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What’s that great line from No Country For Old Men when Tommy Lee Jones’s Sheriff is asked if a multiple body massacre is a mess?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A relatively poor but decent Midwestern kid transfers into a new high school filled with shallow rich ki---hey, why are you stopping me? Ah, yes. I did request. But you can’t get very far into any plot point from Never Back Down without an earlier high school entertainment popping into mind. In this case Beverly Hills 90210 or, if you replace Midwestern with “homeschooled” Mean Girls is your movie. But wait there’s more. The protagonist has daddy issues.

My memories of Paranoid Park, the latest high school head-trip from Gus Van Sant (Last Days) are fuzzy at best. But rather than skip a review because I saw the movie months ago at the New York Film Festival, why not acknowledge that Van Sant's recent forays into art cinema sometimes feel fuzzy even as you're watching them. So discuss it I shall. Pardon the haze.

Ever had a mouthful of PopRocks? The tart red candies turn into a whole party in your mouth, like tiny fireworks popping away. The human equivalent just might be Amy Adams. The ascendant princess of the smash romantic comedy Enchanted and the endearing chatterbox of Junebug returns to theaters as a highstrung actress.

In the very first scene of Trouble The Water, a raw documentary chronicling the Hurricane Katrina disaster, we meet a congenial husband and wife “from New Orleans the Ninth Ward Underwater.” The wife, Kimberly, brags about the footage she has of Hurricane Katrina. “All the footage I seen on TV. Nobody aint got what I got. I got right there in the hurricane."

If we were once or ever naïve enough to believe that television news was keeping us well informed on political and global concerns, the last decade has been a rude wake up call. Important concepts are routinely distorted by or reduced into sound bites (after which they can be easily shrugged off, often to our detriment), biased or outright dishonest agendas are barely concealed (hello, Fox News!). Even in the increasingly rare thoughtful TV news segment, there’s limited time to get at the heart of the matter: you have to make space for those commercials.

I didn’t know who Roman Polanski was until I was a budding teenage cinephile. I had seen Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown before I knew anything about the director’s storied past or his “fugitive” status in the US. I was already, as they say, in his corner. In fact, it wasn’t until he was in the Oscar race for The Pianist when I became fully aware of his long history of controversy as a public figure.

Anvil! The Story of Anvil begins with frenzied head banger concert footage from 1984 focusing on several name bands and then one obscure one - “Anvil”. I thought instantly that this was a rock mockumentary in the vein of cult favorite This is Spinal Tap, also from 1984?

It begins with the ending. Not in the way that films traditionally do, with their intriguing framing devices that give you a peek at the end only to back track to show you the painting inside, stroke by stroke. No, one can argue that Atonement begins only after it ends, the whole picture suddenly refashioning itself into something more troubling, ambiguous and interpretable in the viewer’s mind.

Every Thursday, a triple feature rental suggestion: Fill up your online queues.

Every Thursday, a triple feature rental suggestion for your bulky netflix queues (you are using Netflix right? Blockbuster is raising their prices and Netflix deserves your pennies more anyway).

For the legion of hardcore fans of composer Stephen, the wait for the film version of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street has been excruciatingly long. There have been precious few true Sondheim musicals that have made the transfer to the screen and this grand guignol piece has been a long time in coming. Earlier this decade Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Jarhead) was to direct and numerous names were bandied about for the infamous roles of the demon barber and his accomplice Mrs. Lovett.

First things first. Never before while watching a major motion picture have I been so acutely aware that I was familiar with the source material. My memories of the book never left me while I was devouring the huge and glossy movie adaptation of The Golden Compass. I savored each new flavorful scene and it was only hours afterwards when my stomach felt empty that I realized this feast was amply spiced and flavored with my quite thorough memory of the recipe in question.

Each Thursday a triple feature rental suggestion. You know you need to return those DVDs anyway.

Each week I offer three DVD recommendations for your viewing pleasure or edification. OK not each week. But thereabouts. Can you blame me for taking Thanksgiving off? With Beowulf painting over actors and Enchanted enchanting (Ha. Wow, I'm talented!) moviegoing audiences everywhere, I thought we'd look at three other films that combine animation with live action.