This Weekend: A Whopping Seven Wide Releases!

Flash of Genius [watch the trailer]
Possibly one of the most depressing films with a happy ending ever, director Marc Abraham tells the true life story of Robert Kearns (Greg Kinnear), an inventor in Detroit whose Mona Lisa was the intermittent windshield wiper, which the Ford Motor Company (represented by Mitch Pileggi) proceeded to steal from him and claim for their own, ending his aspirations to manufacture it himself. Yet Kearns feels so egregiously wronged by this development that he decides to take an impossibly dedicated stand against this kind of intellectual fraud, and his determination to see justice win out in the end devastates his family and much of the rest of his life, to the point where this pursuit of the truth is the only thing he has left to sustain him.
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Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist [watch the trailer]
Juno’s Michael Cera is Nick, a sensitive musician who can’t get over a devastating breakup with Tris (Alexis Dziena). Charlie Bartlett’s Kat Dennings is Norah, who is relatively straight-laced and often forced to tend to her drunken friend Caroline (Ari Graynor). When Norah meets Nick, she asks him to be her boyfriend for five minutes to spite the girl who teases her for being alone, who just happens to be Tris. The ensuing night of hijinks, shenanigans and attractions becomes part romance and part fiasco.
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How to Lose Friends and Alienate People [watch the trailer]
Robert B. Weide, veteran director from Curb Your Enthusiasm, is making his feature film debut with How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, a comedy adapted from Toby Young’s novel which, of course, is a play on How to Win Friends and Influence People, the self-help book by Dale Carnegie. Simon Pegg stars as Sidney Young, an ambitious writer who gets his big chance when Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges) offers him a job as a contributing editor to the fashion magazine Sharps. Yet his subsequent attempts to smooth his way into all the hip social circles prove to be ridiculously inept. Current crazily It-Girl Megan Fox plays Sophia Maes, the shallow young starlet who Young lusts after, Kirsten Dunst is Alison Olsen, a colleague who believes Young to be an insufferable idiot, and Gillian Anderson plays a manipulative publicist. Comedy ensues.
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Blindness [watch the trailer]
Blindness is a terrifying affliction for one to have, but it would be made exponentially more frightening if no one else could see, either. This is what makes the latest film from Fernando Meirelles of The Constant Gardener fame, such a compelling concept. The fact that the characters have no names, but are rather billed as “Doctor” (Mark Ruffalo), “Doctor’s Wife” (Julianne Moore), “Minister of Health” (Sandra Oh) “Bartender” (Gael Garcia Bernal) and “Old Man With The Black Eye Patch” (Danny Glover), just adds to the disquieting tone that the trailers strike as they show us a world where the afflicted are quarantined and left to die, causing a general chaos among them as they slowly realize the depths of their situation. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” - Desiderius Erasmus
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Appaloosa [watch the trailer]
Ed Harris hasn’t directed anything since his debut with Pollock back in 2000, which got him nominated for Best Actor (and won Best Supporting Actress for Marcia Gay Harden). So when Harris is in the director’s chair, people stand up and take notice. It may be surprising that he’d move from abstract art to a gritty western, but we’ve all seen Unforgiven - we know what the genre is capable of delivering in the right hands, and it’s hard to believe that Harris’ hands could be wrong. In Appaloosa, he plays Virgil Cole, who blows into town with his partner Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) to find that the place is run by a bastard rancher by the name of Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons), who has just left the town marshal and his deputy for dead. This conveniently leave a pair of openings for Cole and Hitch to step into. Being the wily gunmen they are, Appaloosa soon hosts a battle of wits and wills between the cavalier twosome and the ruthless rabble-rouser. Trouble is that they know that feelings get you killed, but Cole finds himself getting closer to Allie (Renee Zellweger) anyway. When Bragg starts playing on their emotions, things start to get heavy.
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Beverly Hills Chihuahua [watch the trailer]
A movie firmly for the kids and people who like to look at dogs. Chloe (Drew Barrymore) is a spoiled purse-dog owned by Jamie Lee Curtis, and when she leaves her precious pooch in the hands of her niece Rachel (Piper Perabo), she winds up getting lost in Mexico, befriending a grizzled ex-police dog named Delgado (Andy Garcia) and finding her true bark, while her dedicated suitor Papi (George Lopez) strives against all odds to rescue her.
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An American Carol [watch the trailer]
David Zucker has made an unabashedly right-wing film about a Michael Moore-parody getting visited by three Ghosts of Americans Past who show him how awesome America actually is, including George Washington (Jon Voight), Patton (Kelsey Grammer) and JFK (Chriss Anglin).