The acting match-up in Broken City feels like an old school  heavyweight title fight from back in the day when these things really  meant something.  

Writer-director Andrés Muscietti teams up with co-writer Neil Cross to expand his 2008 short about a pair of young sisters (Megan Charpentier and Isabelle Nélisse) found in a cabin in the woods after five years, who get placed into the custody of an uncle (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his wife (Jessica Chastain).  

After a brief postponement from the fall — to edit a violent sequence in a movie theater — Gangster Squad, the 1940s and ’50s crime thriller from Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland and 30 Minutes or Less) seeks a hostile takeover of the weekend box office.   

Yet another horror parody makes an appearance at the box office, this time featuring the return of Marlon Wayans (of Scary Movie and the Wayans family comedy troupe fame).   

The story of a family, with Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts as the parents, that ends up separated during a tsunami. Their struggle to survive and reunite gets a thrillingly dramatic treatment in the hands of Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage).  

David Chase, executive producer of The Sopranos, staves off fading away from the spotlight, serving as writer and director of Not Fade Away, a love letter of sorts to a bygone musical era.  

Fracking, the controversial process to used to release natural gas for collection, drives the narrative of the new Gus Van Sant film, written by co-stars Matt Damon and John Krasinski, but the issue, which widens the already cavernous divide between Democrats and Republicans, never truly takes center stage.  

I’m not sure what to make of this latest edition in the annals of Texas Chainsaw lore.   

Much like Inglorious Basterds, his revisionist take on Jewish revenge on the Nazis, Quentin Tarantino tackles the curious American institution of slavery in Django Unchained.  

Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) sure knows how to set the bar a notch or two higher, just to challenge himself. He follows up his Academy Award winning film by diving headlong into an adaptation of a beloved musical and pushes his all-star cast (featuring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway) to record their vocal performances live.  

Fluffy family friendly alert! Old school grandparents (Billy Crystal and Bette Midler) agree to take care of their three grandchildren when their daughter (Marisa Tomei) and her husband (Tom Everett Scott), a high-achieving new millennial working couple, are forced to jet off to high-pressure assignments.  

For fans of the live Cirque du Soleil experience, complete with example after example of grace and athleticism, it would seem to be a no-brainer to construct a narrative and capture the wonder as only film can  

Screenwriter Dan Fogelman (Crazy, Stupid, Love.) and director Anne Fletcher (The Proposal) team up behind the scenes of this tag-team road trip tracking an overbearing mother (Barbra Streisand) and her son (Seth Rogen) as they cross the country.  

Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise), a hardass military investigator, is the creation of author Lee Childs and, like James Patterson’s Alex Cross, a franchise-in-the-making, so it seems worth asking why screenwriter-director Christopher McQuarrie (The Way of the Gun) hitched his wagon to Cruise who, at 50, might be approaching the period of his career when it would behoove him to settle into a more dramatic phase rather than the frantic running and gunning of the extreme action thrillers.  

The cynical play here would be to knock the “unexpected” nature of this enterprise because, after the overwhelming success of Peter Jackson’s justifiably epic Lord of the Rings saga, why wouldn’t Jackson and New Line seek to replicate that run with The Hobbit?