Meet the Spartans
(20th Century Fox)
The latest spoof-comedy, Meet the Spartans, apparently contains a Rambo joke, that references the film opening against it on the same weekend. That's impressive — here's looking forward to future spoof comedies that reference movies that haven't even opened yet! Carmen Electra and Sean Maguire costar, and the movie's "targets," for those who are really interested, include 300, Transformers, television's American Idol, and Paris Hilton. This film comes to us from "two of the six writers of Scary Movie," so anyone who is in the mood for cutting-edge humor from the most refined wits of our age should drop everything and rush out to the theater this minute....

Untraceable
(Sony Screen Gems)
Oscar nominee Diane Lane is Jennifer Marsh, an FBI agent on the trail of an elusive cyber-criminal in this Internet-age thriller. Colin Hanks (King Kong) is her young partner and, of course, a potential suspect — see Ebert's law of the economy of characters. Together, they're up against a killer who kidnaps his victims and puts them in elaborate Saw-like mousetraps that will only spring when the killer's website, KillWithMe.com, gets a certain number of hits. The more he kills, the more press he generates, the more eyeballs on his site — quite a predicament for our heroes.

How She Move
(Paramount Vantage)
With How She Move, Canada offers its contribution to the urban-teen dance genre, which must not be hurting considering we're only three weeks away from the arrival of Step Up 2 at the box office. Newcomer Rutina Wesley stars as Raya, the pride of her Jamaican immigrant family and a student at an exclusive prep school whose aspirations suffer a setback when family tragedy forces her to return to the low-income neighborhood she happily left behind. A local step-dance competition offers money and street-cred, the two things Raya needs most. Will she enter? Will she win? Is it not obvious?

The Air I Breathe
(THINKFilm)
Happiness, Pleasure, Sorrow, Love — these aren't states of being, they're characters in this allegorically flavored crime drama from first-time director Jieho Lee. Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Sorrow and along with other well-known thesps such as Forest Whitaker, Kevin Bacon, and Brendan Fraser, she navigates her way through a puzzle-box story in which each main character and his or her particular vignette is meant to be representative of one of the four pillars of an old Chinese proverb. If that's not loopy enough, Julie Delpy also has a role as a dying snake-bite victim.

Shoot Down
(Rogues Harbor Studios, Jan. 25)
This documentary examines a controversial 1996 incident in which Cuban MiGs shot down two U.S. civilian aircraft in the business of rescuing raft refugees in transit from Cuba to the U.S. Brothers to the Rescue, the humanitarian/political-activist organization to which the planes (and their deceased pilots) belonged, is examined by director Cristina Khuly, along with the response evoked by the crisis on both sides of the Florida Straits. This film marks Khuly's directing debut after a career that has touched on several art forms, including sculpting and graphic design.