Why is this man smiling?

I ain't afraid of no ghosts. Except in the Paranormal Activity movies.

The Oscar nominations are announced tomorrow, but in the meantime, you can register your own opinion on the best and worst of the past year in film via The Movie Without Pity Awards.

When you're dealing with a filmmaker who has had as lengthy and deliberately varied a career as Steven Soderbergh, singling out one movie to label his absolute best can be a tricky proposition. But a strong case could be made for The Limey, the 1999 thriller he made with screenwriter Lem Dobbs and star Terrence Stamp. Aside from being a terrific film, The Limey is perhaps -- out of all the entries in his filmography -- the most representative of Soderbergh's formal and narrative interests, from the way it fractures its narrative to its dry sense of humor to the morally compromised anti-hero at its center. Made right after the director's big studio breakthrough, Out of Sight, The Limey may be a less jazzy film, but it's far richer in terms of its story. One gives you a great ride, the other lingers in your memory.

Legend has it that for early test screenings of the first Star Wars movie, George Lucas substituted footage of World War II aerial dogfights in place of the not-yet-completed sequences pitting the Rebel Alliance's X-Wings against the Empire's fleet of TIE fighters. Now, three decades later, Lucas has made a full-fledged World War II movie about the Tuskegee Airmen, the celebrated squadron of African-American fighter pilots who defied the prejudice of the times and flew a number of crucial missions in the European theater of the war.

The next crop of MWoP Awards polls have just opened and are awaiting your opinions. Was there a worse comedy this year than Bucky Larson: Born To Be a Star? A better one than Bridesmaids? And what about the year's lamest villain -- had to be that gaseous space cloud floating through Green Lantern, right?

George Clooney for president? Hey, he's got the foreign policy experience.

In the new action picture Contraband, Mark Wahlberg plays Chris Farraday, a retired smuggler who's forced back into the life when his brother-in-law commits a colossal screw-up by dumping a drug shipment that belongs to small-time hood Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi) with a highly combustible temper and an itchy trigger finger. In order to secure the funds he needs to cover his relative's debt, Chris makes one last run to Panama, where a shipment of counterfeit money is awaiting him to transport back stateside. Meanwhile, back in his New Orleans home, his wife Kate (Kate Beckinsale) and their two sons are being menaced by Tim, so Chris calls upon his old friend and partner Sebastian (Ben Foster) to keep an eye on them. But it turns out that Sebastian has a few secrets... ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

I have a confession to make: I've never been a big fan of Beauty and the Beast. Even when I first saw it back in 1991 -- when it has being proclaimed hither and yon as one of the Walt Disney company's greatest achievements and made history by becoming the first animated feature to score a Best Picture nod -- I found myself wondering what the big deal was. And it didn't have anything to do with that conventional bit of Hollywood "wisdom" that boys don't want to watch movies about girls. Three years earlier, I had seen and loved The Little Mermaid and I thought Belle, the headstrong beauty of Beauty, was just peachy keen. I also liked Robby Benson's thundering vocals as the Beast and found the music (penned by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, who died seven months before the film's release) quite good, though none of the individual tunes captured my imagination half as much as Mermaid's triple threat of "Part of Your World," "Under the Sea" and "Kiss the Girl." But aside from those elements, Beauty struck me as pretty blah -- a serviceable version of a classic fairy tale minus that crucial touch of magic.

Over the course of his career, Liam Neeson has proven his mettle against an international prostitution ring, Sith lords, a haunted house and Batman. Now in the new Joe Carnahan-directed survival tale, The Grey, the Irish actor takes on one of his fiercest opponents: a pack of wild wolves.