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.

In a recent interview, writer and director Diablo Cody said that without Juno, she could have never convinced the studio to finance Jennifer’s Body: She needed that success in order to make a movie that was too ridiculous and seemed too risky for a first feature. Unfortunately, it turns out that the film was just too abysmal to merit being produced in the first place.

Ever notice how exclamation points make everything better? They add genuine excitement to a greeting, extra terror to a death threat, a guarantee of an easy “A” to the title of a Cornell class. Steven Soderbergh’s newest film, The Informant! is no exception.

There are lots of reasons to be excited about the silver screen right now in Ithaca: Cornell Cinema is firing on all cylinders; cutsie romantic comedies and more sophisticated offerings are available at Cinemapolis; dark thinkers, bloody battles and uplifting idiotics are rotating with astonishing speed through Regal Cinemas. Certain constraints however limit us from jetting off to every movie that perks our interest, and most of the time those choices can be made based on the actors — how many Brad Pitts and Johnny Depps, Julia Roberts and Natalie Portmans does it have? How many does it have to be?

People with disabilities are portrayed quite callously in the movies: Cliff Robertson’s portrayal of Charlie Gordon in Charly, Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Arnie Grape in What’s Eating Gibert Grape?, Tom Hanks’ Forrest Gump and Sean Penn’s less successful title character in I Am Sam. As Robert Downey Jr. also brashly points out in Tropic Thunder, playing a handicapped individual in a serious drama is a sure way to get an Oscar nomination. Not to say the above stated roles were in any way throwaway performances — quite the contrary. Still, it’s best to approach films with such a scenery-chewing centerpiece with caution.

Contemplating the concept of existence leaves room for many questions. What does it mean to exist? Is there a difference between living and being alive? What is happiness? We can define what it means to be alive, at least in the scientific sense: we breathe to pump oxygen to our hearts; we consume nutrients to keep our bodies functioning. But, in order to define the existential state of living, we must go beyond this corporal aspect, something that may require personal will and enlightenment. You, the Living a Swedish film playing at Cornell Cinema this weekend, is a somewhat surrealist attempt to illustrate “the living," people who are alive but who tread a fine line between dream and reality, between being alive and being something else altogether.

Ten years later, people everywhere are still quoting the sharp dialogue and witty one-liners of Mike Judge’s first feature length film, Office Space, but the only thing people in Ithaca may remember about their trip to the theater on Saturday to watch Judge’s newest flick, Extract, was how loud and excessive the two people in the middle row laughed throughout the entire film. Sure the movie had its funny moments, but none deserving more than a chuckle. Certainly not the hysterical laughter the middle row was providing them. No, Extract won’t go down in history as one of the worst movies ever, it will just become one of those “forgotten” movies that get subconsciously passed over in Blockbuster.