Do you believe in ghosts? It doesn’t matter. The best films on the subject will have you incontrovertibly convinced until the theater lights come on. There have been good and bad films claiming to be “horror,” on slashers, poltergeists, cannibals, plagues, zombies, vampires and even vaginal teeth. None quite spook the soul like an old-fashioned ghost yarn. Ghosts are often felt and not seen, the icy spot in the empty room or the creak of tree branches overhead in a dark wood. Ghosts are: the door that shuts on its own, the piano that plays in the dark, the distant train miles from any tracks. I don’t know about you, but I’ll take a hockey-mask wearing killer.

Everything I love turns to shit. It’s like the world loves playing these sick little filmic jokes on me. “Oh, Graham, you liked this? You thought it was a good movie? Well guess what, we just got Nicolas Cage to do the remake. And he’s bringing his worried face.” Nicolas Cage is the worst. But they did it with Rambo, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and now the fat greasy suits pumping Scorsese’s brain are threatening to remake Taxi Driver.

In the newest Coen Brothers’ film, A Serious Man, the writing and directing duo draw from personal experience to create an interesting story about a middle-aged Jewish man whose life is falling apart before his eyes. The film is set in Ethan and Joel Coen’s home state, Minnesota, specifically in a suburb where religion plays a significant part in everyday life. In his first lead role, Michael Stuhlbarg is brilliant as Larry Gopnik, and is supported by a wonderful cast including Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick and the wonderfully pathetic Richard Kind.

We all grow tired of our realities — the weight of peoples’ expectations, the feeling of needing to provoke others into reciprocating our love. Amidst all of this, who wouldn’t want to, say, sail off to run through the woods in their PJs and sleep in a gigantic pile of down-covered limbs and furry backsides?

Spike Jonze (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) once again does just what he wants in his film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, one of the most beloved bedside stories of all time; he executes a minimum of editing in his fantastical vision and preserves his stylistic edge. Meanwhile, he reminds us how the playgrounds of our creativity can help us to recognize flaws in the ways we treat other people as well as remind us that, at the end of the day, we’re all only human. Whether it is between king and subject, monster and kin or mother and child, love is beautifully imperfect.

“Girl power” movies occupy a tenuous space between the comfortable niche reserved for genre and cult status films, as feminist pieces, and on the other side, self-parody, all yap and no bite. Films with the best of intentions can accidentally swing both ways. Let’s rephrase that …

It’s difficult to release a film about women and issues facing women without preaching about century-old patriarchal ills. Make the film too effeminate or girly-celebratory, and you risk losing the Y-chromosome audience. What better way to strip a woman of power than to avoid taking her seriously?

In the latest Captain Planet effort, Earth Days is more like watching a screen saver on your computer of historical errors then a political statement. It’s not a bad film; it’s just lacking that “what we do next” phase. Directed by Robert Stone, the documentary serves more of a lesson then an actual movement towards environmental change.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs was pretty much everyone’s childhood dreams come true. Why have a snow day when you can have a “snowflakes made of ice cream falling and making huge mountain scoops of frozen sugary milky goodness” day? There is still a decent sized part of me who dreams of that every night. When the trailers for this movie first came out, I expected the dreamy whimsical bedtime story of the town of Chewandswallow (I wish I was clever enough to come up with something inappropriate to say here) where food falls from the sky. In the book, no one questions why — in fact, there are no real characters to do the questioning — and the weather’s always sunny-side up until the food starts to destroy the town with monstrously large hot dogs and killer pancakes.

I thought I knew the game. Slasher flicks don’t usually stray too far from the prescribed formula, relying on our pulses to fake entertainment. So I figured I’d review one for The Sun, make some dipshit jokes about boobs and blood, and be on my way. But I swear, Sorority Row is like staring in a mirror. It probed the darkest corners of my soul, had my emotions swinging from one extreme to the other, and easily made my top ten list of the worst movies ever made.

A long time ago in a galaxy that looked an awful lot like southern California, the science-fiction genre was completely redefined when George Lucas’s Star Wars hit the big screen. Since then, sci-fi films have come with a certain set of expectations: alien planets, eye-popping special effects, nerdy fan conventions where even the biggest Star Wars geek wouldn’t be caught dead … (I was 10 years old, OK? Get over it.) Basically, science-fiction has become more of an industry than a movie genre, concerned more with the marketability of action figures and video games from a summer blockbuster than with the film itself. But this is all about to change thanks to the arrival of Moon, the first feature film by Duncan Jones (David Bowie’s son).

Love happens. Love happened. Love is happening all around us. In fact, the only place love isn’t really happening is in this movie. Aside from an awfully deceptive title, though, there really isn’t anything awful about it. Take off the romantic-drama hat and take out the tissues — this one’s a Saturday night sob-fest. Centered on a theme of pain, in contrast to the expected sickeningly-adorable love story, Love Happens is a movie about acceptance, grief and letting go. Writers Brandon Camp and Mike Thompson were intrigued by the grieving process and created a story line demonstrating the way people react in the aftermath of loss.