- Terminator Salvation: "I'll be back... again and again and again..." And again. Yep, Warner Bros. thought a fourth film about post-apocalyptic crusading cyborgs would be perfect for summer 2009. This time around, it's 2018 and Edward Furlong's John Connor has matured into resistance-leader Christian Bale. Helena Bonham Carter makes an appearance and Common joins the quest to rally nuclear holocaust survivors and save the world.

- Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian: Lovable night guard Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) is back, this time a successful inventor who returns to his old post at New York's Museum of Natural History where the curator, played to perfection by Ricky Gervais, tells him that many of the old exhibits are being shipped to the Smithsonian, for storage or destruction. Daley races to D.C. where he's joined by Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams)—and eventually everyone in the Air and Space Museum—on a heartwarming journey to save old friends and defeat the evil Kahmunrah (Hank Azaria).

- Every Little Step: Wanna know what it takes to dance on Broadway? Filmmakers James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo were allowed unprecedented access to the auditions for 2006's revival of A Chorus Line. The resulting documentary weaves archival audio and footage into video of the '06 the audition process in an inspiring revelation of the love, sweat, and tears poured into casting and producing one of the most beloved American musicals.

- Dance Flick: Yet another send-up of pop cultural detritus, courtesy of the Wayans brothers. The plot in a nutshell: Aspiring stars Megan (Shoshana Bush) and Thomas (Damon Wayans, Jr.) overcome their differences (she's privileged, he's from the "wrong side of the tracks") to realize their dreams. Dance flicks spoofed include Save the Last Dance, Flashdance, and Step Up.

- The Brothers Bloom: Adrien Brody, Rachel Weisz, and Mark Ruffalo power this "indie" film with a Juno-sized budget. Stephen (Ruffalo) and Bloom (Brody) are skilled conmen about to pull off their last job. The target: quirky heiress Penelope Stamp (Weisz). Together they travel the world in an elaborate effort to swipe millions from Stamp, with whom Bloom falls in love and complicates the con.

- The Girlfriend Experience: Adult film star Sasha Grey stars as a high-end call girl with the clothes, class, and capitalist savvy to back her $2,000 per hour price tag in Steven Soderbergh's film. But staying on top of her game becomes an endless struggle, juggling responsibilities to her "continuing education" classes, personal trainer boyfriend (Chris Santos), and clients.

- Summer Hours: Olivier Assayas’ brilliant meditation on French nationalism and globalization chronicles the death of one generation and the rise of the next. When the Marly family's matriarch dies, she leaves the estate—brimming with coveted works of art—in the care of eldest son Frédéric (Charles Berling). It's up to him to keep his mother's collection intact for generations to come, but he meets more than a little resistance from expat siblings (Juliette Binoche, Jeremie Renier) and disaffected children.

Add to this two dimensional T-shirt portrait yet another flat depiction of the face of the Cuban revolution—Steven Soderbergh's epic, two-part, 4-hour-and-23-minute biopic Che.

Soderbergh does get a few things right: the film is shot in Spanish, provides English subtitles and stars Benicio del Toro (who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in Soderbergh's 2000 film Traffic) as the Argentine medical student-turned demonstrator-turned exile Ernesto Che Guevara. Casting is one of the few areas in which the film excels, but even that is limited by Peter Buchman's (heretofore the brilliant mind behind dragon tales like Jurassic Park III and Eragon) and Benjamin A. van der Veen's script.

While sure to please the pants off history buffs for its stringent accuracy and adherence to Che's memoir "Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War," fans of Che's ideology will find gaffes and gaps of character development in the script. The film should have opened not with the 3-minute, '50s-filmstrip geography lesson but with Ernesto in Argentina, a young middle class collegian participating in student protests, organizing against the government–the reason he meets Fidel Castro in Mexico City and gets involved in the whole Cuban thing (and the fire behind his desire to bring revolution to all of Latin America, a.ka. foregrounding all of Part 2). And none of Che's post-Jan. 1, 1959 operations in Cuba make the cut. Soderbergh only alludes to the role Che plays in Cuba's ailing economy in a series of poorly sown black and white flash-forwards to his UN visit. Including at the very least a montage of his hands-on approach to sugar cane cropping and government would have begun to flesh out and highlight the fundamental differences between Che and Fidel's political ideology (del Toro's insistence that his cadres learn to read and write during the revolution's downtime manages to scratch the surface) and the real reason Che leaves for Africa and Bolivia–to escape his entrapment in Castro's Cult of Personality.

What's more, even in the midst of the Maestra, Che was a ladies man, as aware of his looks and charm as he was of his thin-mountain-air-addled asthma. A brief consult of one of the hundreds of biographies written about the man would have told Buchman that. But watching march after march, skirmish after skirmish, and toothless campesino after barefoot child as the revolutionary ants go marching on in Part 1(as for Part 2, it's basically Part 1 but set in Bolivia, a dead horse whose flogging is truncated by the emotionally sterile treatment of Guevara's 1967 execution), it seems as though the writers used an equation to crank out the script: 100 frames x 12 beseechments of troops to quit/study/leave campesinos alone ÷ 3 asthma attacks = 1 page of Che's memoir sloppily slapped on paper for the silver screen. What happened to interviews with family members, Che's infamous motorcycle diaries. What happened to multiple sources?

If Soderbergh et al wanted to make a film about guerilla warfare a la Che Guevara, they succeeded. To be sure, the battles are bloody and the film is beautiful–the tight, grainy, black and white auteur-shots of del Toro's unshaven lips wrapped around a Cuban cigar were much appreciated. But to give the name "Che" to a film mostly about battle tactics is misleading; this war film has little to do with unpacking the character of the revolutionary whose egalitarian ideology was–at least to Che–bigger than life itself.

Now playing in D.C. at Landmark E Street Cinema, "Che" is set for wide release Jan. 24

The director is still looking for financing for Cleo, which will star Catherine Zeta-Jones and Hugh Jackman and feature music from Guided by Voices.

The best part? It's going to be in 3D. I'm guessing by the time this gets off the ground, Hannah Montana fans will be old enough to appreciate a little history with their OMG-it's-like-I'm-totally-there! music flicks.