When I first heard the plot of Freedom Writers -- inspirational movie about a white teacher bringing hope to poor, black students -- my initial reaction was: Yawn. Haven't we already seen this story, in Dangerous Minds, with Michelle Pfeiffer in the role of the white knight saving the day? So it was with not a little trepidation that I settled down with my popcorn and diet soda for the screening of Freedom Writers. And then ... what do you know? I was actually surprised -- in a good way -- to have my expectations proved wrong.

Welcome to the first weekend of the new year! You know what that means, dontcha? That's riiiiight: Amazingly crappy movies! Yes indeed, what with all the Oscar-type movies cascading into their platform releases and the studios holding all their high cards until Spring (and Summer) -- it's junk-a-thon time at the local multiplexes. Case in point: The very first weekend of movies: Two certifiable dungpiles and one "inspirational drama" that's getting a few kind words, if only by default.

Code Name: The Cleaner (2 positive / 42 negative at RottenTomatoes.com)

Pro: "It's always fun to see Liu beat on some bad guys. Check your disbelief at the door and you'll get just what you expect." -- Michael Ordona, The Los Angeles Times

Con: "Wastes so much energy on parsing out a convoluted plot that its stars' brightest moments are saved for the blooper reel in the closing credits." -- Scott Tobias, The Onion AV Club

Pro: "It is a slight piece of entertainment that does entertainment on a basic level." --Stefan Halley, Pop Syndicate

Con: "The spectacularly implausible plot is dropped on moviegoers in boulder-size chunks during speed-talking monologues." -- David Hiltbrand, Philadelphia Inquirer

Bonus! "Even with low expectations, however, I was disappointed in this movie." -- Jette Kernion, Cinematical

Freedom Writers (45 positive / 25 negative at RT)

Pro: "A simple, straightforward and surprisingly affecting story of one woman who managed to make a difference." -- Scott Foundas, L.A. Weekly

Con: "Sometimes art imitates life. And sometimes life goes to Hollywood and disappears completely." -- Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star

Pro: "Delivers the expected messages about hope and the ability to change one's destiny, and does it in a manner that it is emotionally and intellectually satisfying." -- James Berardinelli, ReelViews.net

Con: "Hits all the expected marks, with no cliché left behind." -- Robert Keser, Slant Magazine

Bonus! "Swank's passion and personality suck you into the story right from the start, and knowing that the script is based on real stories makes it meaningful and inspirational." -- Kim Voynar, Cinematical

Happily N'Ever After (3 positive / 50 negative at RT)

Pro: "Characters are painted broadly enough for the vocal cast to have a heap of fun, especially Weaver, who clearly relishes the opportunity to play a heartless diva." -- Tom Keogh, Seattle Times

Con: "Not counting derivative, obnoxious, poorly animated, and woefully unfunny, what Happily is most of all is dull." -- David Cornelius, eFilmCritic.com

Pro: "This most recent po-mo take on fairy tale may be "Shrek"-lite, but it is just cute enough." -- Nell Minow, Movie Mom at Yahoo! Movies

Con: "Unhappily unsuccessful as either low-budget, time-filling kiddie fare or satire aimed at adults." -- Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press

Bonus! "The couple of times I laughed during the film, it was in utter disbelief at one awful line or another." -- Kim Voynar, Cinematical

Next weekend: Alpha Dog, Primeval and Stomp the Yard

Remember Shrek? Cute fairy-tale story, nice animation and music, interesting, original characters and storyline? Happily N'Ever After, I'm sorry to report, is nothing like Shrek. It's not often I can say with certainty less than a week into a new year that I've already seen what's sure to become one of the worst films of the entire year, but in this case, I feel pretty secure in saying that this film will be anchoring my "worst of 2007" list come December.

There was, quite honestly, nothing good about this film, from the cheesy opening voiceover to the predictable ending, so all I can really do for you is enumerate the ways in which this film is utterly wretched, in the hopes that you will stay away from it in droves, thus saving yourselves money and the desire to have the memory of its 73 minutes burned physically from your brain (actually, I suppose you could say its brevity is the one good thing the film has going for it).

Q: What do Code Name: The Cleaner and Cars have in common?

A: The "outtakes" in the closing credits were the funniest parts of the movie.

My expectations for Code Name: The Cleaner were not high -- certainly not as high as they were for Cars, or even for Flushed Away. I expected to see a silly, predictable comedy with wacky hijinks provided by Cedric the Entertainer, vampy allure provided by Nicollette Sheridan, and -- Lucy Liu? I wasn't sure how Liu got involved with this movie but I always enjoy watching her in action. Even with low expectations, however, I was disappointed in this movie.

Code Name: The Cleaner hangs its comedy on a stale action-adventure storyline. Jake (Cedric) wakes up one morning in a strange bed, unsure how he got there, his head hurting as if in the throes of a hangover. He realizes someone's next to him, and immediately starts ass-grabbing. Okay, raise your hands -- who thinks that the unseen stranger in bed is going to be a guy? Yep. Gotta get that first laugh in there. But at least there's a twist: it's a dead guy, who turns out to be an FBI agent. Jake can't remember how he got there or even who he is -- his head is hurting due to an injury that inflicted Hollywood Amnesia upon him.

One of the great tragedies in the current onslaught of biopics is that they seem to have adopted a movie formula, as if any old person's life could be crammed into the same three-act structure. (Aren't human beings supposed to be as different as snowflakes?) The most brutally obvious recent examples were Ray (2004) and Walk the Line (2005), which, as we speak, are probably inadvertently merging the legends of Ray Charles and Johnny Cash into interchangeable tidbits.

Chris Noonan's Miss Potter doesn't rectify this situation, but it does move in a different direction, into a more fanciful realm. It's more interested in capturing the essence of its subject -- children's author Beatrix Potter -- than in providing a checklist of the things she accomplished. Like a smoother Finding Neverland (2004), it moves away from reality and into movieland, which at least is more honest than falsely representing reality. Miss Potter starts badly and ends badly, but a good, solid hour in the middle is as charming as anything you'll see this holiday season. It's actually a perfect movie to see on Christmas Day between presents and dinner.

We hear it on the news twice a week, it seems: A young dead woman has been found on the road, in a ditch, back behind someone's barn, etc. We give the news a casual listen, perhaps offer a brief bit of sympathy to the girl's family, and then throw our focus back into our own lives. The world can be an ugly place; best not to dwell on the more horrific aspects of it ... until we have to.

Karen Moncrieff's follow-up to 2002's Blue Car is a decidedly unique take on the "serial killer movie." The Dead Girl is not a mystery, nor is it really a thriller. It's more of an anthology piece that introduces us to a collection of people on the periphery of a horrible murder. It's not a movie about the killer, per se, nor is it a character study of the victim ... except when it is. It's a tough movie to describe, a tougher movie to "enjoy," but an easy one to recommend -- provided you don't mind a little darkness, gloom and sobriety mixed in with your indie-style ensemble pieces.

What do you say about the best movie you saw all year? It's happened to all of us: that rare movie that completely knocks you over and blows you away, that takes you somewhere else for two hours or so and returns you wide-eyed and slackjawed, leaving the theater quietly and slightly stunned at having to return to mundane life. How can you write clearly and critically when you just want to say, "Damn, that was good."

I thought I might like Pan's Labyrinth (aka El Laberinto del Fauno) but then two days before I saw the movie at Fantastic Fest, I thought I might love Tideland and was sadly disappointed. Tideland may have cinematic merit but it is not lovable and it does tend to smack you in the face with some very repellent things. People do repellent things in Pan's Labyrinth, but you're not pulled out of the movie by sheer disgust -- you remain involved in the world of the film.

"... the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding." -- W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

If you want to set out to make a period drama set in China in the 1920s, it's only natural that the source material should be a work by William Somerset Maugham, whose simple direct prose and uncanny talent for telling tales of less-than-perfect characters without resorting to preachiness or melodrama made him the most famous and highly paid writer of the 1930s. The Painted Veil, helmed by John Curran and starring Naomi Watts as unhappy, solipsistic socialite Kitty Fane and Edward Norton as her stern and unforgiving husband, Walter, takes us from London to Hong Kong to the remote outreaches of a Chinese village beset by a cholera epidemic, in this bittersweet tale of love and duty.

Black Christmas is a slasher film of what I like to call the 'speed-demon' variety. Unlike, say, a Friday the 13th film where Jason Vorhees gets a lot of screen-time, often doing a geriatric stroll toward his intended victims in full view of the camera, the speed-demons are not stars: they are disposable villains who must remain in the shadows, anonymous, until they are finally 'revealed' in the third act. The speed-demon is forced to prowl around outside for most of the running time of the film, tending to the cutting of phone lines, slashing tires, leaving calling-cards or other busy work. When it's time to kill, the speed-demon will typically attack with great speed from outside of camera range or burst out of the closet like a Tazmanian devil, slashing a victim into scissor dolls before the camera has time to get a fix on what's going on. Defenestration is also a good tactic for a speed-demon -- one lightning-fast blur of action, and the busty brunette is sailing down toward the pavement, mission accomplished.

Since we usually never find out who the speed-demon is until nearly everyone is dead, the last fifteen minutes of the film must be squared away for a pointless blab-a-thon in which a third-grade sleight, prom date gone wrong or other psycho-forming event is re-hashed in a therapy session at knife-point. Black Christmas mixes this up a bit, providing us with an entire parallel story-line, told in flashbacks throughout the present-day action. It's in those flashbacks that we meet the Lenz clan, who are sort of like a Far Rockaway version of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre family. The mother, played by Karin Konoval, not only keeps her teenage son Billy padlocked in the attic at all times, she also rapes him, gets pregnant, and carries Billy's sister-daughter to term. The link between the flashback action in the 1980s and the present is the family home itself, which has, in the intervening years, become an upscale sorority house populated by the likes of Lacey Chabert and Michelle Trachtenberg.

In the strange and provocative stream-of-consciousness documentary, The Case of the Grinning Cat, 85-year old director Chris Marker (La Jetee) shows us several events in recent French history linked together by a recurring oddity -- a cartoon cat with a toothy Cheshire smile that appears at each defining moment, stealthily reproduced onto the buildings, sidewalks, trees and subway walls of Paris. The graffiti bandit or bandits responsible for painting the cat all over the city are never positively identified, which delights Marker to no end, allowing to him to load the cats up with as much symbolic freight as they can possibly carry on their yellow backs. As the film drifts aimlessly through the Iraq war fallout, a contentious election and immigration protests, the cat is always there, like the banner of some romantic, underground revolutionary movement. Ethereal connections are even made between the watchful cats and pop-culture happenings, like the French Sid & Nancy story of a few years back, when actress Marie Trintignant was beaten to death by her boyfriend Bertrand Cantant, leader of a popular rock band.

Marker maintains a detached omniscience throughout the piece, commenting on events as though reading about them from the pages of a history book, although his political inclinations are never in doubt. Grinning Cat is something of a sequel to a 1977 film, unseen by me, called Grin Without a Cat, which comments on the state of the French left. The issue Grinning Cat sticks with the longest, before floating on to other topics, is the 2002 French election, in which hard-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen stunned France and all of Europe by placing second in the first round of the Presidential elections. This passage is one of the few in the film that is uncluttered by flighty, off-topic observations; Marker wants to tell the story in its entirety. Other points of discussion include an AIDS-related 'die in' protest and the phenomenon of flash mobs. The fondness of the film for diving into sidebars, combined with its basement production values -- was it filmed with a camcorder? -- makes it a sometimes grating, unpleasant experience, despite the intriguing charm of those darn cats.

Inland Empire is the film where David Lynch says goodbye to narrative and sends the viewer dancing down the rabbit-hole of his psyche, (there are actual rabbits) landing us in a grimy hall of mirrors where the half-remembered stars of his dreams clash in the night. Since a dream is like a treadmill, or a stuck record needle, the inhabitants of this world are confined to speaking in an abstract dream-English, made up of a frustratingly small allowance of words and ideas compact enough to fit on the turntable of the unconscious mind. The film's conversations -- over three hours worth -- consist of non-sequiturs, run-on sentences and story fragments. The goings-on are often inscrutable, although sexual content is one of the few consistent clarity boosters. Take one conversation, where a female character played by Laura Dern sits in a darkened interrogation room and recounts an attempted rape. Her story flows forward; the record needle doesn't skip. Other characters speak stiff monotone English, devoid of spark, but her accent and personality, preserved in the memory, are colored in.

That accent is Arkansas white-trash; she bounces the 'f' in 'fuck' off her bottom lip with each usage, as if to preserve its sexual power. Her sentences are declarative and informational, like "I kicked his nuts into his brain." Compare this to another conversation, between two suburban neighbors, where the lack of electricity is palpable and the small-talk full of circular logic; we can see the camera fighting boredom in that scene, pushing in hard on their faces, striving valiantly to maintain focus and stay awake, before the whole thing collapses and is re-absorbed back into the memory pool. This is Inland Empire, for better or worse; a hard and bruising tumble down the neuron branches of an uncompromising painter of moving pictures. Monotony and wheel-spinning are standard in Lynch's world, but if you're so inclined, think of that as the admission price for what comes later: a sharp lightning charge into the center of the director's brain, where the dream neurons flash-pop like the bulb of a table lamp in a cheap hotel room.

A deeply mesmerizing exploration of one man's desperate search for his own humanity, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, is very much more than your average serial-killer story. Based on the German bestseller by Patrick Süskind and directed by Tom Tykwer (best known to American audiences for Run Lola Run), the film is meticulously true to both source and setting, plopping the viewer smack-dab into the middle of the bustling, over-crowded, stench of 18th-century France.

Where Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette filled the screen with the cotton-candy colors and fashions of the palace elite, Perfume delves into the realm of the lowest of the low -- an unwanted babe born to an unwed fishmonger, delivered amid filth and discarded to die in a pile of fish guts, who nonetheless finds it within his small self to cry out for life, thus condemning his mother to death and himself to an orphanage.

This is what you go to the movies for: A piece of filmmaking so majestically well-made, so unerringly committed to being what it is, so full of ideas and adrenaline that it makes your mind and heart race. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), Children of Men is the best film of 2006 -- an exciting, powerful and haunting film that mixes our hopeful dreams with our most fearsome nightmares.

Children of Men begins with a bleary-eyed Clive Owen stumbling into a London coffee shop jammed with shell-shocked people staring at the TV: "The world was stunned today by the death of Diego Ricardo, the youngest person on the planet, the youngest person on earth was 18 years, 4 months, 20 days, 16 hours, and 8 minutes old." It's 2027, and -- for reasons no one can understand -- the human race has been collectively, completely infertile for 18 years.

This is just the premise, of course, and Children of Men is no more "about" its sci-fi idea than Moby Dick is "about" fishing. Owen's Theo Faron -- burnt-out, rumpled and perpetually fishing a pint of whisky out of his pockets -- is drinking and thinking his way through a world of horrible strangeness and horrible familiarity. Curarón and his production crew paint the world and its end for us so briskly that we understand that life in 2027 is exactly like life in 2006, but more so: The numb hum of consumerism, the muffled grunts of injustices done in the name of the common good, the shaking shock from the last horrible piece of news, the hunched wait for the next unhappy headline.

One of the most striking things in the days following 9/11 was the absence of air traffic. The sound of planes taking off and landing, the sight of jets zipping through the sky, have become such a part of the background noise of our lives, we noticed them only in their absence, and the silence of the skies in those couple days was deafening. The absence of children in the film Children of Men has much the same impact.

Imagine, if you will, a world without children. Not the temporary, blissful, child-free retreat of, say, a fancy restaurant, or a weekend away from the kids, but an entire world without a single child in it. No pregnant women, no families pushing strollers and shepherding toddlers, no preschoolers chasing bubbles, no schools or playgrounds, no kids building sandcastles or snowmen ... no future. The year is 2027, and for 18 years all the women on Earth have been infertile. From New York City to Paris, from South Africa to the South Pole, not a single baby has been born on the planet for nearly two decades.

Happy Holidays to all and to all a ... few good movies. I've been asked to step in and semi-resurrect our regular old Review Roundup feature, which works out pretty well considering I usually spend most Fridays (and some Wednesdays) poring through all my favorite critics, agreeing with some and questioning the basic sanity of others. But since the release date schedules get extra jumbly during the year-end holiday season, I figured I'd spend my first column covering, well, everything. Let's start with the ones that actually opened yesterday ...

The Good Shepherd

Pro: "It's not a tub-thumping anti-CIA screed, but at the same time it's not a gung-ho patriotic extravaganza about the moral certainty of our side." -- Stephen Hunter, Washington Post

Con: "This is featherweight entertainment, sans visual elation and moral consequence-like Munich for Beginners." -- Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine

Pro: "The bottom line is that The Good Shepherd is engaging cinema. The length is a drawback, but not a big one since the movie earns the majority of its 165-minute running time." -- James Berardinelli, ReelViews.net

Con: "De Niro's vision seems unfocused and ill-executed. It seems as though he had a thousand good ideas about what a spy film should be that didn't quite coalesce into a singular product, but he crammed 'em all in there regardless and tossed the editing shears into the garbage." -- Phil Villareal, Arizona Daily Star

BONUS: "A truncated American tragedy, noticeably half-finished and undercooked, but often tantalizing for the promise that clearly lay buried in the material, like unbroken codes." -- Ryan Stewart, Cinematical

Night at the Museum

Pro: "Trying to get kids to go to a museum over their holiday vacations might be a little easier after seeing Night at the Museum, a family-friendly comedy that tries to entertain while educating - and often succeeds, at least with the former." -- Mack Bates, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Con: "A volley of contented cackles greeted the final third of Night at the Museum, a pea-brained fantasy-comedy with a riot of kid-pleasing special effects." -- Jan Stuart, Newsday Magazine

Pro: "What do you know, not only is this a delightful popcorn movie, Ben Stiller is actually really good in it." -- Kevin LaForest, Montreal Film Journal

Con: "The possibilities for building an intriguing and original story around this concept -- the Museum of freakin' Natural History comes alive every night! -- are endless, and they chose this. That is downright criminal." -- MaryAnn Johanson, The Flick Filosopher

BONUS: "Lots of pure imagination, with an extra helping of the most fun you might have at the theater all year." -- Erik Davis, Cinematical

We Are Marshall

Pro: "Warm and big-hearted, We Are Marshall succeeds as a tribute because it respects its subjects. It succeeds as a movie because it doesn't confuse respect with lifelessness." -- Jessica Reaves, Chicago Tribune

Con: "Director McG, known for the whiz-bang acrobatics of his Charlie's Angels movies, applies a warm, shiny veneer to everything here which prevents any emotion from getting through." -- Christy Lemire, San Francisco Gate

Pro: "The film is injected with a refreshing energy whenever McConaughey is on-screen, balancing some of the inherent sadness of the story." -- Kevin Crust, Los Angeles Times

Con: "No matter how earnest the intentions are, however, the harsh truth is that We Are Marshall is shockingly empty, one-dimensionally written, and finally unconvincing." -- Dustin Putnam, TheMovieBoy.com

BONUS: "A film that walks a tightrope with tricky subject matter, and somehow makes it to the other side." -- Ryan Stewart, Cinematical

Now let's skip back over the past week or so and see how the other holiday break also-rans fared with the critics...