Movie Michelle Williams gives an Oscar-worthy performance as Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn. The movie focuses on the summer of 1956, when Monroe went to London to shoot The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier (played by Kenneth Branagh). From the start, nothing goes well. Monroe is hopped up on pills, messes up her lines, is always late on the set and lacks self-confidence. No one likes her except for Dame Sybil Thorndike (Judi Dench) and messenger boy Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne). The story is told through Colin’s eyes. For all the Harry Potter fans out there, Emma Watson…

Movie If you like scary movies, Paranormal Activity 3 could be just the movie for you. This old-fashioned ghost movie prequel takes the story line back to the beginning of the franchise and focuses on the two sisters seen as adults in the previous films. The girls share a two-level home with their mother and her boyfriend. The girls are aware of a ghostly presence in the house; the adults, at first, are not. The boyfriend has video cameras set up all over the house—running all the time, day and night. The suspense builds as we watch the surveillance-type video, waiting for a ghost to appear. …

Movie Footloose is back, 27 years after America first cut loose with the story of old folks who hate loud music and wild dancing teens who want to shake their groove thing all night long. The story remains basically the same in this remake, largely shot in Hiram, Acworth, Kennesaw and other Atlanta-area sites. A grieving pastor (Dennis Quaid now, John Lithgow in 1984) leads a drive to pass an ordinance forbidding dancing, and a few years later his daughter, Ariel (Julianne Hough now, Lori Singer then), stirs controversy by participating in forbidden, underground dancing. The new kid in town, …

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Adam, a 27-year-old man who has his whole life ahead of him until he discovers he has a rare form of cancer and only a 50/50 chance of survival. The people in Adam's life react differently to the news. His girlfriend, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, pledges to stand by him, then dumps him. His mother, Anjelica Huston, goes into smothering mode and his best friend, Kyle, played by Seth Rogen, tries to keep his spirits up by turning his life into a non-stop party. Rogen co-produces "50/50," a movie based loosely in part on the life of Rogen's good friend Will Reiser. …

Brad Pitt sets out to revolutionize baseball in the real-life story Moneyball. Pitt plays Billy Beane, the Oakland A's general manager who hires math whiz Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) to spark the revolution. The film doesn’t spend a lot of time on the field. Instead, it’s the story of nerds using statistics to take over a jock's world and hit a grand slam. Moneyball stands on its own with a strong supporting cast of personalities, including Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman as the team manager at odds with the Ivy League math theory. Aaron Sorkin helped write the script, which is not really …

Ryan Gosling fuels Drive as Driver, a solitary stunt driver who works on movie sets by day and drives getaway cars at night. He falls for his apartment neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), a mom with a small son whose father is an ex-con. The ex-con drags Driver into a robbery that goes wrong. Albert Brooks plays a crime lord with a thing for forks, Ron Perlman is the Jewish gangster who does business in a pizza parlor, and Bryan Cranston plays Driver's best buddy, giving this film plenty of acting horsepower. Drive is a gritty yet glamorous film bursting with action. European director Nicolas …

Six actors play three roles over 30 years in a thriller about Nazis, Israeli spies and lots of lies in The Debt. Helen Mirren plays a retired Mossad agent named Rachel who is honored for her role in the assassination of a Nazi war criminal in 1965. Thirty years have passed, but questions remain. Did she and associate Stephan (Tom Wilkinson) and others kill their target? Jessica Chastain plays a young Rachel as the suspense builds across two time periods. It’s a political thriller worth watching simply because it is so much smarter and more realistic than most movies. Consider it brain food. …

Dinner: NCG Cinemas at 4421 Cinema Drive in Acworth offers a Dinner & A Movie package, which includes two movie passes and a $25 gift certificate, all just for $39. The Mill & Pub is one of the participating restaurants, and you can redeem the certificate there. Movie: Paul Rudd is part Forrest Gump, part Dude from The Big Lebowski as Ned, an immature man-child who drives his family crazy in Our Idiot Brother. Ned first lands at his sister Liz's house. Liz, played by Emily Mortimer, is an insecure Brooklyn mom married to Dylan (Steve Coogan). Ned quickly wears out his welcome and moves in …

Conan the Barbarian is back. Bare-chested, bloody and brutal, it is everything you would expect from a franchise that helped launch Arnold Schwarzenegger's career 30 years ago. The new barbarian in town is Hawaiian actor Jason Momoa (HBO’s Game of Thrones), who breathes new life into the role of Conan. The long-haired actor, who looks as if he belongs on the cover of a Harlequin Romance, brings his muscular physique to a new legion of fans in 3-D. The story line is simple: An evil overlord massacres Conan’s village; Conan picks up a sword and slays everyone who stands in the way of his …

Dinner: NCG Cinemas at 4421 Cinema Drive in Acworth offers a Dinner & A Movie package, which includes two movie passes and a $25 gift certificate, all just for $39. Waterstone Grill is one of the participating restaurants, and you can redeem the certificate there. Movie: The Social Network star Jesse Eisenberg finds himself in dire straits as a pizza delivery guy-turned-bank robber in the dark comedy 30 Minutes or Less, out today. This film is based on a similar premise to another Eisenberg movie, Zombieland: By placing incompetent characters in outrageous situations and facing near-death …

Movie Chimps, gorillas and other primates take some mind-altering drugs and give a big, hairy smackdown to the humans in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. James Franco plays a scientist trying to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease, which has stricken his father (played by John Lithgow). Franco’s character rescues a newborn test chimp and names him Caesar.  Caesar grows up to be so smart that he is sent to a “primate shelter”—ape prison. Caesar gets angry, then uses his brain to rally the other apes and get even. The great Andy Serkis, best known as Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, provides …

Movie Double O Seven star Daniel Craig forms an unlikely alliance with Harrison Ford and Olivia Wilde in the Sci-Fi/Western genre mashup Cowboys and Aliens. Craig plays an 1870s outlaw with amnesia who wakes up with an alien bracelet and figures out he can zap space monsters with the flick of a wrist. The monsters are bad and the cowboys are good. A classic western with an intergalactic twist. John Favreu directs the movie and, as an added bonus, Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard and Brian Grazier have their hands all over it, making this a trailblazing future classic. The CGI is great, the evil …

Movie Chris Evans goes from 98-pound weakling to superstar in Captain America: The First Avenger. Evans plays Steve Rogers, chosen by a military scientist (Stanley Tucci) for an experiment. Evans ends up turning into a superbuff, greased-up Ken doll, Captain America. In addition to Tucci, the film’s strong supporting cast includes Tommy Lee Jones as Col. Chester Phillips; Hayley Atwell as Rogers’ love interest, Peggy Carter; and Hugo Weaving, the go-to bad boy since The Matrix, as Nazi commander/supervillain Red Skull. The film bookends a modern sequence around events involving the 1940s …

Movie A dark comedy with big names is coming to a theater near you. Would killing your supervisor make the world a much better place? That question is explored in Horrible Bosses. Three tortured employees combine forces to off their bosses with the help of a hit man, played by Jamie Foxx. Charlie Day is the dental assistant who is sexually harassed by his boss, Jennifer Aniston. Jason Sudeikis has a new boss at the chemical company—the owner's cokehead son with a bad comb-over, played by Colin Farrell. Jason Bateman is looking for a promotion but will never get it with a supervisor like Kevin…

Transformers: Dark of the Moon Autobots and Decepticons face off in the apocalyptic Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Shia LaBeouf again plays Sam Witwicky, now looking for work and finding nothing but trouble. Director Michael Bay also is back, but supermodel Rose Huntington-Whiteley has replaced Megan Fox. The star-studded supporting cast includes franchise favorites Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson and John Tuturro, supplemented by John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Patrick Dempsey and The Hangover’s Ken Jeong. But acting is not what’s important in this film; it's all about giant robots that …

Movie: The Green Lantern Ryan Reynolds squeezes into a green unitard and joins an intergalactic, evil-fighting fraternity in The Green Lantern. I'm a fan of the Green Lantern comic book series, but not of this film. Reynolds plays Hal, a test pilot transformed into a superhero after getting a special ring from a dying alien. He has issues concerning the death of his father and the lack of a mother, and he battles the evil force called Parallax, which floats across the universe gobbling up anything that gets in its way, in 3-D. Peter Sarsgaard plays Hector, a nerdy scientist who gets …