Occasionally Hollywood cobbles together random members of the A-list to play family members on film, even if their genes obviously come from opposite ends of the earth. If the actors are good enough or if the chemistry is there, sometimes the combo can work, such as Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman as brothers in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead or Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor in Cassandra's Dream. Other times, it stretches credibility, such as Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman in The Darjeeling Limited. My all-time favorite oddball casting is in Sidney Lumet's Family Business (1989), with Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick playing grandfather, father and son. (Huh?) At the same time, there are actor combos out there who just scream to be paired up in a family capacity. Remember Julia Roberts and Kyra Sedgwick in Something to Talk About? Well, neither do I, but that pairing was perfect. Here are a few others that could work:

1. Helen Hunt & Leelee Sobieski

They're so similar it's spooky, from their hair and foreheads, right down to the tonal quality of their voices. Anybody check the hospital records for mixed-up babies? (Helen is about 20 years older.) Not too long ago, both careers hit a peak: Helen won an Oscar while Leelee was working with Stanley Kubrick and playing Joan of Arc on TV. Now they're both in decline. For some reason, whenever Helen's name comes up, I hear "I HATE Helen Hunt!" And Leelee's last movie was for Uwe Boll. Now would be the perfect time for these two to team up in a mother-daughter drama. If they cooked up something along the lines of Terms of Endearment, with a good, solid writer and/or director, it could be interesting. Or better yet, how about something really strange and kooky with Spike Jonze or Harmony Korine? (Note: apparently the two once went head-to-head on "Celebrity Death Match.")

Gallery: Actors who could play relatives

This never occurred to me before, but "train" movies are a really interesting sub-genre. You could program an entire two-week film festival of train movies, from comedies (The "Three Stooges" shorts, The General, The Darjeeling Limited) to suspense movies (James Bond, Strangers on a Train, Murder on the Orient Express, Runaway Train) and tons of others. It's the perfect setting for a movie: it's a limited space, but long -- for chases -- and it moves through the frame as opposed to sitting still like a hospital room or a warehouse. Plus, unlike an airplane, there are plenty of beautiful views going by outside. And so, if the train movie is a genre, it follows that it needs a solid genre director to add another potential classic to the list.

Brad Anderson (no relation to me, by the way) is such a director. Like Howard Hawks or Billy Wilder, he has been able to effortlessly leap between dark, genre films (Session 9, The Machinist) and romances (Next Stop Wonderland), and even weird combinations of the two (Happy Accidents). His films may not reach the pinnacles of great art, but each and every one of them represents a good, sturdy, entertaining example of sheer, joyful craftsmanship. Anderson's fifth feature (not counting his early, hard-to-find The Darien Gap) is Transsiberian, a film that I would be proud to add to the list of recommended train movies. The title train runs from Beijing to Moscow and crosses through some pretty remote, snowy terrain; it's a great place for something devious and sinister to happen. (The 1973 Peter Cushing / Christopher Lee film Horror Express took place on the same train!)

Imagine you're a filmmaker and you've got this cockamamie story about astronaut chimps that just won't go away. You don't have much money, but the story involves lots of technology and outer space effects. What do you do? You could use your imagination and shoot in darkness with lots of odd angles and perspectives, like Mario Bava's sci-fi masterpiece Planet of the Vampires (1965). But that would raise all kinds of questions about how to present the chimps. You could do a hand-drawn animated cartoon, something like Persepolis, for comparatively little money. But that would expose the fact that you really don't have much of an idea. So you decide to make a big, computer-animated film, make it fast, fill it with annoying jokes and hope no one notices how cheap and unfinished it looks. But what you don't do is open it three weeks after the astonishing WALL-E so that everyone notices the difference.

Space Chimps comes from the folks who brought you the universally despised animated film Happily N'Ever After (2006), and although I didn't see the earlier film, I'm told Space Chimps represents something of an improvement. Regardless, everything here has a kind of mechanical sheen rather than organic textures, and it feels like something closer to Tron than a cartoon about monkeys. Then comes the story: Ham (voiced by Andy Samberg) is the grandson of a famous chimp astronaut, who actually went into space. The younger Ham works at the circus, getting himself shot out of cannons. In the film's opening scene, he rockets toward the moon and reaches out for it, disappointed when gravity's pull inevitably begins dragging him back toward Earth.

I'm slightly mistrustful of titles that include exclamation points. They always remind me of the musical version of The Elephant Man, Elephant!, in The Tall Guy ("... there's an angel with big eeears..."). But in the case of Mamma Mia!, I'm actually surprised the title only included one exclamation point -- you can imagine the filmmakers or the creators of the stage version embracing even more emphatic punctuation, just to let you know that This! Is a Musical! And also Wacky!! As if chorus lines of men in flippers, Meryl Streep waving a feather boa, and enough ABBA music to sate the leads of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert wouldn't have clued you in.

The movie, like the stage musical it's adapted from, is essentially and unabashedly an extended gimmick -- an excuse to sing and perform songs that originated from the Swedish musical group ABBA. Characters spontaneously burst into song not because they're aspiring performers (Chicago), or because their singing is meant as a melodious soliloquy (Sweeney Todd), but because the situation or their emotional state reminds them of an ABBA song (sometimes more tangentially than others), and they decide to share it with everyone. I've had friends like this in real life, although that seems to have been a college-age thing.

A little over a year ago, I was assigned a "Cinematical Seven" on the most overrated actors in Hollywood. I stand by five of my choices, but things have changed for two of the others. Heath Ledger (#4) was one, and his amazing performances in both I'm Not There and The Dark Knight proved me wrong, not to mention that he's no longer alive to be overrated, underrated or any kind of rated. The other was Ben Kingsley (#1). For some reason I have seen five Ben Kingsley movies in the past three months. Seeing such a wide range of performance in such a short time has caused me to re-think my opinion on him. The first Kingsley film I saw this year was The Wackness (31 screens), as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. I didn't much like the film; I found it to be a rather bland, tame coming-of-age picture disguised as a daring snapshot-of-an-era movie. And Kingsley's performance as a pot-smoking shrink struck me as yet another piece of overacting, with lots of weird pauses and run-on sentences in his dialogue.

His turn as the villain in War, Inc. (20 screens) didn't fare much better. I liked the film, but strapped to a wheelchair, his immobile body only increased his tendency to overdo it in his line readings. The third movie, Transsiberian (opening this week on 2 screens), proved somewhat more interesting. He played a Russian narcotics detective, complete with an accent, but somehow his performance perfectly clicked with that sturdy suspense film. The fourth film, The Love Guru (over 400 screens), was by far the worst of the lot but also proved the most revealing.

Emily Mortimer, 36, first popped onto the radar as Hugh Grant's only decent bind date in Notting Hill (1999). She couldn't compare with movie star Julia Roberts, but she had a cute, unassuming quality; she could grow on you. And she grew on moviegoers throughout the rest of the decade, in Wes Craven's Scream 3 (2000), Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost (2000), Stephen Fry's Bright Young Things (2003), Woody Allen's Match Point (2005) and David Mamet's recent Redbelt, as well as switch-hitting between oddities like The Pink Panther and Lars and the Real Girl. If she once had a sweet, shy quality, she eventually shattered it by appearing naked -- and hugely vulnerable -- in Nicole Holofcener's Lovely & Amazing and brandishing a big gun and an even bigger attitude in Ronny Yu's Formula 51. Her role in Brad Anderson's new thriller Transsiberian -- co-starring Woody Harrelson and Ben Kingsley -- draws on all that experience. She plays Jessie, a former bad girl now doubtfully married to a church-going, happy-go-lucky train nut. After a peace mission in China, they take the title train and wind up entrenched in drugs, murder and other unforeseen troubles. The charming Ms. Mortimer recently spoke to Cinematical in an all-too-brief, yet enjoyable phone conversation.

Jason Freeland's Garden Party plays a bit like Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), taking a look at a cross-section of Los Angeles characters, though it runs less than half the length and, conversely, half the depth. The movie also reminded me a little of that early scene in Billy Wilder's Sabrina (1954), wherein the titular heroine secretly watches a swank Los Angeles party from a safe distance, imagining what it must be like to be there. Likewise, sophomore writer/director Freeland (Brown's Requiem) doesn't quite feel like the host of this particular "garden party," but rather like the party's Sabrina, secretly spying from the sidelines. The film feels a bit removed, unwilling or unable to muster the courage to party crash, to really engage its characters.

Garden Party starts with April (Willa Holland), a beautiful 15 year-old with an Avril Lavigne look, who tries to escape from her lascivious stepfather by acquiring a fake ID and posing for nude internet photos for cash. Then we meet Sally St. Clair (Vinessa Shaw, who played the prostitute "Domino" in Eyes Wide Shut), a successful, controlling and backstabbing realtor. She keeps a greenhouse full of prime pot that she uses to close deals, and her assistant Nathan (Alexander Cendese) is at her beck and call 24/7. Nathan drives her car, stays in her house and looks after her garden. He smokes too much pot, is confused about his sexuality and seems to have forgotten why he came to the City of Angels in the first place. Todd (Richard Gunn) is an independently wealthy artist who lives in the house he grew up in. He's obsessed with Sally, whose old, nude photos he has admired on the Internet. By chance he meets her in a parking lot and endears himself to her by removing gum from her expensive shoe.

Imagine one of the Star Trek crews transported to Tolkien's Middle Earth, or Buffy and her Scooby gang whisked away into the heart of Narnia. That's how Hellboy II: The Golden Army can feel, as you watch a cartoonish-looking, cigar-smoking demon fight gorgeous creatures right out of ancient folklore (and one Miyazaki-esque nature deity). Your reaction to such a contrast -- as fascinating, jarring or downright repellent -- will likely influence your feelings about the latest film from Guillermo del Toro, a sequel to his 2004 adaptation of Mike Mignola's graphic novels. The writer-director's previous film, Pan's Labyrinth, was a favorite of mine, and while Hellboy II doesn't quite measure up to that film's richness of character and story, it is still visually extraordinary.

I came into this film entirely ignorant of the Hellboy universe ... much like with Sex and the City, although it seems bizarre to compare Mignola's characters to Candace Bushnell's. I haven't read the graphic novels and I hadn't even seen the first movie (it was impossible to find a rental DVD of Hellboy in Austin last week, which may bode well for the popularity of the sequel). And yet, unlike Sex and the City, I didn't feel as though I must have missed something in order to fully appreciate the film. Hellboy II gives us virtually no backstory on its main characters, but that's not necessary, as the setup becomes obvious almost immediately. Sure, there were a few scenes where the comic-book fans were laughing and I didn't get the joke, but it didn't bother me and I never felt lost or confused.

Here's one of my dirty little secrets: I love lists and I keep track of my year's ten best movies all year long. Most other critics hastily assemble their lists at the last second, which is partly why so many December movies dominate; critics can't remember what they've seen earlier in the year. My list shows that 2008 has had a pretty poor first half, but I do have some contenders for listhood. Two movies are currently competing for the top spot, though I need to see them both again to be sure. Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon (6 screens) is one; it has a lovely, laid-back, observant quality and feels less severe than some of Hou's other recent films. But I haven't yet decided if the film is a comedy or a tragedy. It all feels pretty light and insignificant, except for the saddest thing: no one seems to notice the red balloon of the title, drifting around Paris, unable to find a boy like Pascal to love it. The film also contains the year's most vibrant performance: Juliette Binoche playing a frenzied single mom working with a puppet troupe.

Back in the old days, moviegoers used to get a cartoon before every movie. A lot of the classic Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry, Droopy, Popeye, Superman & Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons that many of us grew up watching on TV were once savored on the big screen. Eventually filmmakers began cranking out cartoons much more cheaply for television, and it was the end of an era -- almost. In recent years, Spike & Mike's touring cartoon festival has been a big success and other cartoon festivals have joined in. Earlier this year the five Oscar-nominated animated shorts opened in theaters, although together they ran nearly two hours. The new The Animation Show 4 collects some 18 shorts and series and runs less than 90 minutes. (See official site.)

Curator Mike Judge, the gentleman behind "Beavis & Butthead" and "King of the Hill," is definitely a man who likes his cartoons to get to the point, and so the three longest shorts here run about 7 minutes apiece. Steve Dildarian's Angry Unpaid Hooker is one of them. When his girlfriend arrives home early, Tim has trouble explaining the angry unpaid hooker sitting on his couch. The befuddled Tim will go on to star in his own series, "The Life and Times of Tim." Another epic is This Way Up, from the team of Smith & Foulkes. In it, a pair of long-faced morticians (father and son?) carries a sarcophagus to its final resting place, attempting to keep the box upright despite cruel fate's best attempts to knock it down. Stefan Mueller's Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen and Mr. Horlocker, from Germany, is the other "long" one. A cop investigates some noisy neighbors in an apartment building, but can't quite get the entire story until the same scenes are played out again, behind closed doors. This features the greatest cinematic drug trip since James Toback's Harvard Man.