Overview: Tim Burton takes a stab at Lewis Carroll's timeless tale of a young girl (Mia Wasikowska) lost within a fantasyland with this 3-D production of Alice in Wonderland. The Lion King's Linda Woolverton provides the script, with Hollywood heavyweights Richard Zanuck and Joe Roth heading up the production team. Burton veteran collaborator Johnny Depp co-stars as The Mad Hatter in the Walt Disney Productions picture.

Overview: Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan team up for the Warner Bros. police buddy movie Cop Out in this Kevin Smith-directed production. From a script by Robb and Mark Cullen, the picture focuses on a detective duo who investigate the disappearance of a baseball card.

Verdict: No, Smith didn't write it, but he might as well have. Because it's a Kevin Smith movie even before it's a Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan movie. And like every other Smith movie ever made, the point is not the stuff happening on screen. The point is Smith selling you his brand, and that brand is his deeply held conviction that the world really is a place where impersonating Oprah's "I loves Harpo" speech from The Color Purple is not only the funniest thing ever, but that it's something guys sitting around smoking weed do when they want to crack each other up.

Overview: Mark Ruffalo and Leonardo DiCaprio team up as a pair of U.S. Marshals who travel to a secluded island off the coast of Massachusetts to search for an escaped mental patient, uncovering a web of deception along the way as they battle the forces of nature and a prison riot in this Martin Scorsese-helmed period picture.

Verdict: Scorsese is a master of his craft, but Shutter Island, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, feels disappointingly like a minor work. But hey, who says every film has to be a masterpiece? Uber film nerd Scorsese seems to be having a blast with this genre exercise, a thrilling blend of noir and psychological horror that comes infused with more references and homages than most audiences will probably notice. And in Scorsese’s trademark fashion, it’s fantastically stylized, chock full of breathtaking visual flourishes and thematic clues that come together like the pieces of a puzzle once everything in its twisted plot is revealed.

Overview: Jane (Streep) is the mother of three grown kids, owns a thriving Santa Barbara bakery/restaurant and has—after a decade of divorce—an amicable relationship with her ex-husband, attorney Jake (Baldwin). But when Jane and Jake find themselves out of town for their son’s college graduation, things start to get complicated.

Verdict: Nancy Meyers, director of 1990's What Women Want, appears to have taken that title as her mantra. Everything about her movies falls under the category of wish fulfillment, specifically pertaining to middle-aged women.

She does occasionally deliver up some clever lines, but It's Complicated is vacuous overall, although attractively packaged. Meyers' last films 2006's The Holiday and 2003's Something's Got to Give focus on thriving career women living in gorgeous homes, sans romance. This particular brand of rom-com has become Meyers' stock in trade.

Meryl Streep stars as Jane, a divorced fiftysomething with a successful Santa Barbara bakery/restaurant. She lives in a stunning Mediterranean-style house, has three loving grown children and a circle of caring friends.

Alec Baldwin plays ex-husband Jake, an attorney who zips around in a shiny black Porsche and is married to the much younger Agnes (Lake Bell). We learn that Jake left Jane a decade earlier, but his new union is faltering. Sure, Agnes looks like a supermodel, but she lacks the grace of the charming, wise and nurturing Jane.

As anyone who has seen the billboards or ads knows, the former spouses wind up together between the sheets. Jane is conflicted about their trysts and also is drawn to Adam (Steve Martin), a genial, divorced architect.

Overview: Famous film director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) grapples with epic crises in his personal and professional life. At the same time, he must strike a balance among the demands of the numerous women in his life, including his wife (Marion Cotillard), his mistress (Penélope Cruz), and his confidant (Judi Dench).

Verdict: The man at the center of the universe in Nine, the sun around which a bevy of beautiful women will circle, needs to be irresistible, radiating heat. Unfortunately, Daniel Day-Lewis is more of a cool blue moon in a distant sky type, which has its own charm, just not one that works for this adaptation of the 1982 Broadway sensation, a musical / stage riff on Fellini's classic 8½, which featured a magnetic Marcello Mastroianni as the misdirected director in the middle.

And while we're filling the suggestion box. . . . Because Nine is a musical, it would help if your leading man could sing, and I don't mean carry a tune, but actually flex some vocal muscle. Again, love Daniel Day-Lewis, excellent racing shirtless through the forest, but a song-and-dance man he is not.

So what does that leave Nine with? Well not much.

The galaxy of actresses who should bring some sizzle feel kind of chilly too. Maybe that's the fault of the fishnets and bustiers, which is what the film relies on to keep your attention rather than a story, disappointing since the script was in the hands of Michael Tolkin (The Player) and the late Anthony Minghella (The English Patient.). What makes all these fumbles surprising is that director Rob Marshall knows his way around musical theater, hitting his highest notes with Oscar best picture winner Chicago.

The story here is loosely based on director Federico Fellini's experience. At middle age, the Italian auteur found himself with a bad case of writer's block; while the words wouldn't come, a lot of memories about the women he had bedded did. No surprise, thinking about the women was easier than working on a script, but ultimately the two merged to provide the foundation for 8½, which follows a middle-aged filmmaker with writer's block and many women as he tries to find his way back to the mistress he loves the best, his work.

But what in Fellini's hands became a classic -- its black comedy deconstructing the artistic temperament -- only to survive an initial translation to the stage, now returns home to film as a fiasco.

Overview: New Yorkers Paul (Hugh Grant) and Meryl (Sarah Jessica Parker) Morgan seem to have it all -- except for the fact that their marriage is crumbling around them. But their romantic woes are small compared to the world of trouble they find themselves in after they witness a murder.

Verdict: So here's a question for the Feds, whose famed witness protection program takes care of Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker, the couple on the edge of divorce in the (note the use of ironic quote marks) " romantic comedy" Did You Hear About the Morgans? What about the rest of us? We could have used some protection here too.

Grant has never been less charming and Parker never less fashionable or more grating than they are as Paul and Meryl Morgan, a hot-shot Manhattan couple split apart by Paul's one-nighter in L.A. I've got news for them -- infidelity is the least of their problems. What we allegedly have here is both a fish-out-of-water tale and a romantic comedy -- a kind of two-fer from writer-director Marc Lawrence. As to the romance half of the equation, the "Will they get together?" has been changed to "Will they get back together?," which could have been fun. Ah, if wishes were horses!

Speaking of horses, the fish part, which flops miserably, is their time in Ray, Wyo., where just about everyone rides those four-legged critters, drives trucks and carries loaded rifles they fire off a lot. In case Mary Steenburgen's obsession with guns -- she's Emma, the sheriff's plucky wife -- doesn't have you thinking Sarah Palin, there's a truly leaden line that should clear it up.

Paul and Meryl have been whisked to Wyoming because they were the sole witnesses to a murder by a professional hit man who wears a skullcap against the cold, but apparently never considered that a ski mask might have served his client's interests better.

Overview: In a dynamic new portrayal of Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous characters, Sherlock Holmes and his stalwart partner Watson embark on their latest challenge.

Verdict: Sherlock Holmes has been reimagined with fighting skills as potent as his intellectual acumen. The iconic British detective has undergone a makeover in the latest Sherlock Holmes, with little resemblance to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's literary character. Only his pipe-smoking remains intact.

Holmes as a lethal action hero would seem a natural assignment for a director such as Guy Ritchie (Snatch). And having proven himself a savvy superhero in Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr. would seem a wise choice for a character boasting equal parts brawn and brains.

Holmes is an even more slovenly shut-in than he was on the page. His grooming doesn't involve plaid coats or rakish caps. It also doesn't seem to include a razor. But he's an inventor and a guy who definitely pumps iron, in the dark confines of his rented rooms on Baker Street.

As for Dr. Watson (Jude Law), he's no longer a bumbler. He's a marksman, a risk-taker and a romantic gent with a fiance (Kelly Reilly). But Watson's more substantive relationship is with Holmes. Though the production design looks entrancingly authentic, neither Holmes, Watson nor others sound like they live in the 1890s. Worse, the plot is convoluted.

Holmes is on the trail of the lofty Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), whose dastardly deeds involve occult crimes and threaten the future of London. The detective is both hampered and assisted by Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams). There is more chemistry between Downey and Law than between Downey and McAdams. But there is not much point to her role except to show that woman can be action heroes, even in corsets and skirts.

Overview: AVATAR takes us to a spectacular world beyond imagination, where a reluctant hero embarks on an epic adventure, ultimately fighting to save the alien world he has learned to call home.

Verdict: With the game-changing, magnificent visual spectacle that is Avatar, writer/director James Cameron can be crowned king of the virtual world. But he still needs to hire a screenwriter. For all the grandeur and technical virtuosity of the mythical 3-D universe Cameron labored for years to perfect, his characters are one-dimensional, rarely saying anything unexpected.

But for much of the movie, that hardly matters. The scenes in Pandora a planet with an Earth-like environment are so breathtaking that the narrative seems almost beside the point. The first sight of this exotic paradise may rival the seminal scene in The Wizard of Oz, when the Technicolor munchkin world first comes into focus. It's a jaw-dropping introduction to the tropical world of blue-skinned, golden-eyed aliens. Their lush jungle home is vibrantly hued, with flora and fauna, fabulous winged creatures, flying spirits that look like wispy sea anemones and floating mountains.

Cameron seamlessly melds live action, computer-generated animation and 3-D technology. The motion-capture technique that dazzled in Lord of the Rings reaches a new level of proficiency, enabling more nuance in facial expressions. But why diminish all this with clunky dialogue?

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a former Marine, now in a wheelchair, recruited to Pandora. Humans are there at the behest of a powerful corporation mining a mineral that could solve the energy crisis on ravaged Earth.

Pandoran air is toxic to Earthlings. So scientists create a program in which human "drivers" are connected to avatars, bodies created in the lab that look like the natives of Pandora, called Na'vi, and can survive in the environment. Human DNA is mixed with Pandoran DNA, and these hybrid beings are sent on reconnaissance.