Fourth Row Center

Cirque du Freak is something for teens, a modern Fright Night , as far as I’m concerned, and it’s a good, clean vampire fun. Two best friends become vampires after visiting a peculiar little freak show run by Mr. Tall (Ken Watanabe) and come down on opposite sides of a vampire conflict: one sides with the good vampires (they do not kill humans) and the other sides with the evil vampires who kill humans and want a war with the good vampires. Silly, of course, but this kind of goofy cinematic fun is sometimes what movies are all about. Director Paul Weitz ( In Good Company, About a Boy ) keeps the action moving in this simple but entertaining good versus evil story. The decent performances by John C. Reilly, Selma Hayek and a terrific turn by Willem Dafoe as one of the "good" vampires provide the flick with a little street cred, as does a screenplay co-written by one of my favorite screen scribes Brian Helgeland ( Payback, Mystic River, L.A. Confiedential ).

Directed by Jane Campion, “Bright Star” is not only a poem by John Keats but the person for whom the poem was written, a young Englishwomen by the name of Fanny Brawne, who falls in love with the young Keats despite the fact that the struggling poet has no income to support a wife. Their romance is not an easy one, lacking the approval of both Keats’ best friend and Fanny’s traditional family, and the three year romance is ultimately cut short by Keats’ tragic death at age 25, a failed poet, broke and alone in Italy recovering from an illness. A great romance flick for those who love poets and poetry.