The film opens three years in the past, with John and Lara a happily married couple, doting on their three year old son Luke (played at three by twins Tyler and Toby Green, then at six by Ty Simpkins). They're in love, passionate towards each other and seem to have a good life together. Then Lara finds a blood stain on the back of her jacket just as Pittsburgh police crash through the door and arrest her for the murder of her boss. The damning evidence? The two fought the previous day at work, the blood stain matches, and a witness places her at the scene of the murder.

There are glitches in the storyline, including a ridiculously unprofessional attorney (Daniel Stern) and a scene where junior college literature professor John successfully takes on a room full of hardened criminals, but there wasn't anything that lost me as the film proceeded to its satisfyingly ambiguous ending.

If you're a fan of pulse-pounding thrillers, The Next Three Days is a good choice, with the second half an amazingly long alternating cut between their escape efforts and the police, notably Detective Quinn (Jason Beghe), unravelling the clues to try and catch them. Like all good action films, the story doesn't proceed quite as you expect either, so pay attention.

There are some movies that are good date films but are really "guy films", then there are guy films that are really just for men and would most likely go down in the annals of bad dates if you, a guy, were to bring a gal with you. Yeah, that's sexist, but think of The A-Team as the guy version of Sex and the City 2 and you'll understand what I mean.

Based on the 1980s TV series of the same name, The A-Team starts with a backstory that explains how the team was formed by a group of former Army Rangers during a crazy adventure in Mexico. 80 successful missions later, they're tricked into a new mission that involves stolen US Mint plates that need to be recovered before a flood of counterfeit $100s destroy the American economy.

The team fails at its mission, is framed and each A-Team member is subsequently thrown in separate high security prisons scattered throughout the Western hemisphere. No worries, they break out through an unlikely sequence of events and have the dual task of recovering the stolen plates and clearing their names.

Or, at least, the plot seems to be something like that, but this is the kind of film where it's really not much about the story line at all, and somehow, that's okay. The film is still entertaining and the cast (Liam Neeson as Hannibal, the group leader, Bradley Cooper as Face, the handsome woman-crazy group member, Quinton Jackson as tough guy B.A. Baracus, a role made famous by Mr. T. in the original series, and District 9 standout Sharlto Copley as the crazy Murdock) works well and has an appealing chemistry even as the scenes often make no sense.

I wanted to enjoy Clash of the Titans. The previews highlighted some terrific special effects and certainly Greek mythology is a fertile field of sweeping sagas, epic stories of men challenging the gods and strange, amazing creatures.  Unfortunately, there were two problems with the movie, problems that doom an otherwise entertaining adventure film: the retrofit 3D effects and the poor performance of Sam Worthington in the title role of Perseus.

Perseus is a demi-god, the offspring of the god Zeus (Liam Neeson) and a mortal woman, Danae (Tine Stapelfeldt). When Danae's mortal husband Acrisius (Jason Flemyng) learns that her child was not from him, he nails her and the baby into a coffin and hurls it into the ocean in rage. Miraculously, they safely wash ashore and become the wife and child of the humble Greek fisherman Spyros (Pete Postlethwaite).

That's where things diverge from classic Greek mythology and that's where the film starts to get confusing. In a nutshell, most of the mortals are tired of having to pay homage to the gods and begin to rebel. In one scene, they topple a massive statue of Zeus into the sea. The gods are not happy because it's the love of mortals that give them life: if no-one believes in them, if no-one worships them, they'll die. Meanwhile, Hades (Ralph Fiennes), brother of Zeus and god of the underworld, takes advantage of the foment to put his own schemes in place to become the top god and restore his place on Mount Olympus.

You've probably heard of Miyazaki, he's had three films in relatively wide distribution here in the United States: Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Howl's Moving Castle. None of those hit the big time, however, and with the backing of Disney and some top voice talent, there are high hopes for little Ponyo.

The film was released in mid-2008 in Japan under the name Gake no ue no Ponyo, with a tagline "Welcome to a world where anything is possible."  All of the voices in that original are Japanese actors, as you'd expect, including Yuria Nara (Ponyo) and Hiroki Doi (Sosuke). In the new release, everything's redubbed into English, with Miley Cyrus' little sister Noah Lindsey Cyrus as Ponyo and littlest Jonas Brother Frankie Jonas as Sosuke.

In this lovely story, little goldfish Brunhilde (Sosuke names her Ponyo when he finds her) is chafing under the grip of her batty mad-scientist dad Fujimoto (voiced by Liam Neeson), who has grown a hatred of humans because of their littering of the oceans and is storing up magic potion to bring the sea back to the "Devonian Era". 

Escaping his grip to explore the greater world, Ponyo finds herself trapped in a jar, unable to break free. Luckily five year old Sosuke, a kind-hearted, sweet little boy, finds her while playing in the surf with his toy boat and carefully breaks the jar, freeing her. He puts her in a bucket of water and carries her about as a pet and playmate. 

The story, about Ponyo and Sosuke's adventures as the water level of the ocean keeps rising and cuts them off from Sosuke's mom, Lisa (voiced by Tina Fey), is wonderous and Miyazaki avoids the heavy environmental moralizing of his previous films, making this an instant masterpiece of its genre.