Ewan McGregor

CHICAGO – With all the creatively bankrupt, audience-repelling dreck clogging up theaters these days, it’s easy to see why a comedian would sign up for a challenging art house satire rather than pick up a fat, unearned pay check. Robin Williams delivered his best work in years in Bobcat Goldthwait’s “World’s Greatest Dad,” and now Jim Carrey adds to his streak of woefully underrated performances in Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s “I Love You Phillip Morris.”

Rating: 3.0/5.0

CHICAGO – John Requa and Glenn Ficarra’s “I Love You Phillip Morris” debuted at the Sundance Film Festival nearly two years ago and was released internationally so long ago that it’s out on DVD in most markets around the world. After financial difficulties plagued the first company intent on stateside distribution, the movie sat on a shelf and most of us assumed it would be making its U.S. debut on a round shiny disc.

CHICAGO – Baz Luhrmann has made two great films and one masterpiece in “Strictly Ballroom,” “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet,” and “Moulin Rouge!” and the latter two are finally available on Blu-ray, the format for which they were made. In the only way we should expect from a perfectionist like Luhrmann, both films have been lovingly remastered in HD and accompanied by excellent special features. They’re a pair of great HD releases.

CHICAGO – Roman Polanski’s name has drawn a lot of media attention in 2010 due to his continued international legal problems but the controversy regarding his real life has overshadowed the fact that he recently made one of the best films of his career, the tragically underrated and straight-up brilliant “The Ghost Writer,” a must-see now that it’s on Blu-ray and DVD.

CHICAGO – What a disappointment. You’d think with a cast this great and a premise this outlandish that this film simply couldn’t lose. And yet, the best things about “The Men Who Stare at Goats” are its title, its poster and its trailer that gives away nearly all of the biggest laughs. The actual film is a charmless slog that doesn’t take itself nearly as seriously as it should.

CHICAGO – It seems downright sad that “Amelia,” a movie that was so widely predicted to be a part of the 2009 awards season, would be released on Blu-ray and DVD on the same day as the Oscar announcements. On paper, “Amelia” seemed like Oscar bait through and through with important subject matter headlined by one of the few women to have more than one Oscar. On Blu-ray, it’s easy to see why this cinematic plane crashed and burned.

CHICAGO – Give Ron Howard an intimate character study like “Frost/Nixon,” and he’ll knock it out of the park. Give him a sprawling plot-driven thriller like…well, let’s face it: anything written by Dan Brown, and he’ll be consumed by the enormity of his subject. Yet while Howard’s “The Da Vinci Code,” failed on a human level, it did succeed in highlighting the tantalizing questions raised by Brown’s text, particularly the implications of historical distortion throughout the centuries. When the characters were allowed to simply analyze the story’s inherent mysteries, the film took flight.

Rating: 1.5/5.0

CHICAGO – Ron Howard’s “Angels & Demons,” the sequel to “The Da Vinci Code,” is an absolute mess, a film that tries hard to break free from the dull tone of its predecessor but ends up even more ridiculous, frustrating and generally worthless.

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Tom Hanks stars in Columbia Pictures suspense thriller Angels and Demons.

CHICAGO – This 17-image slideshow contains the official press images from Sony’s “Angels & Demons,” starring Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer, Stellan Skarsgard, Pierfrancesco Favino, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, and Armin Mueller-Stahl. The film, written by David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman based on the novel by Dan Brown and directed by Ron Howard, opens on May 15th, 2009.

CHICAGO – Despite its timid title, “Deception” has all the right ingredients for a decent tale of mystery: a strong premise, sound acting and the famous femme fatale. It even starts with a promising conviction: How does a background player in life deal with initiation into a secret society?