P.S. I Love You
(Warner Bros., Dec. 21)
Academy Award–winner Hilary Swank is Holly Kennedy: beautiful, sexy, widowed in her late 20s. Gerard Bulter (300) plays the frisky Irish stud who leaves her for the great beyond, but not before he arranges an elaborate scheme to comfort her in her grief through the delivery of a few strategically timed letters. Puppy-faced Harry Connick Jr. is the corporal being with another kind of comforting in mind, while Lisa Kudrow and Gina Gershon show up as Holly's gal pals. P.S. promises great rewards for the soppy romantics out there, but Butler and Swank's saccharine husband-and-wife portrayal will leave others with a weird "manufactured" aftertaste.
VIEW: The Trailer

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep
(Sony, Dec. 25)
Ladder 49 and My Dog Skip director Jay Russell helms this fantasy-tinged tale of a small Scottish boy who discovers an egg housing the embryo of a giant sea creature. Adapted from the novel by Dick King-Smith (who also wrote Babe), Water Horse is heart-warming family fare (the creature is cute, not Cthulhu) with a nod and a wink towards "real" life — you see, when the creature becomes too large to keep in a bathtub, the boy is forced to set it free inside a particularly well-known Scottish Loch…
VIEW: The Trailer

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem
(Fox, Dec. 25)
Round two in the series that has given fan-fic writers hope that one day their crossover fantasies will come true, AVP-R picks up where the last one ended… with Aliens. Fighting Predators. This time, a ship carrying Aliens and Predators crashes in a small Colorado town, and the innocent humans get caught in the crossfire of an intergalactic version of the Hatfields and the McCoys. If the Hatfields were into dreadlocks and the McCoys had acid for blood, of course.