Oi.  Four new films releasing this week and nary a single one worth getting excited about.  The Ridley Scott spy thriller? The combination of Scott, DiCaprio and Crowe wasn't enough to get this one into any of the big fests which tells me that it's every bit the overwrought bit of hand wringing that the trailer implies.  No thanks, I'll pass. The Dennis Quaid starring racial sports flick? Get behind me Satan! Quaid has done hardly anything worthwhile in the past decade - arguably even longer - and there's nothing in here that hasn't been done better many, many times before. What does that leave us? Two very, very different flicks ...

See that poster to the left? That's for Quarantine, a new first person zombie-horror flick from Sony. I haven't seen it.  Nobody has. Know why? Because Sony doesn't want them to. Because Sony has no faith in it. What I have seen is [REC], the hit Spanish film that this is a quicky knock-off of, but I've only seen that because I got to it before Sony locked it away in a vault and threw away the key. See, their is pretty much a shot for shot remake of the Spanish flick only - by all accounts - not nearly as good and they're so afraid of people seeing the original film first and comparing the two that Sony has sealed it up and refused to allow anyone in the United States to see it under any circumstances.

[REC] has made only one appearance in North America at all - that being at the Fantastia Festival in Montreal thanks to a contractual quirk that prevented Sony from blocking the film screening in Canada.  But they tried.  The original film is a little over hyped in my opinion but is certainly one of the more effective zombie flicks of recent years while the only real selling point I can see for the remake - check the trailer here - is that the irritating sister from Dexter gets killed.

The only other film hitting screens this week is kids' fantasy City of Ember from the same people who made the Narnia flicks. Walden is kind of desperate for a hit at this point for a very simple reason: other than the Narnia titles Walden films have absolutely zero personality. This is not really an exception.  Kids will like it okay, Bill Murray's got a secondary part in it and they built an absolutely massive standing set that is a lot of fun to look at and explore but any adult in the room will have forgotten the film entirely five minutes after walking out of the screening.

Sigh.Good thing the TV season is strong so far ...