No one in The Last Song ever utters the word Tybee. Not even once. Oh, someone does mention that the story is unfolding in Georgia, and a little sign about 90 minutes in reads "Tybee Island Baptist Church."

Judy Maltz, a journalism professor at Penn State University, had an amazing story to tell. Maltz, who produced and co-directed the film No. 4 Street of Our Lady, was descended from a family of Polish Jews who had survived the Holocaust thanks to the efforts of a woman who almost single-handedly saved the lives of 15 people by hiding them in her small home for two years, risking her life by feeding and caring for them all during the Nazi occupation of their small town.

Unless there’s a last–minute gold rush of five-star movies between now and the end of the year, the 2009 Oscars belong to director/producer Lee Daniels and his film Precious – Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire.

Winner of the Outstanding Narrative Award at the Los Angeles Film Festival, and the Audience Award at the Woodstock Film Festival, writer/director Suzi Yoonessi’s Dear Lemon Lima is a warm, tender drama about a young girl’s coming of age in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Since his breakout role on HBO’s Six Feet Under, Ben Foster has appeared in one high–profile feature film after another. He played the mutant Angel in X–Men: The Last Stand, drug–addled teen Jake Mazursky in the crime drama Alpha Dog, and psychotic cowboy Charlie Prince in the western remake 3:10 to Yuma.

THAT EVENING SUN *** Like the Jeff Bridges vehicle Crazy Heart, That Evening Sun is one of those films that generates nearly all of its goodwill from a smashing central performance by a long-established veteran. Here, it's Hal Holbrook who shows up to demonstrate to Hollywood's young pups how it's done. Holbrook plays Abner Meecham, an elderly Tennessee farmer who's been dumped into a nursing home by his well-meaning but insensitive son (Walt Goggins). ...

THE LAST EXORCISM *** The prospect of journeying to Hell and back seemed less daunting than sitting through another horror yarn made in the faux-documentary style of The Blair Witch Project, but The Last Exorcism proves to be a pleasant surprise -- even more so since Hostel gorehound Eli Roth is listed as one of the film's producers. Unlike Roth's hard-R outings as a director, The Last Exorcism is rated PG-13, but don't let that ...

THE SWITCH * A vile scenario doesn't necessarily have to translate into a vile movie, providing there's some objective or empathy on the part of the filmmakers. Gaspar Noe's 2002 French release Irreversible, for example, centers around arguably the most brutal rape sequence ever committed to celluloid, but several factors, specifically Noe's decision to tell the story in reverse (thus delineating the heartbreaking -- and commonplace -- circumstances that could have prevented the tragedy), provide ...

EAT PRAY LOVE ***1/2 Just for the record, not all porn flicks are of the X-rated variety. More palatable for mass consumption are the films that qualify as "food porn," works that show off delectable dishes in all their mouthwatering glory (e.g. Babette's Feast, Julie & Julia). Then there's the "travel porn" branch, efforts that offer postcard perfection and entice moviegoers to blow their savings on airfare and overseas accommodations (Out of Africa, Under the ...

THE OTHER GUYS **1/2 It makes perfect sense for a film like, say, An Inconvenient Truth or Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room to end with some sort of plea to our sense of activism or with a mountain of hard data about the evils of unchecked capitalism. But what to make of The Other Guys, featuring closing credits that are packed with statistics concerning government bailouts and the glaring discrepancy between the average ...

THE BACK-UP PLAN * Jennifer Lopez's first screen outing in four years isn't a motion picture so much as it's a new form of Chinese water torture: Seemingly innocuous at first, it continues to pelt the viewer with one abysmal scene after another until insanity seems like the only logical result. Lopez stars as Zoe, a single woman who, tired of waiting for Mr. Right while her biological clock continues to tick away, elects to ...

The 82nd Annual Academy Awards will be held this Sunday, March 7, meaning we only have a few more days to mull over the possible outcome.

The Road Zombies seem to be de rigueur in today’s strain of post–apocalyptic motion pictures, yet this adaptation of the novel by Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men) offers nothing quite so fanciful. The undead shambling through this bleak movie’s ravished landscapes are, technically speaking, still human, though many have taken to eating human flesh, and all seem to be moving forward as though propelled by a natural instinct to survive at all ...

9 **1/2 Not to be confused with Rob Marshall's upcoming musical Nine (or, for that matter, with the summer hit District 9), this single-digit offering is actually director Shane Acker's expansion of his own Oscar-nominated short film from 2005. That animated work ran approximately 12 minutes; this new version clocks in at 80 minutes, shorter than most theatrical releases but still thin enough to outstay its welcome by at least a quarter-hour. Set in ...

Fast & Furious The best part of Fast & Furious is its tagline - "New Model. Original Parts." - which means that the studio wonk who created it deserves the big bucks more than anybody who actually appears in the film. It's a catchy line because it advertises the fact that all four stars of 2001's The Fast and the Furious - Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster - ...

Granted, Chewbacca is a memorable movie character, but would Star Wars have become such a huge smash had the bellowing Wookiee been the protagonist rather than Luke Skywalker? And who doesn't love the character of Peter Clemenza in The Godfather ("Leave the gun; take the cannoli"), but would we have rather spent the majority of the picture's running time following him instead of the Corleones?

There's a very real sense of satisfaction in the documentary Winnebago Man, when filmmaker Ben Steinbauer finally tracks down his quarry: A man named Jack Rebney, whose profane rants and temper tantrums between takes on a 1988 industrial video shoot had become the stuff of Internet legend.

When Jack Rebney had his meltdown, during the filming of an in-house video for Winnebago Industries, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, Johnny Carson was still hosting the Tonight Show, and Ben Steinbauer was in grade school.

It’s an old story around here: High–profile, high–quality movie gets released.

With its brutal, modern, mechanized tactics, World War I devastated Europe. Everything, suddenly, was different. As people began tentative, reactionary steps towards a new kind of normalcy, so too did European artists begin thinking of things in alternative ways.