Like Tracy and Hepburn, or Charlie Sheen and blow, Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston are the most unsurprising of pairings.

They are the master and mistress of middlebrow mirth, for whom the three-star review is an unattainable plateau. In fact, it’s hard to believe these two forces of rom-com mediocrity haven’t met-cute over some 15 years of shepherding penis jokes and treacle into our multiplexes. In Just Go With It, the stars finally align, and the result is like watching Frazier and Ali … synchronized swimming.

To be fair, Sandler and Aniston are both perfectly acceptable in this thing, in the same way a machinist is acceptable at snapping together widgets on an assembly line. At no point does either actor challenge him or herself; preparation might have consisted of watching tapes of their old schticks and imitating them.

Their performances are effortlessly banal, and their characters are inexorably shopworn: He plays plastic surgeon Danny, yet another commitment-fearing Sandlerian man-child who exploits a wedding band from a previous botched marriage to lure gullible hotties into one-night stands. She plays Katherine, Danny’s “homely” personal assistant, apparently desexified with librarian glasses.

When Danny’s latest sexual conquest (supermodel Brooklyn Decker, a Barbie doll with a name like a New York sub shop) becomes something more, he needs to realize his mountain of lies to keep her. Katherine and her two kids thus become Danny’s temporary ex-wife and children, all of whom end up joining Danny and his buxom bimbo on a Hawaiian sojourn.

The plot becomes a succession of ludicrous, uncomfortable comic set pieces, each one more implausible than the next (including a scene pilfered from Charade, in which the two leads having to move a coconut up their bodies without using their hands), and we wait with impatience for Sandler and Aniston’s inevitable arc toward real love.

The filmmaker is Dennis Dugan (Grown Ups, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry), a sixtysomething director-for-hire with the sense of humor of hormone-driven 14-year-old boy. Once again, he looks squarely at depth and maturity and proceeds to kick them both in the balls. Most of the juvenile humor in Just Go With It involves either emasculation -- testicular harm, erectile dysfunction and secretly gay macho men all rear their clichéd heads – or scatological cheap shots.

Example: Nicole Kidman adds some class to the picture as the nemesis from Katherine’s old sorority, even though her name in the movie, Devlin, has been established as a synonym for excrement in Katherine’s poop-happy family. Her son Michael’s (Griffin Gluck) only apparent personality trait is that he defecates a lot.

Dugan adds some strange spices to his puerile cauldron, with Dave Matthews, Kevin Nealon, Rachel Dratch and sportscaster Dan Patrick (why?) peaking nominal interest while they’re on-screen. Nick Swardson, a genuinely funny character actor, is saddled here with the thankless Rob Schneider role of the buffoonish sidekick. For Danny’s invented life, Swardson pretends to be a Eurotrash Internet sheep salesman wearing mad-scientist spectacles. Yeah, unfortunately, you read that right.

There are three or four actual chuckles in Just Go With It, a couple of minutes’ worth of material aimed at thinking adults. The rest is strictly ear and eye candy for pubescent males. Say what you want about Dugan, but he really knows how to make boobs jiggle.

JUST GO WITH IT. Distributor: Sony; Director: Dennis Dugan; Cast: Adam Sandler, Jennifer Aniston, Nicole Kidman, Nick Swardson, Brooklyn Decker, Dave Matthews; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Today

Like every good idea capitalism has leeched onto and subsequently tarnished, 3D technology has already jumped the shark in its light-speed ascent from cult novelty to the establishment standard of big-budget moviemaking.

Dimensions have thus far been added to movies so atrocious I wouldn’t see them if they leaped off the screen, ran to my house and did my laundry for me. I enjoyed The Green Hornet despite its obligatory 3D presentation, not because of it, and the addition of 3D to the asinine Jack Black vehicle Gulliver’s Travels couldn’t have been more superfluous than a 3D taping of Charlie Rose.

But watching Sanctum, which was executive-produced by James Cameron and shot with Avatar’s technology, it’s easy to remember what was so exciting about the advent of realistic 3D in the first place. What galvanized a nation to abandon On Demand and Netflix for one night and actually see a movie in a theater a year ago – even if said movie was really a reductive, half-baked antiwar allegory dressed up with jaw-dropping cinematography – has the potential to do so again this year.

Beyond a few IMAX-worthy aerial shots of nature’s rich bounty, Sanctum is set almost entirely in the underwater Esa-Ala Caves in the South Pacific, so the setting isn’t as imaginative as Avatar’s. But the details are just as, well, detailed. Rather than having us simply look at multiple dimensions on a flat screen, director Alister Grierson does 3D the old-fashioned way, by bringing elements like dripping water and beams of light off the screen and right in front of our eyes. I imagine that, like Avatar, it’s as visually immersive as the cinema can be.

But enough tech talk – the story is still the most important element, and Sanctum’s narrative never reaches the astonishing level of its storyboards. The central conflict is the rote, surprise-free journey of a prodigal son reuniting with his disconnected, emotionally absent father. Josh (Rhys Wakefield), an extreme adventurer, resents his father Frank’s (Richard Roxburgh) obsessive digging in remote caves.

Frank has become a leading authority on dangerous spelunking, to the detriment of any kind of personal life, and neither father nor son has taken the time to understand one another. But when a tropical storm causes both men, and a few other divers, to be trapped in the treacherous cavern, they must work around their grievances and escape certain death.

As Josh, Wakefield has a pleasing television persona; his resume so far is scant, but I imagine he would make a strong replacement on Grey’s Anatomy or House should the opportunity arise. At any rate, he fares much better than the monotone performance of the gravel-voiced Roxburgh, whose Frank oscillates between two moods: broodingly incensed and broodingly taciturn.

Sanctum follows formula to the T, so there’s no question the two central characters will end the movie lovey-dovey. The open question, and it’s a pretty compelling one, is whether anyone will make it out of the cave alive. Sanctum is a brutal movie, a traditional suspense yarn sprinkled with squishy horror-movie close-ups and enough expletives to earn its R rating (It’s refreshing to see a film that doesn’t even attempt to get the more box-office-friendly PG-13; here, the characters say what anyone would when they’re in a state of near-death panic).

In fact, the final death count, while not giving away specifics, is uniquely high for a movie that is ostensibly a feel-good Hollywood survival story.

However, as an emotional roller coaster worth your tears, Sanctum is half the movie 127 Hours is, and it tries twice as hard to move you. Sanctum confirms that even though James Cameron’s stamp of approval can nearly beat an artistically dead technological horse back to life, he can’t prevent another example of two-dimensional characters on a three-dimensional screen.

SANCTUM. Director: Alister Grierson; Cast: Rhys Wakefield, Ioan Gruffudd, Richard Roxburgh, Alice Parkinson, Dan Wyllie, Christopher Baker; Distributor: Universal; Rating: R; now playing at area theaters

Going into today’s release of Academy Awards nominations, it looked like a two-horse race between The Social Network and The King’s Speech -- both superior pictures -- and nothing about the announcements from Hollywood changes that.

Both movies, of course, made it into the field of 10 for Best Picture and they will also be competing head-on for Best Director (David Fincher vs. Tom Hooper) and Best Actor (Jesse Eisenberg vs. Colin Firth). Both films are nominated for their screenplays, but Social Network is an adaptation, while King’s Speech is not based on another source.

This 83rd annual Oscars race marks the second year in recent times that there are 10 Best Picture nominees and, while I have problems with Black Swan, the surprise is that there are actually 10 movies worth calling the year’s best.

In addition to the three already mentioned, the category also includes The Fighter, The Kids Are All Right, Toy Story 3, Winter’s Bone, 127 Hours, True Grit and Inception. The most obvious beneficiary of the expanded category is surely the low-budget independent Winter’s Bone, which also pulled in a much deserved nod for the terrific young Jennifer Lawrence as the backwoods girl in search of her drug-dealer dad.

It is hard to quibble with the 10 Best Picture nominations -- ok, OK, Black Swan still strikes me as overwrought and out of control in its second half -- but it is unfortunate that Ben Affleck’s The Town was snubbed here, gaining only a mention for Jeremy Renner in the Supporting Actor category. Affleck’s script and direction were impressive, and a later release date might have made the difference.

The other egregiously overlooked movie, and a far longer shot at a Best Picture nod, was Barney’s Version, which opens this weekend in South Florida. Also low-budget, it opened at year’s end in Los Angeles for eligibility’s sake, had little or no nomination campaign and was roundly ignored. I will say more about the movie at the end of the week, but believe me, it was robbed, as was its star, Paul Giamatti, doing his best work yet on screen. (He won the Golden Globe for best male comedy performance, but Barney’s Version is no comedy.)

With 10 Best Picture nominations, but only five Best Director slots, the category is like a game of musical chairs. For sheer directorial virtuosity, it is hard to beat Christopher Nolan (Inception) or Danny Boyle (127 Hours), but the Academy didn’t see it that way. Yes, I would have taken them over Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan) and those perennial Oscar favorites, the Coen Brothers (True Grit).

The surprise, but a worthy one, for Best Actor is Javier Bardem in the bleak Mexican film Biutiful. He is up against Colin Firth (The King’s Speech), James Franco (127 Hours), Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network) and Jeff Bridges (True Grit). Not making the cut was Ryan Gosling, superb in Blue Valentine, whom I would take over Bridges or even Eisenberg. The point is moot, because Firth has a lock on the win.

Gosling’s co-star Michelle Williams was nominated for Best Actress, the difference being that there are so few strong female roles this year. More dubious is the glum performance by Nicole Kidman in Rabbit Hole, made worse by her botoxed-immobile face. It looks to be a two-way race between Natalie Portman, who suffered through Black Swan and emerged victorious, and Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right), who may have the edge because of past Oscar losses. (Her co-star Julianne Moore jockeyed between Best Actress and Supporting, a strategic campaign that saw her lose out both ways.)

Also likely to sail to an easy victory is Christian Bale as the irresponsible, drugged-our brother in The Fighter, a can’t-miss performance for Best Supporting Actor. The rest of this field is quite deserving, though -- Renner (The Town), John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone), Mark Ruffalo (The Kids Are All Right) and Geoffrey Rush (The King’s Speech).

That great actress’s actress, Melissa Leo, who plays Bale’s determined mom in The Fighter, should also have an easy win for Supporting Actress, but the nomination of Amy Adams from the same movie does not help her. As expected, Helena Bonham Carter (The King’s Speech) and newcomer Hallie Steinfeld (True Grit) will be in the running, along with surprise nominee Jackie Weaver, another tough mom in the Down Under crime family flick, Animal Kingdom. Perhaps an indication of the weak support for Black Swan -- am I just hoping this is the case? -- is the no-show here for either Mila Kunis or Barbara Hershey.

Anyway, that is how the Oscars shape up from my perspective on the day the nominations were announced. But there is a long time between now and Sunday, Feb. 27, when the awards are given out. Let the disinformation and negative campaigning begin.

Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss (Criterion)

Release date: Jan. 18

Standard list price: $21.99 each

In all the documentaries and video interviews made about the work of the great director Samuel Fuller, the movie referenced more than any other is not even made by Fuller. It’s a scene from Pierrot le fou, Jean-Luc Godard’s manic farrago from 1965. Fuller, in at the time in real life inching toward his ostracization from Hollywood, cameos as himself, stationed in Paris to film a picture. Asked by Jean-Paul Belmondo what makes a movie, Fuller responds “A film is like a battleground. It’s love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotions.”

Fuller’s concise summarization isn’t everyone’s definition of cinema, but it’s shorthand for his entire body of work: A bruising 30-film oeuvre bristling with intensity and broadcasting from society’s corroded fringes.

A virtual nobody when he was most active in Hollywood (under Darryl Zanuck’s employ), it took the recognition of French polemicists like Godard and Francois Truffaut to recognize what critics in Fuller’s own country of origin didn’t see. Now he’s more or less a household name in cinema studies (in Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming, a character applying for a job at a video store is asked by the proprietor, “Who are your influences?” He nervously replies, “Samuel Fuller … all the good ones…”).

Retrospectives and revivals of his work are common in big cities. I saw my first two Fuller titles – Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, made at the end of his studio run – while studying cinema in college. At the time, they were all that was available on DVD. Criterion, the distributor responsible for these early releases, has just reissued both of these epochal titles, in better transfers than before and stocked with juicy extras.

Looking at Shock Corridor a second time, it’s even more brilliant than I remember it. The movie centers on Johnny (Peter Breck,) a journalist angling for a Pulitzer. His plan is to fake insanity so that he can be committed to a mental hospital and solve a murder that has stumped local authorities. As Johnny subtly interrogates the three suspected patients – a man who believes he’s a Confederate general, a self-loathing black racist donning Klan raiment, and a former nuclear physicist reduced to the intellectual capacity of a child – it’s not long before he loses his grip on reality as well.

Fuller’s genius touch in this disturbing, low-budget, black-and-white freak-out is the way he makes his characters’ subjective insanity our objective, onscreen reality. He floods the film’s soundtrack with the bombastic arias blaring in the head of Johnny’s roommate, a dime-store Pavarotti; another patient’s shell-shocked, Technicolor visions of Japanese locales fill the movie’s frame. Their disease becomes our own, and the results are too tragic to be exploitative.

With Shock Corridor, Fuller used the platform of a Hollywood mystery to examine the long-term of effects of brainwashing to incite bigotry and mental corrosion. It’s one of any number of Fuller pictures that confronts the cancer of racial animus in America, a sensitive indictment buried underneath a violent, in-your-face style.

The impassioned melodrama The Naked Kiss, released a year later, picks up where the bonkers Shock Corridor left off. The movie is home to one of the most unforgettable whiz-bang prologues ever filmed: A bald prostitute beats the daylights out of her pimp – and the camera itself, and we the audience – with her purse, a pummeling stanza scored to the jittery wails of hot jazz. But Kelly (Constance Towers), the shaved-headed protagonist in question, is no ordinary hooker. She can quote Byron and Goethe at the drop of a hat, and she wants to get out of the business. This proves easier said than done. Despite a new hospital job nursing disabled children, her damaged past catches up with her.

The Naked Kiss is one of the oldest mainstream films in history to imply an act of child molestation by a pedophile – a revelation rendered in a crescendo-building series of close-ups that still has the power to shock today. All in a day’s work for Fuller, who once again uses his medium to expose the rot at humanity’s core.

Bonus features on these discs include new interviews with Constance Towers, interviews with Fuller on French television in 1967 and 1987 and new illustrations by cartoonist Daniel Clowes. The best of them all is the unorthodox 1996 documentary The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera, about Fuller and his career. The film reveals how Fuller’s experiences in newsrooms and on battlefields directly informed his narratives, and it features a host of movie directors admiring Fuller’s influence.

Martin Scorsese waxes beautifully about Fuller’s inspirational formal qualities, while Tim Robbins and Quentin Tarantino are granted full access to Fuller’s home, where they fondle his movie detritus. It’s a surreal moment of one generation’s maverick passing the torch to another.

Alamar (Film Movement)

Release date: Jan. 11

SLP: $22.49

Shot on location on Mexico’s environmentally bounteous Banco Chinchorro coral reef, Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio’s Alamar is a miniature epic of atmosphere and emotion, as simple in story as it is deep in suggestion. The plot is minimal: Shortly after a parental divorce, a child leaves his mother in Rome to take a maritime journey with his father, whose own dad is a local fisherman who makes a living lobster-diving off the reef. As the child absorbs the foreign lifestyle, what begins as a wordless relationship with his estranged father flourishes into a loving companionship, despite – or perhaps because of – their looming separation at the film’s end. There is no manipulation or dramatic tension; the only suspense is whether the child will be reunited with a friendly egret. Alamar is more of a lyrical tone poem than narrative feature. Every shot is a self-contained work of art, meticulous in composition while still allowing for the beauty of life to flow, unpredictably, in front of Gonzalez-Rubio’s documentary-like lens. You get the feeling that the filmmaker’s immersion into the land, its local citizens and their workaday customs is as much a voyage of discovery for the director as it is the child in the movie – a sort of Robert Flaherty ethnographic doc filmed in the style of the Dardenne Brothers. However Gonzalez-Rubio managed to pull it off, it’s a miraculous achievement.

Paper Man (MPI)

Release date: Jan. 18

SLP: $16.99

Between The Squid and the Whale and The Answer Man, Jeff Daniels has looked awfully good on a fictional book jacket of late; he’s once again typecast as a cranky, reclusive author in Paper Man, the feature debut by writer-directors Kieran and Michele Mulroney. This time, he plays Richard Dunn, a writer of pretentious literature who is embarking on a small-town retreat and pseudo-separation from his wife Claire (Lisa Kudrow) to work on an epic novel about an endangered species of fowl. Delusional and marginally functioning, he still communicates with an imaginary friend from his childhood – a cape-donning, bleached-blonde superhero played with inspired mirth by Ryan Reynolds. Richard’s life changes when he meets Abby (Emma Stone), a local teen with a history of personal trauma that trumps his own quotidian angst.

Given that it’s divided equally between cult-cinema absurdity and the warm uplift of mainstream dramedy, Paper Man works a lot better than you might expect, earning great comic mileage from the charm of its charismatic leads and the Mulroneys’ witty screenplay. Some of the two-dimensional supporting characters, such as Abby’s over-the-top ass of a boyfriend, function only as, well, flimsy paper men for the audience to jeer accordingly, and as with most movies about writers, the literature read onscreen isn’t as profound as it’s intended to be. But this sweet bit of self-help cinema has a lot to say about forgiveness, redemption and shedding the growth-stunting baggage of the past, with corny platitudes kept thankfully to a minimum.

Catfish (Universal)

Release date: Jan. 4

SLP: $18.99

This DIY documentary begins with a look at an unusual pen-pal relationship between Nev Schulman, a 24-year-old photographer from New York, and an 8-year-old Michigan girl named Abby, who makes masterful paintings from many of Nev’s photographs. Eventually, the two connect on Facebook, which is where Nev meets Abby’s family, including her model-beautiful 19-year-old sister Megan. Just as a long-distance romance begins to bloom online, Nev notices that some things about the family simply don’t add up, so he and his brother and best friend – filmmakers Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost – travel to Michigan to uncover the truth. To reveal any more of the plot would be to spoil an initially compelling mystery that couldn’t be more relevant to our times.

On the surface, Catfish is accomplished filmmaking, but the more you think about it, the more questions it raises about the filmmakers’ decisions and motivations. The filmmakers swear their remarkable story is 100 percent fact, though much of the revelatory information we receive is presented dubiously, leading many critics and audiences to doubt the directors’ fidelity to the truth. That’s because there’s something, well …. fishy about the final product, like we’ve been sold a bill of goods. Listening to the movie’s makers chat about Catfish on the DVD’s bonus features actually decreases the film’s appeal, as it shows how much better, and more raw, this expose of Internet deception could have been.

America Lost and Found: The BBS Story (Criterion)
Release date: Dec. 14

Standard list price: $88.99

Released just 11 days before Christmas, Criterion’s America Lost and Found: The BBS Story box set is the holiday season’s ultimate gift to cinephiles. The six films contained in this collection encompass one of American cinema’s most rambunctious, mavericky collectives, which, like the period icons it brought to the screen, burned out in a brazen blaze rather than fade quietly away.

The company in question is BBS Productions, founded at the dawn of 1968 – still early in counterculture revolution that we now refer to as “The Sixties” – by producers Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider and Steve Blauner. Inspired by drugs, radical politics, art-house movies and John Cassavetes, they sought to remake modern American movies in the image of the changing country they inhabited. They took the stories out of the studios and the moralistic messages out of the stories, cultivating the ambivalent antihero as its stock in trade. And they turned a B-movie writer named Jack Nicholson into an unkempt, unhinged reboot of the matinee idol.

BBS’ proclivity for a different kind of American cinema began with its most zonked-out feature: Head, a self-aware genre mash-up that began as a movie vehicle for television sensations The Monkees and ended up an absurdist comedy and visceral antiwar commentary complete with exploding vending machines, a cameo by a giant-sized sexual Victor Mature and plenty of sexual double-entendre (the movie’s name draws from the creators’ desire to proclaim, on the poster for their next project, “From the studio that gave you Head…”). A drug movie if ever there was one, its G rating remains mystifying.

The BBS team gnawed away at the burgeoning countercultural American psyche for another seven films in a prolific five years, culminating with the great Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds (not included in this set, but available in a prior Criterion release). The King of Marvin Gardens, the final film in this collection, is a more fitting death knell for BBS anyway. The communist freedom espoused in Easy Rider, BBS’ biggest money-maker, had given way, per the downbeat Marvin Gardens, into a cinema of desperation and constriction, where the failed quest for easy money in the newly developing Atlantic City real estate market made for a sound corollary to the shattered American dreams of a country still mired in its bloodiest conflict.

For the purposes of this article, I’m most interested in the two movies in America Lost and Found that are making their debuts on DVD. It seems almost redundant at this point to wax poetically about Easy Rider and The Last Picture Show; it’s the release of Drive, He Said and A Safe Place that make this box set an event worth celebrating.

The first of just three features ever directed by Jack Nicholson, Drive, He Said is the most underappreciated film in the bunch and also its most inevitably dated. Nicholson was attracted to this adaptation of a successful book, published six years prior to the film’s production, so that he could explore his love of basketball. The story is divided between dual protagonists, both of whom are suffering breakdowns of varying degrees: Hector (William Tepper) is a jaded college basketball star with a hot-headed demeanor whose idyllic affair with a faculty wife (Karen Black) is beginning to crumble. Meanwhile, his activist roommate Gabriel (Michael Margotta) is coming apart to a more disturbing extreme, killing not only his television but shelves full of trinkets, his toilet, his personal relationships and gradually his own mind, which is fine so long is it’ll keep him away from the draft.

Gabriel’s series of theatrical stunts grow more and more destructive, culminating in the liberation of campus test animals following an attempted rape of Black’s character. Drive, He Said a difficult film to watch, despite Nicholson’s assured direction (in one Kubrickian touch, he transitions from a basketball in midair to a piece of food being thrown across the table, matching the previous shot’s trajectory). Part of the reason the movie failed commercially is because it had no interest in offering a romanticized version of the ‘60s. There are no free-lovin’ hippies in this film; the sex, in fact, looks ghastly and unerotic, and Gabriel’s actions are hardly those of the glamorous outsider. If this is the antiestablishment, then the establishment looks pretty appealing.

I was a lot more taken with Henry Jaglom’s A Safe Place (1972), a non-narrative experimental drama initially released to festival audiences with as many jeers as Drive, He Said. Tuesday Weld stars as a woman alternately known as Susan and Noah, who seems to be living a number of lives simultaneously as she begins a relationship with a square suitor (Phil Proctor), enjoys the company of a nondescriptly European park magician (Orson Welles) and rekindles an affair with a possibly psychotic man from her past (Jack Nicholson). She herself seems to be suffering from a mental disorder, reflected in Jaglom’s immersive, subjective intercutting between past, present and future, all commingling in a seemingly random but highly controlled goulash of imagery.

Open-ended and thought-provoking, A Safe Place is an inventive study of a woman’s insanity, anchored by a disquieting sense of art imitating life: Weld was famously unbalanced as a young woman, suffering from alcoholism, a nervous breakdown and a suicide attempt by age 12. Strangely, in his commentary on the film, Jaglom today seems that A Safe Place was an attempt to probe what was really going on inside the female mind, a theory that suggests all women are crazy … perhaps this comes from the fact that Jaglom, by his own admission, was at the time only hanging out with wackos like Weld and Karen Black!

BBS productions ended as unceremoniously as its characters, but this box set provides an essential reminder of how the drive to be different, especially in an industry running on homogeneity, can help change the language of the very form. In this age of apathy (where is our generation’s SDS?), we could use another BBS now more than ever.

Devil (Universal Home Video)

Release date: Dec. 21

SLP: $19.49

This nifty and compact supernatural thriller holds up much better than expected, considering the story and production credits were handled by none other than masturbatory, self-parodic showman M. Night Shyamalan. Thankfully, he relinquished his grubby hands from the director’s chair this time, bequeathing that duty to Quarantine filmmaker John Erick Dowdle, who directs this minimalist material well: A group of five people are locked in a jammed elevator in a Philadelphia skyscraper immediately following a suicide from that very edifice. According to a superstitious technician in the building, this series of events means that one of the people in the elevator is, in fact, Satan, and that the other four are sundry degenerates destined to meet an unruly fate. Devil is not without its clichés; it’s the kind of cheapo B-picture that used to play in ratty drive-ins. Only here it’s been given a slickly shot reboot and a script that handles the story with a commendable degree of realism in terms of how a jammed-elevator situation might actually be dealt with by local authorities (presented in the form of Chris Messina’s recovering-alcoholic cop). The film’s most beguiling sequence happens before the story begins: Dowdle opens the film with a series of mesmerizing crane views of an upside-down Philadelphia skyline, a disorienting prologue that suggests something just ain’t right.

Chabrol: Two Classic Thrillers From the Legendary Director (First Run Features)

Release date: Dec. 14

SLP: $18.99

Claude Chabrol was one of two French New Wave masters to die in 2010 (Eric Rohmer was the other). Often considered, reductively, as the French Hitchcock, Chabrol specialized in wickedly observant thrillers, creating a legacy of 50 films in his wake (his last and latest, Inspector Bellamy, is still playing in limited release). In honor of his passing, First Run recently reissued a couple of his recent films. Not yet as “classic” as the collection’s subtitle makes them out to be, these two features are perfectly representative of Chabrol’s more recent output. Merci Pour le Chocolat, from 2000, is a family saga of secrets and lies, adapted from an American crime novel and featuring a stirring lead performance by Isabelle Huppert as a chocolate company heiress. The Bridesmaid, completed four years later, is even better. A convincing neo-noir about a young man drawn into an attractive psycho girl’s darkest intentions, The Bridesmaid is sexy and disturbing – a much better flick than, say, Fatal Attraction.

The Films of Rita Hayworth (Sony)

Release date: Dec. 21

SLP: $48.99

Rita Hayworth famously said, “Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda … and woke up with me.” Hayworth is seemingly to be defined forever by her most famous onscreen persona, a vision of sultriness who, more than anyone before or after her, made cigarette smoking look awfully sexy. If she indeed developed as an actress beyond the roles of femmes fatale, sexpots and showgirls, you can’t tell it from Columbia’s new Films of Rita Hayworth box set, but this five-disc collection certainly reminds us why so many, onscreen and off, lusted for her. Of the five movies, only two – Gilda and the splashy Technicolor musical Cover Girl – were previously available on DVD. The other, newly available films are the obscure wartime musical Tonight and Every Night, the W. Somerset Maugham adaptation Miss Sadie Thompson, and Biblical epic Salome.

Salt (Sony Pictures)

Release date: Dec. 21

SLP: $15.99

If my review of Salt isn’t as detailed as some of my others, it’s because I didn’t take a single note while watching it. For many films, this is a sign of being so immersed in the narrative that to divert one’s eyes in favor of the quotidian minutiae of note-taking would be to disrupt, and even insult, the spectacle unfolding before you. Alas, this is not the case with Salt. This time, my absence of mid-film rumination is representative of a film so vacuously middlebrow in its action-movie conventions that it generates nothing worth scribbling. It’s neither an outstanding action film nor an unwatchable hack job. The film, starring Angelina Jolie as a CIA operative who may or may not be a brainwashed Russian spy sent to infiltrate U.S. intelligence system, is this year’s Taken: a breathless, brainless hour-and-a-half-long adrenaline rush, a shot of superfluously plot-twisty cinematic muscle from a director (Phillip Noyce) whose best work has been of the small and suspenseful persuasion (The Quiet American, Rabbit Proof Fence). Roger Ebert’s four-star review of the film this past summer is certainly one of his most curious, to say the least.