The premise is a snooze: Rich people have problems too? You can't buy your way out of a midlife crisis? Lonely Pot-Smoking Maid is an unfulfilling career choice? Yeah, that "no shit" is visible from space. But Friends with Money, Jennifer Aniston's much-touted return to the indie scene, atones for its shortcomings in the plot department by kicking unprecedented ass in the great-actress-triumvirate-of-delight department. The magical gals who save this movie, the three best actresses ever—just to get it out of the way, Aniston is not one of them, though she's okay—are Joan Cusack, Frances McDormand, and Catherine Keener, who, along with Aniston, portray a quartet of Los Angeles best pals. The three tut condescendingly over Olivia (Aniston), who has achieved neither marital bliss nor financial stability, floating through her 30s in a pathetic haze—scrubbing strangers' toilets, scamming free samples at the Lancôme counter, and occasionally having sex with a detached meathead. The dialogue is sharp and the performances are flawless. But it's still a movie about the emotional pain of building an addition to one's house. (LINDY WEST)

Ice Age: The Meltdown

You know what rules!? Ice Age: The Meltdown rules! A bunch of famous people did the voices (Denis Leary, Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Queen Latifah, Jay Leno...), and the animation is infinitely better than the first installment, with vivid colors and far more detail. Plus, that little acorn-loving squirrel guy is back. He's funny. (MEGAN SELING)

Inside Man

Denzel Washington plays Keith Frazier, a New York Police detective, and when a bank holdup turns into a complex hostage situation, he's called to put his silk 'n' granite conversation skills to the test. The film is a long 129 minutes, but that's fine by me. Not only does it allow Spike Lee (working from a silly/smart script by Russell Gewirtz) to take lightweight detours into racial profiling, violent video games, and the exceedingly unfortunate names lovers give to each other's genitalia, but it gives you plenty of time to hypothesize about the hostage-takers' motives. (Is that anti-capitalist speech in Albanian a clue?) The plot has spongy spots, like the amorphous Aryan evil that both the good and bad guys ultimately have to contend with, but it's never less than fun. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Kinky Boots

Charlie (Joel Edgerton), a square, inherits his father's factory, where squares make boots all day. Industrial England has been in decline for ages, so Charlie isn't too shocked when he finds out the business is failing. Still, something must be done! Charlie tries firing people, but that doesn't suit his charming facial features. Then, thanks to the prodding of a sweetie named Lauren (Sarah-Jane Potts), Charlie goes cool-hunting in London and stumbles across Lola (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a damsel in distress who just happens to be a man. Not just any boots will satisfy Lola: You know, they have to be strong enough for a man, but stilettoed for a woman. Over the mild protestations of the factory workers (conveyed primarily through Nick Frost's boyish facial contortions), some satisfactory boots are fashioned. What a climax, eh? That's why there's an obligatory Milan fashion show at the end. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Lonesome Jim

Casey Affleck's character, Jim, is afflicted with chronic despair and, life-wise, he's run out of options. So he runs home to rural Indiana where he meets Anika (Liv Tyler) in a bar. She's wearing her nurse's uniform. He's wearing his Brooklyn haircut. He's sheepish about failing in Manhattan; embarrassed, he mentions he worked at an Applebee's. Without irony, she says, "I love Applebee's." They both identify as writers. The first time they have sex, it's in the hospital where Anika works. The second time, it's in Jim's bedroom, his walls covered with portraits of Hemingway, Parker, Richard Yates, Woolf, Plath—a who's who of suicidal literati. There's a side story about a drug mix-up, there's a fat guy on a motorcycle, there's a moment when Affleck starts singing along to "If You Leave Me Now," but there's nothing very daring in this movie. (CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE)

Lucky Number Slevin

This frenetic pastiche of a movie is about a pudgy-cute dude named Slevin (Josh Hartnett) who inadvertently wades into an all-out race war—excuse me, noble blood feud—between The Boss (Morgan Freeman) and The Rabbi (Sir Ben Kingsley). But most of the time Lucky Number Slevin looks like a feature-length advertisement for Target home décor. It's a good thing there's so much to look at, because it's hard to care much about the convoluted tease of writer Jason Smilovic's plot. There are lots of murders and double-crossings and mistaken identities and novel terms for bloody sleights-of-hand, plus one reference each to North by Northwest and James Bond. But if you get bored, you can always imagine the grisly proceedings are actually taking place in some heretofore-uncharted corner of IKEA. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is a not-very-good movie about old ladies: cute ones, nice ones, grumpy ones, dead ones. (LINDY WEST)

Night Watch

There's vampire-fighting, an attempt to forestall a world-ending prophecy, and a guy who likes to use his own spine as a broadsword. I'm not sure what the hell I saw, but I wouldn't mind watching more of it. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The Notorious Bettie Page

For all you rockabilly dolls dying to see the origin of your aesthetic in all her cinematic glory, go ahead and queue up now—you'll love this movie. The set design, cinematography, and costumes capture the Eisenhower era with affectionate accuracy, from the furnishings in Page's tidy New York apartment to the postcard-worthy boardwalk shots on Miami Beach and Coney Island. With a smooth mix of documentary footage, saturated color, and periodic interludes of soft black and white, writer-director Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol, American Psycho) creates the ideal backdrop for the much-romanticized legend of Page's life and career. Unfortunately, Harron and co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner limit themselves to cursory observations about the conservative mores of the '50s and perfunctory stops along the timeline of Bettie's rise to "notoriety." (HANNAH LEVIN)

RV

Sissyman Bob Munro (Robin Williams) is a big dumb jerk who can't say no to his germaphobic asshole boss, so instead of taking his selfish family on vacation to Hawaii, where he was finally gonna have the time to sex up his attention-starved wife), he rents a giant RV, and drags Snootypants and his two jerky kids to Colorado where he'll secretly attend a business meeting his boss is requiring him to go to. Catch is, Dude doesn't know how to drive the RV or work the poop-emptying machine. You can imagine the hilarity that ensures. (MEGAN SELING)

Scary Movie 4

Scary Movie 4 is just as entertaining as all the previous Scary Movies (something tells me that if you're reading this, you found the preceding flicks at least mildly amusing), and due to some lucky timing, it's actually even funnier. See, last year was full of movies and moments that practically spoof themselves, and the writers of Scary Movie 4 take care to touch on every single one. Jokes about homosexuals, thanks to Brokeback Mountain? Check. War of the Worlds and a lot of "Tom Cruise is crazy" jokes? Check. Self-mutilation gags thanks to Saw? Carmen Electra in a tight and busty little corset that makes boys in the audience go "Woo! Boobies!"? Amy Farina being hilarious? Check, check, and mate! Hooray! (MEGAN SELING)

The Sentinel

A disgraced former Secret Service agent (Michael Douglas) tries to save the President.

She's the Man

A Twelfth Night update set on the prep-school soccer field (from the screenwriters of Ten Things I Hate About You).

Silent Hill

Until a late appeal to logic interrupts the fun, the new goth-friendly splatter flick Silent Hill delivers a freshly rancid freakout of the sort that's intelligible only to some dank level of your subconscious. Based on the video game series, Roger Avery's script cherry-picks liberally from the four installments to date. (Full wimp disclosure: This reviewer never finished the first game, having packed it in when the dead babies came out carrying butcher knives. I mean, Jesus.) The scenario here finds an increasingly freaked woman searching for her daughter in the titular mining town, a mostly deserted place that occasionally slips into a dimension chock full of acid-puking hulks, mobs of charcoal-briquette children, and, an 8-foot-tall dude with a pyramid for a head and a sword that rivals that of Johnny Wadd Holmes. Director Christophe Gans goes for broke during these nightmare sequences, delivering a succession of genuinely disturbing setpieces. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Slither

Written and directed by James Gunn (who also did the screenplay for 2004's Dawn of the Dead), Slither lives up to all expectations: It boasts an onslaught of blatant gore, a tentacle rape scene, and the complete understanding that it's a total joke. (MEGAN SELING)

Take the Lead

Based loosely on the life of ballroom-dancing revivalist Pierre Dulaine, Take the Lead is the familiar tale of teenage redemption via fox trot. The story arc is soothingly predictable: Latin dandy Dulaine (Antonio Banderas) shows up at a New York City public school, inexplicably yearning to teach merengue to the snarling masses. The beleaguered, no-nonsense principal (Alfre Woodard), after laughing in his ignorant face ("Life for these kids is like a fight to stay alive and a hustle to make ends meet, not ballroom dancing"), wearily agrees, and Dulaine's delinquents montage, montage, montage their way right into the Big Competition. Take the Lead is neither as charming nor as satisfying as its documentary predecessor, 2005's Mad Hot Ballroom. The scripted progression of professional actors and dancers can't touch the exhilaration of watching spazzy preteens master it for real, but TTL's dancing is polished and entertaining nonetheless. It's the rest of the movie—vaguely racist, enthusiastically sexist, and weirdly anticlimactic—that stinks. (LINDY WEST)

Thank You For Smoking

As a work of satire, Thank You for Smoking is safely and securely dated. The book it's adapted from (by conservative novelist Christopher Buckley) was published in the mid-'90s, when tobacco lawsuits were flying fast and loose and the word "probe" was rampant in headlines in the Washington Post. But what the movie loses in relevance, it gains in absurd comedy. (ANNIE WAGNER)

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a masterpiece, flat out. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

V for Vendetta

As a work of cinema, V for Vendetta is no Batman or Matrix. But its timing (it opened the day before the third anniversary of the second Iraq war) is impeccable. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

The Wild

A Disney movie about escaped zoo animals.