9

This might sound like heresy, but after seeing the extraordinary doomsday parable 9, Pixar's Up is now only my second-favorite animated work from 2009 to feature a gravelly vocal performance by Christopher Plummer.

ALL ABOUT STEVE

It's one thing for a movie to present its audience with hateful characters. It's quite another when the movie itself appears to hate its characters, and in the depressingly, almost sadistically unamusing All About Steve, very little reads beyond the filmmakers' contempt for the "lovable" whack-job they're purportedly championing. I've seen stupider movies this year - at least two or three of them - but I don't think I've endured one that annoyed me more than this new Sandra Bullock vehicle by director Phil Traill, which humiliates its star at every turn, and humiliates you for spending 100 minutes trying to make sense of it.

THE FINAL DESTINATION and HALLOWEEN II

In a somewhat odd scheduling decision, this past weekend saw the release of both The Final Destination - the fourth in the popular series of cheat-death-and-pay-the-price splatter flicks, presented (on some screens) in eyeball-gouging 3D - and Halloween II, writer/director Rob Zombie's sequel to his 2007 remake of John Carpenter's horror classic. But for fellow genre fans wondering which of the two makes for a more gratifying fright film, I'm afraid it's a draw; the former is kind of fun but mostly terrible, while the latter is kind of fascinating but almost no fun at all.

They don't touch, they don't come within five feet of each other, and with one notable exception, they don't share a moment of eye contact. But in the Riverbend Theatre Collective's current production of Hate Mail, Jeff De Leon and Stephanie Burrough exude such combustible comic spark that you wouldn't necessarily want them to interact directly; the Village Theatre might damn well go up in flames.