When Andrei Rus looks over the next few months, she sees a vast wasteland of stupid comedies, non-scary horror movies, dramas and boring crap: the studios know that this is a fallow time, with the return of children in school and adults who nest in after holiday bills, and, as usual, they are saving the good things for later in the year. But there are, surprisingly, quite a few films scheduled for January, February and March that look like they could be good, and that could help me keep my sanity until the likes of Indiana Jones 4 and the new Batman film is released.

Films I look forward to, despite myself:

Cloverfield: I love a good disaster film, and New Yorkers still get a chill out of seeing their city wreck the film (but only on the film).

Rambo 4: Stallone the latest incursion by revisiting its past, with Rocky Balboa, is so terribly good that gives me hope for this unexpected times (he wrote and directed two films).

Jumper: Although Hayden Christensen keeps trying to prove me wrong when I defend her acting skills, this action flick is directed by Doug Liman - who kicked ass with film Mr. & Mrs. Smith and The Bourne Identity.

10,000 B.C. Because it represents, like, the mammoths and sabertooth tigers and other animal's cool glaciation.

Movies with a British provenance, and I am nothing if not an Anglophile:

The Other Boleyn Girl: The script is by Peter Morgan (The Queen), and there are people like delicious Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson and Eric Bana in period costume. Yum.

Inkheart: It is a fantasy about books, books and bring to life, and I am as big a book nerd that I am a nerd movie (and more stars Brendan Fraser and Andy Serkis).

Run, Fat Boy, Run: Even though it's a fairly standard romantic comedy (I saw him last fall, when he was originally scheduled to open), it stars one of my boyfriends, Simon Pegg, and it was just adorable.

 

Films on oddballs, which are always fun:

Charlie Bartlett: I saw this one last year, before its release was postponed, and it has major future star Anton Yelchin as a millennial Ferris Bueller.

Penelope: Yet another film pushed back from the summer, when it would have lost any awards, and because it is about a pig-faced girl (Christina Ricci) who gets wooed by James McAvoy, proving that even Non-pig-faced girls can be loved too.

 

Movies that might have a chance to be among the best in all of 2008:

Be Kind Rewind: Writer-director Michel Gondry (The Science of Sleep, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) still makes wonderfully trippy films.

Pride and Glory: With Edward Norton and Colin Farrell, bringing intensity to a story of corruption in the NYPD, via a script by Joe Carnahan, who made the brilliant and misunderstood Narc (I am ready to forgive Awful Smokin' Aces), it could be this year's The Departed.

Stop-Loss: Boys Do Not Cry filmmaker Kimberly Peirce turns his unique eye on the mess that is the American army in Iraq, and she got Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Timothy Olyphant to follow suit, and they're two of the best actors working today. 'Nuff said...