Had Jeremy Renner not suddenly become Hollywood's go-to utility franchise player in the past few years, it's easy to imagine Aaron Eckhart taking over the Bourne series once Matt Damon decided to move on to greener pastures. Where Renner is an innately more volatile screen presence, Eckhart has the same contrast between his placid, matinee idol exterior and inner action hero that made Damon's Jason Bourne so relatable. Eckhart must have realized the missed opportunity, given that his new thriller Erased is essentially Bourne-lite, sending the star's ex-CIA alter ego on a cross-country race through Europe as his Agency past nips at his heels.

Having recognized that mainstream Hollywood holds few options for her beyond roles as mothers and/or cougars, Julianne Moore has established primary residence within the independent film world in recent years, where the range of characters is supposedly broader. For example, Moore's latest indie features The English Teacher and What Maisie Knew -- both of which have already opened in limited release in select markets and expand wider today -- cast her as... um, a cougar and a mother respectively. So much for range, I guess.

I'll give Eli Roth this; having found a successful gimmick, he's not about to surrender it anytime soon. That particular gimmick can best be described as "Assholes abroad" -- an idea he tried out in the first Hostel and returns to again in Aftershock, the new horror film/disaster movie he co-wrote, produced and stars in, but didn't direct. Be grateful for small favors, I guess.

We're only halfway through 2013, but it's unlikely that we'll see an odder cast than the one at the center of Brian Herzlinger's low-budget musical comedy How Sweet It Is. In fact, the movie is almost worth seeing solely so that, years from now, if you ever get asked the trivia question "What movie musical starred Joe Piscopo, Erika Christensen, Paul Sorvino and Eddie Griffin?" you'll be able to provide the answer, plus a plot synopsis and maybe a few bars of the title number, with complete authority.

Are you fed up with sparkly, sex-adverse vampires? So is Xan Cassavetes apparently, because her enjoyably sleazy new vampire drama Kiss of the Damned embraces the inherent carnality of these monsters (albeit in a primarily heternomative way) with an enthusiasm that thankfully has more in common with Interview with the Vampire than Twilight.

As media reporters rarely miss an opportunity to remind us, China is rapidly becoming the world's biggest market for entertainment. Amidst the Hollywood studios in particular, getting a movie onto the nation's carefully regulated screens represents the new box office Holy Grail. To try and grease the wheels in their favor, more and more big companies are striking co-production deals with Chinese media conglomerates as a way around the lengthy, laborious approval process. The documentary Unmade in China depicts another potential way for American filmmakers to tap into this market. Unable to find domestic funding for his thriller based on the infamous "lonelygirl 15" Internet scam, indie director Gil Kofman winds up finding an interested backer in China and agrees to direct a Chinese-language version of the film on location in Xiamen, despite having never visited the country before or speaking a single word of Mandarin or any other of the country's numerous dialects.

Serious question: When was the last time John Cusack smiled in a movie? Hot Tub Time Machine? High Fidelity? Grosse Point Blank? Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the answer was as far back as One Crazy Summer. It's surprising -- not to mention more than a little sad -- how one of the most charismatic actors from my generation's formative moviegoing years has grown up to become a middle-aged grump who sleepwalks through lackluster thrillers with generic titles like The Raven, The Factory and, now, The Numbers Station. Cusack's glum visage immediately lays a wet blanket over Danish director Kasper Barfoed's English-language debut, scripted by former video game producer, F. Scott Frazier, and keeps it firmly in place until the final fade-out.

Ten years ago, French filmmaker François Ozon scored an art-house hit with Swimming Pool, a supremely entertaining thriller and still one of the best movies about novelists and authorship in recent memory. After a decade of highs (Ricky) and lows (5x2), Ozon makes a successful return to similar territory with In the House, which again uses the act of writing as the launching pad for a thoughtful, deftly plotted mystery.

The Sopranos may be long over, but James Gandolfini just can't seem to get the heck out of New Jersey. Last year, he played the out-of-touch father of a wannabe Jersey rocker in David Chase's criminally underseen Not Fade Away, which arrives on DVD later this month, meaning you have no excuse for skipping it a second time. Now he's back in a Garden State state of mind in Down the Shore, an indie drama originally filmed in 2011 right on the Jersey shore made notorious by the eponymous MTV reality show -- an area that's now struggling to recover from the devastation wrecked by Hurricane Sandy.

If last year's effects-laden blockbuster Snow White and the Huntsman (or, for that matter, ABC's ongoing Once Upon a Time) isn't your ideal re-telling of the classic fairy tale about a beautiful princess, an evil queen and a poisoned apple, you might fall under the spell of Blancanieves, a black-and-white silent version of the oft-told legend, written and directed by Spanish filmmaker Pablo Berger. Transported from medieval times to Seville circa 1920, the film also recasts Snow White's royal characters as bullfighting royalty, an alteration that, in execution, isn't as strange as it might initially sound.