Beowulf is a laughable 150 million dollar cartoon experiment by Robert Zemeckis who has obviously failed to learn his lesson from the last time he tried to do this. If the opening box office numbers are taken into account it will tank every bit as badly as The Polar Express did in 2004. Clearly, all the Angelina Jolie fanboys who have been drooling over her since the Tomb Raider franchise got started (which Zemeckis has actually admitted to pandering to) have seen the movie in the opening weekend and it just doesn't have the legs to carry it through the notoriously difficult holiday season.
Fred Claus is just more of the same insipid humor that Hollywood seems to be so fond of at the moment.
Saw IV is recycled garbage from a franchise that's run its course but who's financiers refuse to let die with even the slightest bit of dignity.
The Mist may have some potential, but if many of the previous Stephen King film adaptations can be any indication it will lack the psychological depth and fascinating character development that makes King's work so readable on the page.
I'm not knocking anyone's choice in movies, and in the end only you can decide for yourself what you like or dislike before deciding which films to pay through the nose to see in theaters. But many serious students of film, myself included, are questioning more and more every day the ability of the studio system to make "good" movies anymore.
The Hollywood industry is dying, people. And the fingers on the triggers are the same fingers that are killing the music industry. The greed heads who own the studios are floundering and thrashing around like a speared fish, and they will subject you to anything and everything that they can do to make themselves a few more pennies before the entire studio system collapses under its own prodigious weight.
Do yourself a favor and spend the criminal amount of money you pay to see a film in a crummy theater with a sticky floor, half an hour of blatant commercials, poorly designed sound systems, and idiotically expensive concessions on a month or three of Netflix service. Do some independent research, stop paying attention to the paid reviews you read in newspapers, learn to discount anything any of the widely accepted "film critics" (Ebert, Roper, et al.) say on a case by case basis, and rent yourself some genuinely good movies to watch in the comfort of your own home with your own popcorn. Become a better informed and more intelligent movie fan and you'll learn to appreciate the good ones even more. You'll feel better about yourself by the time Spider Man 23 or Final Destination 158 comes around and you hear all the compensated reviewers pontificating on what brilliant films they are. You'll know better.
By far the only movie currently worth seeing is Lions For Lambs. It will not win any Academy Awards or other accolades from the current power structure in the film industry, and it will bore the people who don't understand it and make those who do extremely uncomfortable, but it does EXACTLY what Redford intends for it to do. As a piece of entertainment it's only so-so. The plot itself is less than spectacular, but the underlying story that ties the narrative together is quite possibly the most important thing that anyone in the film industry has said since Hopper and Southern wrote Easy Rider in '69. It is scathing political commentary at its highest caliber. Given the propensity of our current administration to throw anyone who's political views contravene their own into a very dark cell in a federal prison, it's genuinely surprising that Blackwater or some other government inspired task force with alphabet soup acronyms on the back of their vests haven't kicked down Robert Redford's door and dragged him off into the night. Lions For Lambs says the things that really need to be said right now and examines the big questions that very few filmmakers are willing to acknowledge.
