Not altogether shocking, Alien vs. Predator is an unreviewable motion picture.

While this The Manchurian Candidate doesn’t leave the same chilling residue as Frankenheimer’s opus, this version is still a surprisingly unnerving procedural.

What’s amazing isn’t that Sam Raimi’s follow-up to his 2002 smash is a lot of fun, but instead that it might just be the greatest superhero comic book adventure film I’ve frankly ever seen. Spider-Man 2 is superb.

But with Mean Girls Waters and Fey do what they can to show scrubbing off one’s humanity for a mechanical glassy-eyed façade is something that should be avoided. In the end, life in plastic just isn’t worth the effort.

It’s a beautiful screenplay overflowing with moments of such sudden, tight-fisted insanity that frequently knocked my socks off, all of its coupled with a poignant purity that’s beyond terrific. As early-year movies go, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind isn’t just a surprise, it’s a bona fide cinematic miracle I’m not ever going to forget.

Ultimately, if The Return of the King isn’t quite the thrilling conclusion we were all hoping for, it is still very much a rousingly successful culmination to what may be the most satisfying cinematic trilogy of all time.

Despite a winning moment here and a wonderful one there, The Haunted Mansion has more in common with The Country Bears than it does Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and that’s too bad.

Elf isn’t Christmas cheer, it’s Christmas excrement, and here’s hoping it finds its way to the sewers as fast as possible.

Alien holds up as if it were made yesterday.