MIAMI - Like his old pal Ferris Bueller, Matthew Broderick may need a day off. The former teen star, 47, is getting slammed for his performance in Broadway's "The Starry Messenger."

Nearly 20 years ago Grant Heslov met fellow struggling actor George Clooney at an audition.

Mo'Nique likes to laugh. A lot.

The Fourth Kind" is a "found footage" horror movie with a few new tweaks, though not enough to escape a certain clunkiness.

Filmmaker Richard Kelly's initial encounter with Richard Matheson's fiendish little short story "Button, Button" - about a cash-strapped couple offered a million dollars to push a button on a box that will instantly cause someone they don't know to drop dead - came not on the page, but on TV.

TORONTO - In "The Men Who Stare at Goats," Jeff Bridges plays Bill Django, a military man who returns from Vietnam to embrace the '60s counterculture headlong - the whole Aquarian Age, flower power, altered states of consciousness thing.

DETROIT - It's a quiet afternoon in downtown Detroit as an invasion is in progress.

"The Box"

Capsule reviews of films opening this week:

TORONTO - Oprah Winfrey did not write "The Bluest Eye" or "Middlesex" or "Love in the Time of Cholera." But her formidably influential book club has helped many an author - alive or dead, famous or no - reach a wider audience. (Sample thank-you note from the beyond: "Oprah, thanks for your support of 'Anna Karenina.' Leo.") Now the multinational corporation disguised, cunningly, as a cultural arbiter and television personality hopes she can do a similar favor for a film she "really, really, really loves."

Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival is going on the road for one night next winter.

Lionel Barrymore. Alastair Sim. Laurence Olivier. Albert Finney. George C. Scott. Bill Murray. Michael Caine. Mr. Magoo. Scrooge McDuck.

"I am actress Milla Jovovich," the star says, directly to the audience as she introduces her new movie, "The Fourth Kind."

Some upcoming holiday releases seem like deja vu all over again, either because of the talent involved or themes that evoke the ghosts of crowd-pleasers past.

Although the Halloween candy is still fresh, the holiday movie season is just around the corner.

Actor Tom Hanks says viewers are in for a realistic "wartime experience" when the new film he produced, "Beyond All Boundaries," opens at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans on Friday.

Zhang Yimou says his first movie in three years has shades of comedian Stephen Chow's outlandish humor and marks the first time the "Raise the Red Lantern" director shot in digital format.

Brad Pitt says he is in the market for a new motorcycle.

Roman Polanski has re-appealed to the Swiss courts to be released from prison on bail, officials said Tuesday, the latest step in the director's protracted legal battle to avoid extradition to the United States.

Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin are taking on the Oscars.

Capsule reviews of films opening this week:

A fun tone is undermined by disjointed storytelling in George Clooney's "The Men Who Stare at Goats," and it all starts with the disclaimer that opens the movie: "More of this is true than what you might imagine."

Jim Carrey, Colin Firth and Bob Hoskins switched on London's Christmas lights on Tuesday and attended the world premiere of the 3-D film "A Christmas Carol."

Hollywood loves money. So does Ebenezer Scrooge. So what better way to launch the holiday season than putting the old money-grubber at the head of the line to separate movie-goers from their cash?

The new Disney "A Christmas Carol" is another epic achievement in motion-capture animation, advancing the art form closer to photo-realism than "The Polar Express" or "Beowulf." Dazzling, ornate visuals take us to the snowy London of 1837, swooping over its digital rooftops and down its digital chimneys. Faces take on musculature, expression and detail.