The new Disney version of Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" is entertaining, imaginative, and fairly true to the original story. Using computer-generated animation based on reallife filming, it swoops and slides along to show us 1843 London and to zip through roofs and floors to get us in to see the Cratchit's modest home, the inside of a sewer pipe, a school room from fifty years before, and twenty or so different other interesting interiors.

Viewers may be tempted to remember the new film "The Box" as a celestial shoe-box full of oddities. Like director Richard Kelly's last movie, the problematic "Donnie Darko," there isn't any single clear explanation for the assembly of events. But the film isn't experimental story telling. It's just odd.

Kansas school children learn—or used to—that Amelia Earhart was from Atchison. Lots of pioneering pilots and plane manufacturers were from Kansas (including Leonardville's Alvin Longren). Earhart was important among them because she was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic.

The boys in Hollywood must believe that you may buy DVD copies of recent movies to give as Christmas presents. And they assume you'll buy on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Otherwise how are we to explain the number and quality of the DVDs scheduled for release this month?

David Bowers's new movie "Astro Boy" is based on Japanese animation. It has the story of Pinocchio with elements of Oliver Twist tossed in gratis, but it is science fiction. It assumes humans pretty much trash Earth and have to move up onto a floating island.

You remember "The Blair Witch Project," don't you?

No time is really "typical" in the wild, calendar-sensitive world of motion pictures. But perhaps the list of feature films new to video currently is as good a cross-section as can be imagined of what one sees at the twelve-plex month in and month out.

In much the same way that Poe invented the short story and Bill Monroe invented bluegrass, Alfred Hitchcock invented the movie thriller. The new movie "The Stepfather" is a classic version of the form.

The 1970s' "Death Wish" movies concerned themselves with revenge. Charles Bronson played a man who turned vigilante after crimes committed against his wife and daughter went unpunished. A similar story came to the screen more recently under the title "The Punisher."

The new movie "Where the Wild Things Are" is a solid version of a classic children's book. The hour and forty minutes Spike Jonze film is true to the much-loved, brief Maurice Sendak book.