It's not really fair to compare Monsters to Cloverfield. True, both follow young people as they travel through a war zone to reunite with loved ones, while a battle is being fought between the military and a giant monster who remains largely unseen until halfway through the movie. But that's where the comparisons end. While Cloverfield is captured on shaky, hand-held cameras in one of the biggest cities in the world, Monsters is a mostly uneventful trip through the jungles of Mexico, and the main character, a photographer, is more interested in the quiet moments than in seeing any action. While not without its action scenes, the movie is actually mostly quiet moments, and the depiction of a country ravaged by these creatures is more important than the creatures themselves.

The premise for Welcome to the Rileys has been described by some critics as the thinking moviegoer's The Blind Side, and I suppose that's fair. After losing their daughter in a car accident, a married couple (played magnificently by James Gandolfini and Melissa Leo) have grown apart, and have managed to avoid facing and dealing with their crushing grief. Like, completely. They don't speak to each other, he's cheating with a Waffle House waitress, and she's deathly afraid to leave the house, among other issues. But when Gandolfini comes across a teen hooker (played by Kristen Stewart) with more sores than positive role models in her life while on a business trip to New Orleans, he decides she represents a second chance at saving his daughter, gets Melissa Leo on board, and after a bumpy road, emotional healing is had by all.

With Tron Legacy poised to eviscerate our eyeballs, it's never seemed like a better time for studios to raid their back catalogs and turn their most iconic movies into franchises. Sure, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps didn't exactly set the box office on fire, but, to be fair, it was a movie about banking. And why make a movie about a street when you can make one about a highway... to the danger zone? That's right, Paramount is supposedly looking to make a sequel to Top Gun, and they may even get original director Tony Scott to direct. Sure, the sequel could end up focusing on computer techs who pilot drone planes by remote-control (which should make for an interesting beach volleyball scene), but Tom Cruise would still be front and center, ready to sing a little karaoke. With that news, we'd like to see Cruise revisit most of his iconic '80s and '90s roles -- here are some sequels that we want to see.

God, I feel old.

A lot has been said about online entertainment news reporting, and how it's basically rumors propagated by blogger after blogger after blogger until somebody in the know actually comes in and refutes it. (Except even then, bloggers will claim that person is lying.) So we aren't going to put much stock in this insider report that George Lucas will finance new Stars Wars movies with the scratch he makes from re-releasing the old ones in 3-D. However, it has gotten me thinking about whether I'd actually want to see them. The crazy action in the LucasArts video game The Force Unleashed shows that the Universe can still tell new stories and generate excitement, so maybe there is hope, after all. Here's what I'd want to see if this movie buzz is real, and not wishful thinking on some fanboy's part.

You would think that Paranormal Activity 2 would be less scary than the first one, since we've seen all of the home-movie format's tricks, and the sequel takes place in a house full of people, including a baby and a guard dog. Well, you'd be wrong, because PA2 somehow manages to be more frightening, even as it builds on the first film's minimal mythology. Yes, it repeats a few scares from the first movie, and has enough generic scares in it that could be from any horror movie, but the fact remains that they're still pants-pissingly delivered. I'm not going to say that seeing it alone in a small, nearly empty budget theater in the back of a discount store wouldn't help, but I'll assume it was just as scary for those in stadium seating.

It's always tough when you come across a movie in which there's no one to root for. Sometimes you find yourself rooting for the least insufferable of all of them, or, more often, hoping that all of the characters die in a bus accident, but usually you tend to gravitate towards the most charismatic and entertainingly cruel of the bunch. And in this particular movie, that's Stone, Edward Norton's cornrowed convict, who displays both willful ignorance and deadly cunning in his attempts to earn himself an early parole. Norton has always loved his accents, and his streets-of-Detroit delivery is funny at first, then sad, then just plain evil. The story of how he gets from here to there doesn't have a lot of twists in it, although it meanders quite a bit, but it serves to show off the new, entertaining character he's created.

Everyone has been all aflutter over the rumor that celebrated auteur Darren Aronofsky will direct the second X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie, and now it's confirmed, straight from the Logan's mouth. While Aronofsky has worked with Hugh Jackman before and is arguably the best there is at what he does (and what he does is so, so pretty), many are questioning how the dark director will handle the New Avenger. But Jackman himself is quick to point out that Wolverine is far from cuddly, and we wholeheartedly concur; if you ask us, the franchise could easily go a lot darker. In fact, if you look at Logan's comic book history along side Aronofsky's body of work, you'll see a lot of similarities!

Halloween can certainly be a dangerous time of year, whether you're a drunk teenager with obscured vision on your way to a kegger or a child wandering the streets asking strangers for candy. (Or, if you're the adult who's on the road or at home and has to deal with them.) But real Halloween will never be as dangerous as movie Halloween, so when you're looking for safety tips to get you through the holidays, just pop in a movie -- they've already thought of every worst-case scenario.

This week, killers travel through space, and theories about space get people killed.