Zombies, Grrrls and Liars Battle Over Long, Strong Weekend

Welcome back to Movieline Attractions, your regular guide to everything new, noteworthy and unusually crowd-pleasing and good at the movies. This week we reap a harvest bruising, lying, zombie-whacking pleasures; no matter where you turn, from the multiplex to the art house, your satisfaction seems guaranteed. And it's about time. Run down the weekend outlook with Movieline after the jump.

WHAT'S NEW: Zombieland is this week's lone new release on 3,000+ screens, which, despite its R-rating, kind of gives it the top spot by default. It doesn't hurt that the story of zombie-plague survivors outracing a nation of undead is a laudatory lightning rod at Rotten Tomatoes, proving that smart, sincere, funny, well-made, modestly budgeted cinema transcends genre. How hard was that, Hollywood? More like this, please -- and with Zombieland pulling in around $19.5 million this weekend, we might just get it.

Fox Searchlight and Warner Bros., meanwhile, are taking Whip It and The Invention of Lying to about 1,700 screens apiece. Drew Barrymore's terrific roller-derby coming-of-age story should and likely will overtake Ricky Gervais's high-concept romantic comedy, with the pair finishing at a margin of $10.4 million to $7.5 million. Disney's 3-D (and three-hour) re-release of Toy Story and Toy Story 2 will steal some families from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs -- enough, probably, to knock the latter film into second place overall with $18.3 million while the double feature takes in about $10.6 million.

Expanding this week to nearly 1,000 screens is Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story, which made ridiculous cash last week in New York and Los Angeles and will suck in another $6.5 million or so this time around. Also opening: The LeBron James documentary More Than a Game, and in New York only (for now), the alienated-youth film-festival darling Afterschool.

THE BIG LOSER / THE UNDERDOG will not be seen this week as virtually everything will perform pretty much in line with what's expected of it. Of course the Coen brothers' haphazard Jews-in-Minnesota fable A Serious Man will dominate per-screen average in six theaters, but they're not what anyone what call underdogs. And while I know next to nothing about A Beautiful Life besides a title that too closely resembles that of one of TV's quickest-cancelled shows (it's actually about the haunted romance between a runaway and an illegal immigrant), all you need to know is that it features Movieline BFF Bai Ling (right) as a stripper/chanteuse. Yes, she will win that Oscar someday.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD's this week include DreamWorks Animation's relatively underperforming Monsters vs. Aliens, Sam Mendes's baby-apprehension drama Away We Go, a restored 70th anniversary edition of The Wizard of Oz, Madonna's directorial debut Filth and Wisdom, the mopey L.A. ensemble flick Shrink, and the Sasha Grey/Steven Soderbergh curio The Girlfriend Experience.