The Elephant in the Living Room begins with its heroic subject Tim Harrison, a police officer turned animal expert in Ohio, cruising in his patrol car, rattling off his accomplishments and experiences in dealing with exotic animals on the loose in America to a passenger seat cam, intercut with local news reports of these crazy animal attacks. At that stage, it’s hard to know what’s special about this feature documentary on exotic animal ownership in the US that sets it apart from an Animal Planet program (which Tim Harrison has been on before—not to mention Discovery, National geographic, etc.). Several scenes in, we find out.

One of the things you miss when you see movies at press screenings is the trailers beforehand. Watching a trailer in a theater is fun because you can see how it compares to the movie it is attached to, as opposed to being a separate entity. In Bridesmaids' case, it was preceded by a trailer for a comedy called The Change-Up where the trailer climaxes with a scene displaying a half-naked Leslie Mann’s hotness. This has the film’s star Jason Bateman revved up, but Mann then ruins the mood by going to the bathroom. Bateman’s character then refuses to be near her and makes silly quips about how gross she is for taking a shit. The point of the joke being that it's funny when women let men know that they have bodily functions too—because they're totally not supposed to do that, amirite?!

Nicolas Winding Refn has had an interesting career so far. At one point, he was making duds that were so ignored that they left his production company bankrupt and forced him to make sequels of his smash hit debut Pusher just to bounce back financially; but once re-established, Refn delivered two festival favorites back-to-back in Bronson and Valhalla Rising, finally getting the rest of the world to notice and leading right into his highest-profile film yet.

He’s already lined up to remake Logan’s Run with his Drive star Ryan Gosling and there’s even talk of Warner Bros possibly giving him the wheel to a Wonder Woman movie. Big things are in store for Refn. For the immediate, though, he can lean back his seat and set cruise control, since he’s just given us one of the best films of the year with Drive.

In its examination of the role God and religion have in human lives, Secret Sunshine doesn’t make it a one-way street where you either gain faith or lose it. Rather, it maps out the whole road of its main character’s brush with divinity at her darkest hour.

Being a film drenched in details that spreads the few plot points it has across a two-and-a-half hour running time, it’s not a film that can be replicated with plot descriptions. Naturally, revealing some of its significant acts are somewhat necessary to discuss it. The power is in how it details the series of decisions and emotional assaults its protagonist go through in order for her state of mind to come to accept God, and the further consequences of that decision, both of the positive and negative variety.

Despite being a filmmaker firmly in the school of visual storytelling who avoids using dialogue if he can help it, Kim Ki-duk is not a Korean director whose work translates easily to an international market. He has, however, been fairly prolific in churning out celebrated (and deranged) love stories, at least once every year since his debut, that are usually variations of the same trope—like an artsy Korean Woody Allen.

Breath is Kim’s fourteenth feature film from a few years back, having competed in the 2007 Cannes Film Festival for the Palme d’Or and released in its native country the same year, but didn’t find US distribution until this year. Compared to the treatment of his previous films following the turn of the millennium, it seems like the interest in Kim Ki-duk as an auteur has waned on the international stage, but the lack of enthusiasm can also be attributed to the fact that Breath is far from his best effort. Derivative, even, for a master like him.

Even when it’s not a true story, it’s always amazingly easy to predict the outcome of a sports movie. If the hero doesn’t win the whole damn thing, they at least make it to the final bout. The point of most sports movies, after all, isn’t to be surprising, but to be inspirational. With that in mind, Warrior never tries to hide the fact that the MMA tournament it’s about is going to come down to Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton, the film’s two leads.

As far as inspirational goes, it’s pretty weak. The main motivation for our heroes’ fighting spirits is neither pride nor glory, just money. They need the money, so they gotta win. The film even provides some good arguments as to why these guys should not fight, and the counterargument is just a simple “But the money!” With the country in its current economic state, though, maybe money is the most persuasive motive of all.

With the recent news of its cancellation and imminent replacement with another new Batman show that returns to a more serious tone, the cycle loops back again. They do this with Batman every few years, rebranding when enough episodes are produced.

The funny thing is, Brave and the Bold is internally conflicted in itself, as I’ve exhaustively discussed in my reviews of Season One. Once again, in this set, we see Batman changing his attitude from episode to episode. Compared to the first season, though, here the producers seem to have a better grasp of just how goofy or just how hardass they will allow their Batman to be, and the opening episode of this set actually has some fun with Batman's rep as a self-obsessed loner.

With the airing of the fifth episode last Friday, we are now halfway through Torchwood: Miracle Day and we are still no closer to understanding the mystery of this season. Nobody can die, a mysterious entity is behind the event, Torchwood is back on the case, and... What?

This leads to a lot of frustration as viewers. There are ten episodes to tell this story and on the outset, it felt like the writers are wasting time focusing on details that are irrelevant to the main plot. Luckily, the fifth episode changed that somewhat by having those details converge into a reveal that inspires this thought: what if it’s the whole point? What if Miracle Day isn’t so much a science-fiction story as it is a scientific hypothesis of a fictional phenomenon?

A love letter to both sci-fi movies of the 1980's and the poor disenfranchised youths of today, Attack the Block looks like what would happen if the kids from The Wire are suddenly thrown into the middle of Gremlins. Obviously, bodies start to drop.

It’s nice to see a sci-fi comedy that doesn’t rely on spoofs, references or physical gags. Downright remarkable, actually. The humor of the piece rely partly on social satire and mostly on sharp one-liners. Despite having the obvious and simplistic us-against-them monster movie pattern, Attack the Block feels incredibly fresh and energetic. When one character is asked to let everyone know about the alien invasion via text message, he hilariously blurts out, “This is way too much madness to explain in one text!” The situation isn’t really complex enough for that to be true, but in the heat of the moment, the way writer/director Joe Cornish cranks the film, we believe that this shit is in fact too wild for one text.

Maybe it’s not cool to admit this, but I think we’ve all subconsciously wished that the recent trend of mumblecore films would have a flamethrowing muscle car or two, just to shake things up. And for once, instead of an abrupt, unresolved goodbye to cut off a dissolving relationship, perhaps post-apocalyptic carnage can take its place. Come on, wouldn’t Nights and Weekends be more satisfying if it ends with Joe Swanberg taking a shotgun to his own chin and credits roll as Greta Gerwig escapes from a mushroom cloud on a badass dirt bike?

Okay, maybe not, but that’s the frame of mind Bellflower operates in (though not those specific actions). “I’m going to end up hurting you,” the girl said to the boy in the first half of the film, as a reason for why they shouldn’t start dating. “No, you won’t,” the boy assures her, ensuring via the laws of fiction that he is definitely going to get hurt. Of course, with that set-up, and in this genre of movies, “hurt” typically means “passive-aggressive resentment turning into a reluctant break-up.” It’s that in Bellflower, too, but with a little more leeway for genre film mayhem.

Every year, I try to wrap up Comic-Con by writing down my overall impression in the form of ten lessons learned, be it from soaring examples or cringe-inducing mistakes. Con this year was a strange mixed bag of emotions for me, who remembers a time when getting into panels did not require getting up at 5 AM and waiting in line for hours. In some ways, this was their worst year since the turn of the century in terms of material and enthusiasm, but in other ways, that may not be a bad thing for those who enjoy the Con experience beyond the footages and star-studded appearances.

Well, this is arguably better than Pink's official music video for this song. Considering that that video has Pink putting on different costumes, this does seem entirely appropriate.

Cosplay Fever has created this positively endearing video of cosplayers from the London Film & Comic Con earlier this month lip syncing to Pink's upbeat underdog anthem "Raise Your Glass." I wish I'd caught this before I left for Comic-Con, but it's nice to find an ode to geek culture just as you're winding down from Con yourself. Check it out.

So here I am. San Diego Comic-Con 2011. It's amazing that a year has passed and yet nothing seems to have changed. Same old convention center, same old hotels surrounding it. Still the same bars, same restaurants and same stores along the gaslamp strip that cuts through downtown San Diego.

As the Con continues until Sunday, we'll be seeing the same old craziness that makes SDCC so special. Here you can read the stuff we experienced on the first day. We've decided to just post everything from all four days here.

What happens when you cross a superhero movie with a Korean thriller? There are no costumes, no gadgets, no global crisis—just messed up personal/family lives and a ton of people die violently. Maybe that’s pigeonholing, but Haunters is proving it to be true.

In this messy superhero origin story, Kyu-nam (Ko Soo) is an unemployed nobody hired to safeguard a small office’s safe against a recurring mysterious thief, only to discover that the thief has the superpower of controlling the actions of anyone he sees. Anyone, that is, except Kyu-nam. Annoyed by this, the villain Cho-in (Kang Dong-won) attacks Kyu-nam’s good-natured boss, which pisses Kyu-nam off and sends him on a vendetta to stop this villain before he harms more people.

Hard to believe that a year has gone by and it’s Comic-Con time already. I’ll be leaving for San Diego Wednesday morning. Gee whiz. I’m sure many of you have your schedule all mapped out already. Hell, I know you Twilight fans are already camped in a line outside of Hall H at this very moment (a spot you’ll lose anyway when you have to go and line up for your badge, but whatever floats your sparkly boat).

But maybe some of you are Comic-Con rookies, or have simply been too busy hitting the beach recently to pay attention to the announced schedule (yeah, right). Either way, here are some of the things you might not want to miss, both on and off the convention center.

And why not? Luke Cage is one of Marvel's best characters, and also its most resilient. A character who started out as Marvel's attempt to cash in on the 70's blaxpoitation craze (and partnered with Iron Fist, who was their attempt to cash in on the 70's Bruce Lee craze), the crack dealer-punching, bulletproof hero from Harlem has come a long way since, currently serving as the leader of the New Avengers in the present Marvel comic books, playing general to the likes of Spider-man, Wolverine and Fantastic Four's The Thing.

A Luke Cage movie has long been in the making, but no one's taking the plunge, which is why people started making their own fan shorts as pitches for Marvel to consider them. I'm confident that these will not be the last of them.

In one of the several sweeping aerial shots across Hogsmeade to survey the destruction that the insidious Lord Voldermort and his army have wrought in this film, we fly over the familiar Quidditch stadium engulfed in flames, as its towers begin to topple one by one.

This is as much of the made-up wizard sport as we get in these last few Harry Potter movies, and that one shot is the crystallization of how far the series has come. What seemed so important in those early movies—indeed, what Harry himself saw as his proudest achievement—is completely insignificant at the end of this boy’s legend. Because, you see, it’s time to grow up.

This is... surprisingly well done? Harry Potter inspired bands aren't new. In fact, there are about several hundreds of them that can be found online. Draco and the Malfoys is one of the most famous, with the same premise of singing as Draco; but while those guys sing original songs, this one's a parody that, as you can guess from the title, cribs from Travie McCoy and Bruno Mars' "Billionaire," sung as Draco Malfoy yearning to become a real deal Death Eater. 

The song is performed by Jon Littauer, Ian Fahey and Wade Tandy of Nerd News and Reviews, with lyrics written by Ian Fahey. Put it on the iPod on your way to see Deathly Hallows - Part 2.

The first trailer for Disney's adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars is finally here, which gives us an idea of how Finding Nemo and Wall-E director Andrew Stanton's first live-action movie will look like. He's not going to be the only Pixar braintrust member to have a live-action movie coming out in the next year, though. The Incredibles and Ratatouille director Brad Bird is helming Tom Cruise's new Mission: Impossible movie. So now we have the first trailers for each movie, which one of these two animation giants will successfully transition to the land of living actors?

Just when I thought that there was nothing about Arnold Schwarzenegger's big comeback to Hollywood that interested me (another Terminator? Yawn. Playing a depressed alcoholic horse breeder? Uhh, okay?), out comes this exciting news.

In a team-up that came out of nowhere, Arnold will now star in the latest movie by South Korean director Kim Jee-woon, helmer of balls-out actioners (The Good, the Bad and the Weird) and bloody violent thrillers (I Saw the Devil). What? Yes. Who cares how that happened. It's happening.