Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire hits theaters riding an ever-growing wave of hype and praise, including major awards at Sundance and Toronto and a cover story in The New York Times Magazine. The question remains whether audiences will embrace the film’s heavily-lauded performances and story of against-all-odds uplift, or be turned off by such plot buzzwords as “multiple incestuous pregnancies” and “harrowing parental abuse.”

A Christmas Carol continues Robert Zemeckis’ foray into motion-capture animation with a re-telling of the classic holiday fable. Jim Carrey voices both Ebenezer Scrooge and the trio of spirits that haunt the old miser one fateful Christmas Eve.

The Box revolves about a couple who receives the eponymous object and must make a choice: if they push the large red button on top, a random person will die and they will receive one million dollars. But those expecting a standard-issue Cameron Diaz thriller be warned: this is the third feature from weirdo auteur Richard Kelly—the mastermind behind Donnie Darko and Southland Tales—so expect some major metaphysical madness.

The Men Who Stare at Goats tells the true-life story of the U.S. Army’s New Earth Army a military experiment that purportedly taught soldiers to use mind control and other paranormal techniques to achieve non-violent success on the battlefield. George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, and the too-little-seen Kevin Spacey all star as former members, with Ewan McGregor as the reporter investigating the defunct battalion.

La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet continues documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s career-long fascination with the inner workings of social institutions, large and small. His 38th feature, playing for two weeks at Film Forum, chronicles the rituals, routines, and performances of the eponymous ballet company.

That Evening Sun features a buzzed-about performance by the incomparable Hal Holbrook as an octogenarian Tennessee farmer locked in a battle of wills over his former farmland, which has been sold by his son to a local ne’er-do-well and his family.

The Red Shoes, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 masterpiece about the friction between personal happiness and artistic obsession, returns in all its blindingly beautiful Technicolor glory for a two-week run at Film Forum. Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker—a frequent Scorsese collaborator and Powell’s widow—will be on hand to introduce the new 35mm restoration at tonight’s 7 p.m. screening.

Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man for Himself) will be at BAMcinématek on Sunday for one day only. Lead actress Isabelle Huppert will personally introduce the 6:30 screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s mid-career meditation on art, sex, and capitalism.

Best Boy, Ira Wohl’s acclaimed documentary portrait of caring for his mentally-challenged cousin, will get a 30th anniversary screening this Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Walter Reade Theater, with Wohl on hand to discuss his Oscar-winning film.

Iberoamérica: Our Way(s) celebrates the eponymous intergovernmental organization, instrumental in financially supporting contemporary Latin American, Spanish, and Portuguese cinema. with this week-long series of films. Highlights of the series—which includes several New York premieres—include Lisandro Alonso’s poetic drama Liverpool, which will be screened Saturday at 6 p.m. (with introduction by producer Luis Miñarro) and Monday at 8 p.m. (with introduction by Alonso).

Apparently, you need higher than a 14 percent rating on rottentomatoes.com for your movie to play nationwide. Who’d have guessed films have to be coherent before they reach us? Fox Searchlight yanked Gentlemen Broncos from theaters beyond the two in L.A. and New York where it debuted after reviewers creamed the film. Here’s a sample of the carnage: “If you didn't know otherwise, you'd swear that Gentlemen Broncos was made by a disaffected high school student — and not a particularly talented one,” writes Claudia Puig in USA Today.

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By now, two months after the rest of the new shows have premiered, you've surely been beaten into submission regarding the plot of V by ABC's marketing department, storing its plot in your brain even if you're unaware of it. Another of ABC's twisting and turning, creepy-crawly shows that repay the audience's dedication, V is a reboot of the '80s miniseries in which aliens arrive on Earth. Surprisingly devoid of tentacles or evil plans, these aliens (led by Morena Baccarin's Anna) are attractive and kindly. They heal the ailing, they promise peace, and they even prop up ailing economies by drawing in an influx of tourists, all eager to take a tour of a real life alien space craft. Oh, and they're actually evil terrorists who have been plotting to decimate the world for decades, while perfecting a human mask that covers their scaly skin.

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Roger Corman’s funny, fucked-up horror film was made years later into a Steve Martin-Rick Moranis vehicle. This earlier version, though, shot basically for no money in 1960, starred Jack Nicholson, in whose performance one can see shades of the future Shining. Forego the songs for the funnier, scarier original tonight at Anthology Film Archives (9:30, $9).

Director Glenn Silber created a victory dance out of his latest documentary, Labor Day, which will open tomorrow at Quad Cinemas. He wanted to show how the Service Employment International Union (SEIU) played a crucial role in securing President Obama’s campaign victory.

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In case anyone doubted Tim Burton’s trippiness, the latest Alice in Wonderland trailer oozes with opium-hazed hallucinations and acid-saturated colors that stay true to Lewis Carroll’s, ahem, inspirations. The trailer is released just weeks before MoMa’s Burton retrospective will show how the artist and storyteller became the goth darling he is today.

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Costa-Gavras' late-1960s film Z gets the Criterion treatment with the new DVD release this week. Our own Armond White has written a piece on the Criterion site. In it he writes: 

"Costa-Gavras’s 1969 political assassination thriller Z appeared at the end of a decade of burgeoning cultural change and rampant paranoia. In the United States, this Algerian-French coproduction sparked a sensation, not just relaying the European political crisis but perfectly capturing a global mood of apprehension at a moment when America was at its most vulnerable, our domestic security seemingly breached by the consecutive concussive shocks of our own political assassinations (John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy). Based on true events, the film vividly imagined and uncovered the machinations behind the May 22, 1963, killing of the Greek social democrat and pacifist Gregoris Lambrakis in Thessaloníki. It made the fact of political murder cinematically real, as no Hollywood film at that time could dare. And by borrowing Hollywood action techniques, the Greek-born Constantinos Gavras raised the genre to a new level—one that he would define as his own."

Read the entire piece here.

It's been a good month for Chuck Klosterman. Just as the writer's latest collection of essays, Eating the Dinosaur, is hitting bookstores and Hollywood has come a-knockin' to adapt Fargo Rock City, his 2001 memoir about growing up as a metal fan in 1980s North Dakota.

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EVGrieve has some good news about Theater 80 on St. Marks—it's acquiring a high-def digital projector in order to occasionally show films. Who needs a new art house in the village when a classic venue can just come back into the game?

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As someone who views the majority of television programming through online channels (or free DVD screeners), the idea of charging for Hulu makes me want to slap some sense into a rich, balding media exec. News Corp. Deputy Chairman Chase Carey recently stated that he thought that Hulu would start charging for content as early as 2010. Do we see where this is going? OK, we're already watching ads for Cymbalta and suffering through strange viewing jumpiness on our high-speed Internet connection, but you actually think young folks are going to fork over money for this content? Maybe if it is for extra-special viewing ops, like sneak peeks for favorite programs or for the ease of downloading to a portable device. But there's no way we're going to pay to watch a TV show like so many do for overpriced cable. No way. This is the same dumb idea as print media outlets thinking that people will pay for online content that they've already been getting for free. Maybe Chris Anderson hasn't been preaching the power of Free enough.

The appeal of Hulu and other online viewing portals is that we get to watch what we want when we want to on our own terms. No need to have destination TV hours on Thursday or Sunday night, we slot TV entertainment into our own busy schedules. We're already paying for our Internet connections (sometimes to the same people who charge us for cable access), so we want to get the most bang for our buck. And those very providers are threatening to charge us more for using the bandwidth anyway. Something has to give. I do think a pay-as-you-go online model may be possible. For example, I'd gladly pay for episodes watched from pay-cable channels such as HBO or Showtime. I don't want (or need) to pay extra for something I don't watch or use. I prefer the a la carte way of watching. But if Hulu (and those networks that feed into it) think that their nifty little system has any chance of surviving a scheme where they charge for content. They'll be sore when we all indeed slap them around by quickly migrating to some other platform that has figured out how to provide is with what we want the way we want it.