Prairie Miller

The Women Film Critics Circle has announced their 2009 nominations for the best movies this year by and about women, and outstanding achievements by women, who get to be rarely honored historically, in the film world.

Dropping the audience right into the center of a turbulent time in recent history without explaining how anyone ended up there or why, Clint Eastwood's Invictus demands that viewers take an awful lot for granted, in good faith and little else.

There are also occasional humorous surprises on hand, such as time out for a little supersonic airborne soccer on broomsticks, and apparently without benefit of steroids

Though the title The Lovely Bones is meant to conjure the unthinkable by combining the ideas of innocence and horror inherent in child murder, the movie itself fails in that regard, when it comes to the execution of the concept.

A kind of 'Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb' - but for real, The Hurt Locker is basically about a military explosives expert in Baghdad who gets a huge rush out of his job, and he's not kidding.