This adaptation of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book 'Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone' follows Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) as he and his team search for weapons of mass destruction and end up exposing a massive and damaging cover-up that, while fictionalized here, feels like non-fiction with a heaping dose of action heroics thrown into the mix for good measure. Grade: A-.

Silliness abounds in this clash of cultures as a pair of blandly-in-love overachievers (America Ferrera and Lance Gross) seek to start off their marriage with a big family wedding that can't seem to blend African-American and Mexican-American traditions. No one involved in this production seems fated for true bliss as the film stumbles down the aisle. Grade: D-.

Here's an early prediction on the Best Pictures nominees for next year's Academy Awards: There will only be five. The great experiment in "widening the playing field" — expanding the number of nominees to 10 this year — turned out to be a complete dud. Anyone interested in the Oscars knew there were only five legitimate nominees: the Final Five, the ones that had also been nominated for Best Director.

Jay Baruchel refuses to rely on the now standard Michael Cera nerd tics (the ubiquitous stuttering and the quiet-sensitive intelligence posing). Instead, he finds ways to live inside the skin and life of a good guy who has unfortunately listened a bit too carefully to the jokingly disparaging remarks of those around him for too long. Grade: B.

It's expected that a 2009 adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Victorian-era 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking Glass' would engage in some major contemporary revisionism, and the biggest change in Tim Burton's new 3-D movie version is to make Alice the kind of defiantly strong-willed, proto-feminist, no-nonsense action-hero suitable for a PG-rated action-fantasy seeking to do 'Lord of the Rings'-level box-office business. It's a mistake. Grade: C.

Co-written by Roman Polanski with political journalist Robert Harris, upon whose novel the film is based, 'The Ghost Writer' is full of plot holes yet still entices. Ewan McGregor plays an unnamed English writer who takes up a surprisingly dangerous job as a ghostwriter/autobiographer for Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), a former British prime minister accused of war crimes. Grade: B-.

Kevin Smith teams up with Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan to do a stand-up riff on buddy pictures in the action-crime genre, and the guys are game jokesters all. Smith has plugged into the pre-release h

Star presence can sweep audiences up and carry them on a X-Games-styled thrill-ride that otherwise would barely generate a disturbance in a kiddie wave pool. And the charismatic leads don’t have

All of the 'Six Degrees of Separation'/Kevin Bacon mental gamesmanship generated by a star-studded ensemble cast could detract from the simple, propulsive narrative drive of a film like 'Brooklyn's Finest,' but director Antoine Fuqua ('Training Day') boldly dares audiences to play the game anyway. And, for the most part, his gambit pays off. It's a fine example of a filmmaker abiding by the law of the streets. Grade: B-plus.

Why doesn’t an incensed American public demand the Senate reform or eliminate filibuster use? It is not mandated by the Constitution. I blame the movies. Specifically, I blame Frank Capra, Hollywood’s great populist director who won three Academy Awards for helming 1934’s It Happened One Night, 1936’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and 1938’s You Can’t Take It With You.
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