DreamWork´s cunning casting of the silky Spaniard Antonio Banderas as a swashbuckling Puss in Boots pays off, brilliantly, in Puss in Boots, a star vehicle for the nursery rhyme kitty cat from the Shrek movies.

Something really bad is coming, an impending apocalypse, and only Curtis (Michael Shannon) can see it. His mom was institutionalized with paranoid schizophrenia when he was 10, however, so are his dreams prophetic or is he starting to lose it? This is the plot of Take Shelter.

The most startling shot in Paranormal Activity 3 is something even the film’s determined unbelievers would concede to be damnably effective. Suburban San Diego three-story home, 1988, in the middle of the VHS tape era. A homemade surveillance camera attached to an oscillating floor fan scans left, then right, and we see a mother (Lauren Bittner) of two girls (Chloe Csengery and Jessica Tyler Brown) walk out of the kitchen.

The slippery, effective new version of The Thing serves as a prequel to the 1982 John Carpenter film, explaining what went down, down in Antarctica, after the intergalactic thing thawed and began eviscerating humans and a husky or two.

The country-twang remake of Footloose strives to give us a more down-home experience than the original film. But is a more authentic Footloose — with less dancing, yet — really the way to go? The first one’s fun largely because it’s hooey, as synthetic as most of the fabrics worn by Kevin Bacon. It boasts genuinely charming things like the dancing-feet opening credits sequence, and “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” (Bacon teaching Christopher Penn about rhythm).

Real Steel, a tale of a boy and his metallic 8-foot man-pet, may well drill past its own tin-plated inanities and strike gold, or oil, or something. My kid wants to see it; therefore I think it’ll be a hit. So much for the science and metrics of box office predictions.

Bad things happened to Julius Caesar on March 15, proof that you should always listen to your soothsayer. But there’s more than one way to kill a politician’s soul, as The Ides of March proves, for a while very entertainingly.

It´s a cancer film; no getting around it. But the tender and funny 50/50 addresses its protagonist’s health crisis and chances for survival directly, with a refreshing lack of narrative hemming, hawing or embroidery, so that it becomes something more: a picture with a commercial sensibility and a quippy streak, yet one honest enough to transcend the usual.

It´s a close call, given the lousiness and the scolding tone of much of her material, but Anna Faris survives What’s Your Number? with eccentric comic charm intact. Dumb film; smart comedienne. Audiences take to Faris for many reasons.

Twilight alumnus Taylor Lautner makes his debut as a leading man in a film tailor-made for him. Abduction puts Lautner in motion and never goes wrong as long as he remains in motion.