In theaters today, 3/27/09

The Haunting in Connecticut - not screened for critics.

12 Rounds - not screened for critics.

Monsters VS Aliens - this was screened, but I wasn't able to attend the screening. But seriously, you already know whether you are going to go see this or not, right? People with kids will take them, most people without kids will not (except the Mormons who are attracted to the PG rating).

Harvard Beats Yale - I wasn't able to get my hands on a screener for this. But a documentary about a 1968 college football game sounds like torture to me.

Sunshine Cleaning - 2 stars

Finally, one I have seen. Sunshine Cleaning is kind of uneven. Sometimes its a comedy, sometimes a drama. It doesn't do either one very well - kind of like last week's The Great Buck Howard (which also just happened to have Emily Blunt and Steve Zahn). Amy Adams and Emily Blunt are sisters who start a crime scene cleanup business. The trailers make it look like cleaning up after a crime scene is a barrel of laughs, like the scene where they are carrying a blood soaked mattress and one of them falls on it. But there aren't a lot of laughs. Its hard to laugh at them getting grossed out by the mess ("Great! Now we're going to have to clean that up, too!") when we know someone has just committed suicide in the home.

We find out that when the girls were young, they found their mother's body after she had shot herself. This makes the cleanup scenes rather sad when we keep seeing flashbacks of the girls coming in the house and finding their mom. There is a ridiculous scene where Adams uses a CB radio to 'talk' to her dead mother. It was supposed to be sentimental, but it just made me groan.

Alan Arkin provides a few laughs, but he is playing a character very similar to the one he played in Little Miss Sunshine. The scenes with him get old fast.

Gomorrah - I did get my hands on a screener of this. Full disclosure - I turned it off after 45 minutes. So I can't review the entire movie. But I will say that I was bored by what I saw. The movie introduces new characters every 5 minutes and its hard to keep track of them. I kept waiting to find out who the main characters would be, and I suspect it might have been the boy who delivered groceries, or the two boys who go to the river and shoot guns in their underpants. If I had stuck it out, I would know. But I honestly have no interest in going back and watching the rest of the movie. Sorry, it bored me to tears.