Zack Snyder

Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg battle the summertime blues in 'Adventureland.'

Courtesy Miramax

This has been heralded as the year of the animated movie, and with good reason: Fantastic Mr. Fox, Coraline and Up, among others, proved as engaging for adults as for children, validating a genre unfairly dismissed as kiddie fare by some critics and too many Oscar voters.

Coraline and best friend Wybie find themselves at home in director Henry Selick's demented fantasyland.

Courtesy Universal Pictures

Adapted from a dark children’s novella by British author Neil Gaiman and directed by Henry Selick, who played a pivotal role in crafting the look of Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline is a visual achievement of the highest order, an endlessly inventive spectacle that represents the first stop-motion animation feature ever filmed in 3-D. Judging by the results, it will not be the last. 



American Gangsters: The Warriors will come out and play all weekend long at the Red Vic.

Courtesy Paramount Pictures

SF Indie's Another Hole in the Head festival is entering its second week. Frameline 33, San Francisco's International LGBT Film Festival, kicks off Thursday with Richard Laxton's An Englishman in New York. Put simply, it's a great time to be a Bay Area movie buff. As always, here's a list of some of the films currently in rotation at an indie theater near you.

Jackie Earle Haley delivers a fiery performance as a masked avenger whose methods are as extreme as his passion for justice.

Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

The year is 1985. Nixon is entering his fifth term as president after leading the U.S. to victory in Vietnam, the Cold War has led us to the brink of nuclear destruction, and the masked superheroes of the world have been forced into early retirement by order of the government. So goes the premise of Watchmen, director Zack Snyder’s messy but often fascinating take on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ celebrated graphic novel.

Snyder's Watchmen wins a ringing endorsement from illustrator Dave Gibbons.

Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

Even as rabid fans and Warner Bros. executives are at long last celebrating the arrival of the Watchmen movie, one of the men most responsible for the Hugo Award-winning tale of fallen superheroes living in an age of impending nuclear war – author Alan Moore – couldn’t care less.

Just ask his partner in creation, artist Dave Gibbons.

As Watchmen's March 6 release date draws near, neither Fox nor Warner Bros. seems inclined to wave the white flag.

Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

By now, it’s hardly news that Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is a potential casualty of a bitter dispute between rival studios - ts March 6 release date in jeopardy as Twentieth Century Fox attempts to prove that the Warner Bros. project infringes on Fox’s copyright, first acquired in 1986. But the biggest surprise in a case that has already inspired some Web-savvy fans to call for boycotts of upcoming Fox tent-poles including May’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine is that neither studio appears willing to back down, whatever the cost.