First of all is what everyone wants to know – how good OCEAN’S THIRTEEN is.  The bottom line is that OCEAN’S THIRTEEN is not bad at all.  Director Steven Soderberg still has it to film an impressive heist in Las Vegas with Danny Ocean and the all-star cast still all high spirited enough to keep the gags and suspense flowing.  The film is well paced with neat little laugh-out loud humour with little twists along the way allowing the audience a chance to relax and enjoy a nostalgic feel-good movie.

The script by director Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon is not short of intriguing characters.  Mr. Smith (Dane Cook) is an obsessive perverted Peeping Tom, who gets off watching murders.  The killings are performed by a serial killer whose real identity is Earl Brooks (Kevin Costner) - in real life, a pillar of society, a successful businessman and loving father.  The investigator is a fierce workaholic detective, Tracy Atwood (Demi Moore) who will risk all to solve the murders.  She is in the process of a nasty divorce.  The characters are woven together with a plot that involves Mr. Smith who catches Mr. Brooks a.k.a. the thumbprint killer at work and blackmails him.  He has problems at home too, when his pregnant daughter (Danielle Panabaker) drops out of school.  It turns out the real reason is that she herself has the traits of her father.  As plots go, this story gets more and more twisted towards the end.

Judd Apatow’s debut feature THE 40-YEAR OLD VIRGIN was an unexpected success.  KNOCKED UP will not doubt follow suit, as writer/director Apatow again applies the principles that made his first film engaging, funny and winning to most audiences.

One has got to like Hal Hartley to appreciate the efforts of his latest eccentric film FAY GRIM.  For those unaware of the Hartley films, it is good to know that FAY GRIM continues the adventures of the principal protagonist of Hartley’s 1997 feature HENRY FOOL – who is currently hiding in Paris.  HENRY FOOL (Thomas Jay Ryan) is a talent-less novelist who had fled the country for past crimes.  He is loved and aided by his wife, FAY GRIM in this new film. 

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD’S END, the third of the series of the Disney PIRATE films ties up the ends of the stories of the first two though it still leaves the story open for the possibility for future ventures.  Gore Verbinski directed all three making WORLD’S END consistent in look, feel and atmosphere.  Reviewers during the press screening were requested not to reveal any key plot points indicating that the filmmakers are (wisely) concerned with the story’s integrity.