To be charitable, the first hour of Dark Shadows was terrific. The film opens in 1750 Liverpool, England, as the Collins family, including young Barnabas, departs for the Colonies, landing in Maine and establishing their fortunes as entrepreneurial pioneers. Twenty years later young Barnabas (Depp) is master of his community, a city named Collinsport, and adored by servant and townie alike. Unfortunately, when he falls for servant girl Angelique (Eva Green) but switches his amorous attentions to Josette (Bella Heathcote), Angelique gets mad and as she's a witch, she curses Barnabas, turning him into a vampire. She then buries him alive where he lays undisturbed for almost two centuries, waking up in the Hippie-inspired world of 1972.

Barnabas awakens and returns to Collinwood, the ancestral home, a delightfully creepy run-down 200-room mansion complete with turrets, peculiar sculptures and secret passages. He meets the last of the Collins line: Family matriarch Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer), her dubious brother Roger (Jonny Lee Miller), his son David (Gully McGrath) and her daughter Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz). Also in residence is Dr. Julia (Helena Bonham Carter), hired to treat David who is ostensibly crazy but actually seems the most sane of everyone in this Adams Family sort of band of oddballs.

The introduction of David's nanny Victoria (Bella Heathcote) and reappearance of the evil Angie (Eva Green) add to the storyline, but when Barnabas and Angie make love in her office, the film falls apart and never recovers. Worse, their love making scene is a disaster of epic weird masochistic proportions as they slam into walls, scratch each other, and turn what could have been creepy interesting into stupid appalling. But that's not the worst scene in the film: there's one later on when Victoria's explaining her childhood that would have fit far better in the torture-porn film Sucker Punch.

By the time the film wraps, there are so many inconsistencies in the story (can Barnabas survive direct sunlight or not?) so many random violent scenes, so much that doesn't really make sense even within the goth soap opera world of Dark Shadows, that most theatergoers seemed glad to see the credits appear. There's a really entertaining film buried inside Dark Shadows, with a delightful performance by Depp, but as is, however, I cannot recommend the film to anyone but the most hardcore Burton fan.

Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is a scruffy orphan who lives in forgotten spaces hidden in the walls of Gare Montparnasse, a bustling train station located in the center of Paris. It's 1931 and memories of The Great War are fresh, even as everyone tries to resume their normal lives. 

How Hugo became an orphan is a major story element and at one point we meet Hugo's father (Jude Law), a watchmaker and tinkerer. His mother has long since vanished, and Hugo clearly adores his happy, upbeat father. They tinker with an automaton that they've salvaged from a museum until his father dies in a mysterious fire. Hugo is then adopted by his alcoholic Uncle Claude (Ray Winstone) and moves to the station. His job: keep the station clocks working.

Hugo is caught attempting to steal a small clockwork mouse by the gruff, unhappy Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley), who takes Hugo's notebook, insisting that the young urchin work for Méliès to recompense him for the goods previously stolen. Méliès? Yes, that Méliès, one of the pioneers of cinema and most famously the director of the ground-breaking 1902 silent film Le voyage dans la lune. 

That's what (500) Days of Summer is about, and it's a truly delightful, funny, heart-warming film.

Summer, in the title, is not a season, but rather an odd, cynical girl (played by Zooey Deschanel) who doesn't believe in relationships and wants to save "the serious stuff" for when she's older. She gets a job at a greeting card company where Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) works as a writer, though he's really a frustrated architect.

Tom looks up and sees Summer over the cubicle walls. That's Day (1). But I'm getting ahead of myself, actually, because it starts with Day 488. The film takes us on a tour of the ups and downs of their relationship, one that lasts 500 days, and it's not linear. We bounce around from highlights to periods when they're not talking to each other, misunderstandings that leave Tom so depressed he's unable to get out of bed to a wonderful scene where the two of them run through an Ikea store pretending they're setting up their suburban love nest and a brilliant scene with Tom walking to work after Summer spends the night at his apartment for the first time.

As different moments in the relationship are portrayed, on-screen titles show "Day (32)" or "Day (317)" and so on. I was afraid it would be hard to keep track of given how much it bounces back and forth, but in fact it's a terrific narrative device and makes the film far more poignant and engaging than if it were a linear love story. Actually, as the narrator explains early on "This is a movie about boy meets girl, but it's not a love story." It is, however, a delightful film.