James Mcavoy

Green Zone . 1/2 (Universal Pictures, '10) $29.98. 115 mins. A U.S. Army officer questions his country's mission when his hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq reveals covert intelligence. With Matt Damon, Jason Isaacs, Brendan Gleeson, Khalid Abdalla. R (violence and profanity) The Last Station . 1/2 (Sony Pictures Classics, '09) $27.96. 112 mins. The declining health of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who denounces material wealth, leads to a battle between his wife and a chief follower over his fortune.

If The History Boys were mashed up in a John Hughes retrospective, and the music were wall-to-wall '80s Brit rock (the Cure, Tears for Fears, Buzzcocks), and the dashing young costar of The Last King of Scotland - James McAvoy - were onboard, well, there you have Starter for 10. Taking its title from an oft-used phrase on a U.K. game show called University Challenge, this coming-of-age lark centers on Brian Jackson (McAvoy), a working-class kid from a working-class town who grew up watching the aforementioned brainiac quiz program.

An Irish buddy picture about two blokes with severe disabilities, Rory O'Shea Was Here could be called - if one were the cold-hearted, cynical type - Their Left Feet. Brenda Fricker, the mum in My Left Foot, is even on board, in the role of the stern supervisor of Carrigmore, an institution for the disabled. But for all its formulaic uplift and button-pushing emotional moments, the filmmakers behind Rory O'Shea have clearly thrown their hearts into the project. You'd have to be as cold and cruel as the lout in the pub where Rory (James McAvoy)

Set in a color-saturated, quasi-present-day London - but a London where most everyone (even the Brits) speaks like Yanks - Penelope stars Christina Ricci in the title role. Her Penelope is a wealthy girl from the venerable Wilhern clan, but she was born with a terrible curse: a pig's snout where her nose should be. And it won't go away until someone tumbles for her with all his heart and soul. Penelope grew up in cloistered luxury, sheltered from the outside world. Her parents (Richard E. Grant and Catherine O'Hara)

As hyperactive action pics go, Wanted goes at zooming speed, whooshing this way and that, tracking bullet trajectories with you-are-there POV shots, defying space, time and gravity as a tattooed Angelina Jolie and her mean-faced minions wreak havoc from the Chicago El to the railways of Eastern Europe. Train travel, in fact, is a big part of the movie, although Jolie and James McAvoy - Wanted's office-drone-turned-hero - prefer to ride the trains from on top. The view's better up there, even if you have to duck for tunnels.

It would be the last night of Briony Tallis' childhood, that sultry summer evening in 1935 when the imaginative 13-year-old bolted from her family's baronial estate to hunt for her runaway twin cousins. As the precocious novelist inhaled the animal smells of grazing cattle and rutting humans, she fancied she saw something not just naughty but criminal. Point of view is everything, is it not? Like L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between , Atonement is a genteel horror story contemplating how an innocent, Briony (played by the startlingly fine Saoirse Ronan)

There's a growing inventory of movies about mousy guys who get major mojo makeovers when they discover hidden gifts. Titles include "Jumper," about a guy who can teleport around the globe, and "21," about a math whiz who realizes his MIT brain can beat the house in Vegas. To date, most of these movies have displayed the complexity of a beer commercial, and followed a kind of anti-Spider-Man theme - with great power comes money, cars, girls. They seem to be aimed (surprise)

I'm sure somebody in Hollywood is buying stock in James McAvoy, the Scottish actor who's quietly proving he can do just about anything. Here in the States, we seem to be getting his movies in some kind of random order - he was memorably bitter as a rebellious paraplegic in "Rory O'Shea Was Here" a few years ago, and last year was the in-over-his-head physician to Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland," holding his own against Forest Whitaker's Oscar-winning...

There Will Be Blood is the title of one of the year's most-anticipated, Oscar-buzzing pictures, but it could also describe what's in store for moviegoers all through this holiday season. Bullets and bombs on the battlefield of Dunkirk (Atonement), crazed carnage in postapocalyptic New York (I Am Legend), bloodshed and barber-ous behavior in olde London (Sweeney Todd). Even The Golden Compass, with its pretty 12-year-old heroine, promises swordplay, gunplay, and ferocious, armored polar bears.

When Robert Redford first heard of The Conspirator , a project being pitched by a new indie distributor intent on making films steeped in American history, he thought, ho hum, another script about Abraham Lincoln , the Civil War, the assassination. "My feeling was, well, Lincoln - that's territory well-traveled by book and film and documentary, so why go there?" recalls the actor and filmmaker whose latest work opened Friday. "But then when I read it, I realized this is fascinating, this is a story that nobody knows - tied to an event that everybody knows.

Green Zone . 1/2 (Universal Pictures, '10) $29.98. 115 mins. A U.S. Army officer questions his country's mission when his hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq reveals covert intelligence. With Matt Damon, Jason Isaacs, Brendan Gleeson, Khalid Abdalla. R (violence and profanity) The Last Station . 1/2 (Sony Pictures Classics, '09) $27.96. 112 mins. The declining health of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who denounces material wealth, leads to a battle between his wife and a chief follower over his fortune.

As hyperactive action pics go, Wanted goes at zooming speed, whooshing this way and that, tracking bullet trajectories with you-are-there POV shots, defying space, time and gravity as a tattooed Angelina Jolie and her mean-faced minions wreak havoc from the Chicago El to the railways of Eastern Europe. Train travel, in fact, is a big part of the movie, although Jolie and James McAvoy - Wanted's office-drone-turned-hero - prefer to ride the trains from on top. The view's better up there, even if you have to duck for tunnels.

There's a growing inventory of movies about mousy guys who get major mojo makeovers when they discover hidden gifts. Titles include "Jumper," about a guy who can teleport around the globe, and "21," about a math whiz who realizes his MIT brain can beat the house in Vegas. To date, most of these movies have displayed the complexity of a beer commercial, and followed a kind of anti-Spider-Man theme - with great power comes money, cars, girls. They seem to be aimed (surprise)

Set in a color-saturated, quasi-present-day London - but a London where most everyone (even the Brits) speaks like Yanks - Penelope stars Christina Ricci in the title role. Her Penelope is a wealthy girl from the venerable Wilhern clan, but she was born with a terrible curse: a pig's snout where her nose should be. And it won't go away until someone tumbles for her with all his heart and soul. Penelope grew up in cloistered luxury, sheltered from the outside world. Her parents (Richard E. Grant and Catherine O'Hara)

It would be the last night of Briony Tallis' childhood, that sultry summer evening in 1935 when the imaginative 13-year-old bolted from her family's baronial estate to hunt for her runaway twin cousins. As the precocious novelist inhaled the animal smells of grazing cattle and rutting humans, she fancied she saw something not just naughty but criminal. Point of view is everything, is it not? Like L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between , Atonement is a genteel horror story contemplating how an innocent, Briony (played by the startlingly fine Saoirse Ronan)

There Will Be Blood is the title of one of the year's most-anticipated, Oscar-buzzing pictures, but it could also describe what's in store for moviegoers all through this holiday season. Bullets and bombs on the battlefield of Dunkirk (Atonement), crazed carnage in postapocalyptic New York (I Am Legend), bloodshed and barber-ous behavior in olde London (Sweeney Todd). Even The Golden Compass, with its pretty 12-year-old heroine, promises swordplay, gunplay, and ferocious, armored polar bears.

If The History Boys were mashed up in a John Hughes retrospective, and the music were wall-to-wall '80s Brit rock (the Cure, Tears for Fears, Buzzcocks), and the dashing young costar of The Last King of Scotland - James McAvoy - were onboard, well, there you have Starter for 10. Taking its title from an oft-used phrase on a U.K. game show called University Challenge, this coming-of-age lark centers on Brian Jackson (McAvoy), a working-class kid from a working-class town who grew up watching the aforementioned brainiac quiz program.

I'm sure somebody in Hollywood is buying stock in James McAvoy, the Scottish actor who's quietly proving he can do just about anything. Here in the States, we seem to be getting his movies in some kind of random order - he was memorably bitter as a rebellious paraplegic in "Rory O'Shea Was Here" a few years ago, and last year was the in-over-his-head physician to Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland," holding his own against Forest Whitaker's Oscar-winning...