley) and Edmund (Skandar Keynes) dream of returning to Narnia where they were a queen and king. In England, they are stuck as simple teens living with their aunt and uncle during World War II. Instead of battling mythical creatures, they're stuck fighting with their stuffy cousin Eustace (Will Poulter, SON OF RAMBOW). Then one day a painting in their room comes to life and transports them back to Narnia and onto the sailing vessel of King Caspian (Ben Barnes). At first they are unsure why they have been called back, but soon learn of the evil pull of Dark Island, which has been trapping people in its seductive green mist.

During the course of their adventure, the heroes will encounter slave traders, dufflepuds, dragons, magic ponds and a giant sea serpent that makes CLASH OF THE TITANS' Kraken look like a sea slug. Along the way, the evil mist will play on the characters' weaknesses. Lucy wishes she were as beautiful as her older sister Susan (Anna Popplewell). Edmund continues to struggle with feeling like a second wheel, only this time it's not to his older brother Peter (William Moseley), but to the new king Caspian. Eustace is susceptible to… well… just name the sin. The obnoxiously practical young man is mentored by the brave warrior mouse Reepicheep (Simon Pegg, SHAUN OF THE DEAD).

I've been mulling over what to say about Gore Verbinski's first foray into feature animation. Like it's main character it has so many dual identities. Its photoreal animation is a truly original, while its script seems cobbled together from dozens of at right angle sources. The film has adult ideas that few American animated films ever have, but it seems lost at what audience it's really targeting. It's a Western. It's a comedy. It's an existential examination.

A chameleon with no name, who sounds like Johnny Depp doing Don Knotts, is trying to find his muse in a Beckett-esque performance for himself in his terrarium. Then he hits a bump along the road, literally. His tank is thrust out of the back of his owner's car along a desert highway. A squished mystic armadillo called Roadkill (Alfred Molina, SPIDER-MAN 2) tells him to go out into the desert and that everyone needs to cross the road at some point.

How can you not be romantic about baseball? That's what Brad Pitt's Billy Beane says in this great baseball movie, which is more about the business of baseball than the game. And that said the film still does stir the desire to grab some peanuts, popcorn and Cracker Jack and head out to the ole ball game.

The story follows Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's, as he is forced to rebuild his team after losing three key players to other clubs. The dirty little secret in baseball, that anyone who knows baseball knows, is that the playing field is not level. As Beane says, there are rich teams and there are poor teams and there is 50 feet of crap and then there is the A's. When a trip to visit the Indians' GM about player trades goes badly, he seeks out the quiet guy by the door who seems to make the others listen to him. That guy is Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, CYRUS), an Ivy League economics grad who believes that professional baseball has it all wrong when it comes to staffing teams.