Welcome back to Movieline Attractions, your regular one-stop guide to everything new, noteworthy and/or not-so-dazzling at he movies. This week might be the equivalent of fall's candy aisle, featuring more colorful choices than you can possibly consume and about all the nourishment of a sugar cube. But! Let's never take variety for granted. Sort it all out after the jump.
WHAT'S NEW: Saw VI arrives right on time the week before Halloween, with Tobin Bell naturally making his return as John Kramer a/k/a the Jigsaw Killer a/k/a the highest-grossing splatter-franchise anchor in history. Its sequels' opening grosses have decreased, however, in recent years, with Saw V barely cracking $30 million last October. And this year, while Saw VI continues the series' envelope-pushing tradition of moral carnage, it faces genuine competition from the wide opening of Paranormal Activity. A lot of folks will see both, so I still think Saw VI should beat Paranormal to take the weekend. But those making a choice will leave a substantial bruise on the horror monolith, nudging it down to about $25.5 million and possibly making it the first Saw entry to gross less than $50 million overall. Paranormal's expanded run on just under 2,000 screens should pull in one of its customarily mind-blowing per-theater averages, grabbing $23 million for second place overall.
Neither film has to worry about much trouble from the horror-comedy-fantasy Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, which will represent Universal's first reality check after their much-needed hit Couples Retreat. Based on a popular series of books and featuring John C. Reilly as a traveling-show bloodsucker who recruits a teenage aide, this is pretty much one-quadrant fare looking at a high of around $8.1 million. Viewers' animation fatigue may keep Astro Boy down to around $10.6 million; Summit has aggressively pushed its adaptation of the hit anime series of the '60s and '70s, and decent reviews might mitigate the lingering marketplace influence of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and Toy Story 3-D. And anyway, you shouldn't underestimate a title character with guns in his butt.
Also opening: Uma Thurman's frazzled-mom comedy Motherhood; the Latino crime drama The Ministers; Tony Jaa's Ong Bak 2: The Beginning, the inevitable follow-up to his 2003 martial-arts smash; Leslie Nielsen's latest spoof Stan Helsing; Adam Goldberg's art-world satire (Untitled); and a 3-D re-release of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas.
THE BIG LOSER: While I can't do much worse in this space than I did last week, it's probably worth hedging a bit on Amelia, Fox Searchlight's Oscar-bait biopic starring Hilary Swank as the doomed aviatrix Amelia Earhart. Searchlight seems to have gotten a late start aligning this with the female viewership it probably should have cultivated in the first place; instead critics have largely brutalized Amelia on its run through the awards-season gantlet, effectively killing buzz, momentum and any potential for word-of-mouth. But who knows? Maybe it's a mother-daughter thing that could find about $6 million on 800 screens. I think the alternative is likelier, though: An odd woman out looking at $3 million and a swift exit to Oscar also-ran oblivion.
THE UNDERDOG: Antichrist courts hyperbole from all sides: The most, the toughest, the worst, the best, etc. etc. I can go on all day qualifying all of that, but it's a lot easier and more straightforward to simply tell you that Lars von Trier's psycho-horror saga is the only must-see film of 2009. You've already read nine reasons why, and you'll read reports from others who'll tell you otherwise. They're wrong. To the extent it has the capacity to infuriate and offend, the story of a grieving couple whose retreat to their forest cabin goes, well, totally awry ultimately demonstrates a mastery of filmmaking you just can't take for granted. From the fearless performances by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg (the film's only cast), to the ravishing silvery slo-mo of DP Anthony Dod Mantle, to von Trier's own unflinching self-analysis, to the talking fox we'll be quoting for years, Antichrist is a film that won't take no -- especially yours -- for an answer. Just go.
FOR SHUT-INS: This week's new DVD releases include the equally disturbing Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Michelle Pfeiffer's tragically underrated drama Cheri, the Bad Movies We Love alumna Blood: The Last Vampire, the Criterion edition of Wim Wenders' classic Wings of Desire, the gritty, acclaimed Brooklyn crime drama The Local, and finally, the complete series collection of It's Garry Shandling's Show. Enjoy!