Want to avert your eyes from the stock market? Hollywood has six new releases out this weekend to numb our collective pain. Phew! The big one is Ridley Scott's actioner, Body of Lies, staring Russell Crowe (looking suspiciously like the late J.T. Walsh) and Leonardo DiCaprio (looking suspiciously like Robert De Niro in Heat). In these quarters, the buzz on Lies hasn't been kind and despite a relentless advertising push, the public doesn't seem that jacked to see it. Or maybe it's just us. Anyway, here's a handy guide to the weekend's other releases.

RocknRolla

What's the story: Guy Ritchie is back! Excited? Nah, us neither.  read more »

The 46th New York Film Festival officially opens tonight with The Class (reviewed this week by Andrew Sarris), but soggy members of the press and industry showed up this morning for a screening of Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky. The film is all about a thirty-year-old woman named Poppy, an irrepressible schoolteacher in the north of London who is (almost crazily) optimistic and upbeat even when facing down the unhappy people who cross her path...or steal her bicycle, or borderline stalk her. Sally Hawkins stars and owns this one. The actress, previously seen in Mr. Leigh's Vera Drake, will surely be one to watch during award season -- she's already won the Best Actress Award at the Berlin Film Festival.  

Why are New Yorker writers so stage-struck? Betrayed, George Packer’s adaptation of his 16,000-word New Yorker feature of the same name that exposed the U.S. government’s shameful indifference to the fate of its loyal Iraqi employees in Baghdad, is a memorable contribution to downtown’s Culture Project. It’s Mr. Packer’s first play, and it’s a trend.

Only a year ago, The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, made his stage debut at Culture Project in a solo performance of his own script, My Trip to Al-Qaeda. At this rate, Anthony Lane will be performing his collected movie reviews. And why not? Henry James was famously stage-struck and look what happened to him. (All his plays were a bust.)  read more »

Wall Streeters prop up the real estate bubble in anticipation of juicy year-end pay-outs; not since before 9/11 have finance folks been compensated for their troubles so handily.

Aaaaaaaagh, George Gurley and his lover Hilly are back in couples therapy.

Back to Canada with ya, eh? Michael Ignatieff says see ya to America, off to save his homeland.