FEBRUARY 2009

HE’S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU: Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Connelly, Kevin Connolly, Bradley Cooper, Ginnifer Goodwin, Scarlett Johansson, Kris Kristofferson, Justin Long (Directed by Ken Kwapis; Written by Marc Silverstein and Abby Kohn; New Line Cinema) Smart, attractive and variously driven young men and women (including Ginnifer Goodwin, Jennifer Aniston and Jennifer Connelly, shown above) meet, mix, meld and sometimes split in exotic, erotic Baltimore. The star-studded story is based on the self-help book by “Sex and the City” writers Greg Behrendt and Liz Tucillo and is being directed by Ken Kwapis, who deserves credit for his contributions to television’s “The Office,” “The Larry Sanders Show,” “The Bernie Mac Show” and “Malcolm in the Middle.” Mention should be made, too, of Kwapis’ big-screen, big-flop “License to Wed,” starring a spectacularly unfunny Robin Williams as a man of the cloth who's determined to put Mandy Moore and John Krasinski through holy hell before deigning to marry them. To read Diane Baroni's 1998 interview with Kris Kristofferson, click here. Opens 2/6

VALKYRIE: Tom Cruise, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, Patrick Wilson, Tom Wilkinson, Stephen Fry, Carice Van Houten, Eddie Izzard (Directed by Bryan Singer; Written by Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander; MGM/United Artists) Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg was the passionately Catholic, marginally crazed Nazi who huddled, somewhat tardily, with his fellow officers and hatched a plan to bump off Adolf Hitler toward the wind-down of World War II. Not only was he motivated by his deepening hatred of Hitler, but he was totally turned off by the war itself, having lost his left eye in a 1943 aerial strafing, plus his right hand and 2 fingers of his left hand on the same occasioin. But that was nothing compared to what happened in July, 1944, when he planted a bomb under Hitler’s conference room table. Some people were killed in the ensuing explosion, but nowhere among them was Der Fuhrer. And that’s how poor Von Stauffenberg came to face a Berlin firing squad later that month. The question now is, who could possibly play the role of this unpredictable, tricky, high-energy wannabe hero? And the answer, of course, is that incomparably unpredictable, tricky, high-energy superstar Tom Cruise. Adding to the promise of unpredictability and trickery is the fact that the director and the screenwriter of the film, former New Jersey high school classmates Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie, are the guys who fooled us so masterfully in 1995’s “The Usual Suspects.” Opens 2/13