Seriously, dude, no means no. The early word surrounding Teeth describes it as "every man's nightmare," which I suppose is apt if you're looking at it from a man's perspective. Director Mitchell Lichtenstein, however, approaches it from the other side of the chromosome divide, and that makes all the difference. His topic is the vagina dentata myth: the notion of a fanged orifice into which randy young men go poking about at their peril. Rather than viewing it as a monstrous threat, however, Teeth treats it as feminine empowerment -- a unique weapon bestowed upon one lucky young woman in order to give impolite boys the biggest surprise of their life.

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Oh you sweet foolish filmmakers. You play the notes so earnestly, yet none of you -- not a single one -- hears the music. Which isn't to say that The Golden Compass, a thudding and lugubrious adaptation of Philip Pullman's fantasy series, could be mistaken for music. The true symphony came and went with Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and we've been thriving modestly well on arias from Harry Potter and Aslan the lion ever since. But this? Too little, too late, and too damn clueless about what it's supposed to be doing.

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Stop me if this sounds familiar. You're watching some terrible WB-esque teen drama about Beautiful Young Things, and their painful relationship problems, and how awful it is to be Beautiful Young Things on fast-track careers that keep them from experiencing the true love they desire more than anything in the world. And you suffer through their self-absorbed smugness and their faux witticisms and the obnoxious implication that their dilemmas have any bearing on life in the real world. And it makes you so irritated that you want to plant your boot in the TV screen, and you hate those Beautiful Young Things with every fiber of your being, and as you watch the banality of their insipid little stories unfolding before you, some anarchistic internal voice whispers, "You know what would kick so much ass right now? A giant monster attack."

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I'm not fond of the soundtrack: smug, quasi-indie Liz Phair style mooning that gilds the film's lily in all the worst ways. I mention this now because it is the only thing about Juno that didn't utterly enchant me from beginning to end. Story, character, brilliant dialogue from screenwriter Diablo Cody, and sharp direction from Jason Reitman... every element arrives with pitch-perfect care to deliver one of the funniest and most insightful human comedies of the last few years.

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The opening of There Will Be Blood makes bold reference to the "Dawn of Man" sequence from 2001: stark, eerie music playing over a seemingly abandoned piece of primal desert. You may think that's a stretch when the camera finally pans down to frustrated silver prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) hacking away at the wall of a mine, but don't worry. They'll come back to it. Plainview has far more in common with Stanley Kubrick's prehistoric yahoos than may initially be apparent. He's more eloquent and he disguises his intentions beneath a modicum of decorum, but at his core, he is equally cunning and no less savage. In other words, he's the perfect man to reap untold riches when he shifts from silver to the burgeoning business of oil.

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Sweeney Todd is a simple matter of the right man for the right job. Purists may quibble at its incidental changes in tone and visual style from Stephen Sondheim's original musical, but few could contest how tailor-made director Tim Burton is for such a grand and ghoulish endeavor. When his psychopathic protagonist (Johnny Depp) extends a silver razor and proclaims "at last my arm is complete again," you can hear Burton echoing the same sentiments about the film surrounding him.

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And now, a full-bore belt to the chops, courtesy of Frank Darabont and Stephen King. Happy Thanksgiving; don"t forget to remind yourself that there"s still sweetness and light in this world when the screening is done. The Mist certainly ranks in the upper echelons of King adaptations, but considering its relentlessly bleak tone, that may not earn it many fans... at least at first. Darabont has an uncanny connection to King"s particular ethos, however, and the devoted accuracy with which he tackles this tale ultimately pays chilling and unforgettable dividends.

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I go to bed each night praying for movies like Wristcutters to come along. Not everyone does, of course, and if they do, they might actually be praying for a different kind of film. The joy of it stems from being exactly, precisely on a given viewer's wavelength. Not their demographic; not their consumer preference; not their test-group vetted, thoroughly researched, inconceivably soulless marketing profile shared by as broad a slice of the population as possible. Their wavelength: that funky, irrepressibly human part of us that always recognizes a kindred spirit.

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Before adapting a genre classic, Hollywood might want to consider why such a work is considered a classic in the first place... and therefore what business they have mucking with it. Yes, yes, a change in medium requires certain dramatic alterations, gloomy stories don't play well in Peoria, etc. But a film like I Am Legend leaves one with the sneaking suspicion that the filmmakers thought they were doing the original a favor by introducing wholesale changes. "It's better now! We've improved it so much! We've tossed out all that silly dross the author put in and what's left is pure gold!" It isn't, unfortunately, and the film's fatal problems emerge primarily from those points when it departs from the tone and intentions of the book it was so eager to appropriate.

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We get a movie like Atonement every year. It's something of an Oscar tradition: highly polished technically, adopting a proper sense of gravitas, appearing to say a lot of important tings without actually saying much at all. The Academy loves honoring such movies because they entail very little genuine risk. No one really hates them, and their Masterpiece Theater sheen imports a sense of film as art... which feels great in the moment but never stands up to the test of time. Atonement has garnered comparisons to The English Patient, and that's very apt. What most people forget is that, beneath its awards-darling dazzle, The English Patient turned out to be a sanctimonious bore.

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