Archive - Feb 20, 2009

Mysterious cell phone messages promise a young American engineer untold wealth -- then make him the target of a deadly international plot. Dangerous security operatives chase the engineer across the globe, while a powerful government official pursues a mysterious agenda that threatens the stability of the entire world.

Bloated corpses buoy a castaway's life raft in TALES OF THE BLACK FREIGHTER, a grisly parable taken from the pages of Alan Moore's WATCHMEN. One of the book's most riveting detours, the comic-within-a-comic (read by one of the book's characters) ominously paralleled the main events of the graphic novel. Although the beloved story was cut from Zach Snyder's big-screen version of WATCHMEN, it's recast here as a standalone animated program aimed at mollifying completists and ramping up interest in the adaptation.

While America was going through the Depression in the 1930s, France was suffering a similar crisis. This musical comedy from Christophe Barratier brings a lighter touch to those days, but it doesn't gloss over the difficulties of the people living through them. A trio of blue-collar men living in the Faubourg neighborhood of Paris struggle to survive, but they think they may have found their salvation when they decide to reopen a local music hall.

In an alternate 1985 America, costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the "Doomsday Clock" - which charts the USA's tension with the Soviet Union - is permanently set at five minutes to midnight. When one of his former colleagues is murdered, the washed-up but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes.

Amazon princess Diana rescues Steve Trevor, an Air Force pilot who crashes on her island. Intrigued by her first exposure to the outside world, she leaves the island and becomes the superhero known as Wonder Woman.