For quite some time, the supernatural thriller Passengers -- starring Anne Hathaway as a grief counselor working with survivors of a plane crash (among them, Patrick Wilson) who begin to vanish -- had been quietly set on opening this Friday, September 5th.

However, as the date neared without any sign of a poster, a trailer, anything, I began rooting around the IMDb message boards and was about to post a Spanish-language trailer, complete with accompanying amateur translation, when along came a legit trailer (by way of Reelz Channel), a real poster (courtesy of IMP Awards), and a new date of October... well, just October for now.

Given his knack for ensemble dramas such as Nine Lives and Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her, director Rodrigo Garcia seems to be a curious pick for the material, as the focus is less on what's happened to the group as a whole and more on Hathaway and Wilson investigating one another. Otherwise, the vibe I'm getting here is the one I had from 2004's The Forgotten: it has just enough of a hook to get me to watch it, but I doubt that the pay-off will live up to it.

What do you guys think? Will September's Lakeview Terrace and October's Rachel Getting Married satisfy your Wilson and Hathaway jones, respectively? And facing this Halloween's mainstream horror fare, is Sony, under the Tri-Star banner, about to dump this in a limited amount of theaters as they had with, say, Wind Chill, which just happened to star Prada pal Emily Blunt?

It's an awesome week for DVD collectors: new box sets devoted to Stanley Kubrick and Mario Bava; new Criterion Collection versions of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, Terence Malick's Days of Heaven and John Huston's Under the Volcano; new editions of Russian silent classic Battleship Potemkim, Brit schoolboy classic O Lucky Man!, horror "classic" Hellraiser, bizarre and wondrous animation Fantastic Planet and the first appearance of paranoid conspiracy thriller Executive Action on DVD.

On the indie side of things, Wild Style gets a 25th Anniversary Edition from Rhino. Director Charlie Ahearn captured rap in its South Bronx infancy, expressed in words, music, dance and subway graffiti. This is a vital, exciting doc. The latest DVD features an audio commentary plus bonus material and deleted scenes provided by Ahearn.

Dog Bite Dog (pictured) is a terrific, ferocious, dark and dank Hong Kong action pic that taps into the worst impulses of cops chasing criminals. It's a throwback to early 90s adult thrillers ("Category III" by Hong Kong rating standards) with standout performances by Sam Lee as an insanely dedicated inspector and Edison Chen as a feral, imported assassin. Cheang Pou-Soi directed. Dragon Dynasty's two-disk special edition features audio commentary by Chen and industry vet Bey Logan and five "making of" features. Note that Dragon Dynasty rental editions, featured exclusively at Blockbuster, only include one disk.

Coming of age tale Nearing Grace features Gregory Smith as a likable hero, Jordana Brewster as a teen vixen, and David Morse and David Moscow as family members falling apart . It's a modest period drama, set in 1978, with modest charms that never transcends its familiar premise, but is pleasant viewing if you're in a nostalgic mood or a fan of the actors. Look for the DVD from Vivendi Visual Entertainment.

The good kid Kale (Shia LaBeouf) loves his ma and pops. After a terrible, grisly tragedy, the kid becomes an unstable and volatile jerk -- punching teachers and being a spoiled brat to his struggling mom. He gets 3 months of house arrest for the teacher assault, and after ma (Carrie Anne Moss) gets tough, taking away all of his expensive toys, Kale starts spying on his neighbors. He falls for the cute, new neighbor Ashley (Sarah Roemer) -- who looks like Ellen Pompeo and spends much of the movie showing off her assets. But not all of Kale's window entertainment is fun. He starts to think that his other neighbor, Mr. Turner (David Morse), might be a serial killer on the loose. Getting the help of Ashley and his best friend, Ronnie (Aaron Yoo), Kale decides to spy.

While it all sounds like it could make for a fun flick, Disturbia is only disturbing in how not scary it is, and how many simple changes could've been made to make the thriller palatable. Sure, the film has good parts -- I particularly loved his party payback that involved reorganizing his stereo and turning up the iPod as a nice, romantic song played. But beyond that, the film is a sloppy movie trying to be Rear Window, Cherish and Say Anything.

I can suspend a lot of disbelief for a film, but sometimes, you just shouldn't have to. When watching a film about voyeurs, you should at least get the basics -- a kid who knows how to spy. Time after time, Kale and his friends spy during the evening, all the lights on and not one curtain drawn. He learns nothing each and every time someone catches him spying -- he doesn't pull the curtains; he doesn't turn off the lights. Instead, he stands in his window, illuminated by a number of lamps, openly spying on people. And this is the same kid who later re-wires a camcorder. Right.

Take a big splash of Rear Window, a tiny pinch of Fright Night and ... a guy stuck in his home thanks to a house arrest anklet ... and you've got Disturbia, an impending thriller that MIGHT have been half-decent if the brand-new trailer didn't give away all the good stuff.

Shia LaBeouf stars as a young man sentenced to three months of house arrest, so he does what any normal guy would do. No, not movies or books or Xbox ... he starts spying on the whole neighborhood! And since one of the guy's neighbors is played by David Morse, you just know there's going to be a big dose of no-goodness goin' down in suburbia.

The liberally borrowed plot structure and spoiler-happy trailer aside, I can still admit a small sense of anticipation for this movie. I've always been a big David Morse fan, plus Carrie-Anne Moss is also part of the equation. Moreover, the director is D.J. Caruso, whose last three movies were Two for the Money, Taking Lives and The Salton Sea -- two of which I enjoyed quite a bit. (The goofily-titled Disturbia opens on April 13.)

I know there are some people who are impressed rather than deeply disturbed by Dakota Fanning and her freakishly adult ways, but I'm just not one of them. Don't get me wrong, I know the girl is a really good actress and all, but when I look into her eyes, I see someone who is much older than I am and I gotta say, it's creepy. Anyway, for you fans who have been jonesing to see the girl ever since Dreamer wandered off the screens, you've not only got Charlotte's Web coming out in December, but also a new, untitled project that is going to be a hell of a lot more exciting than a movie about a spider and a pig.

According to Variety, this new project is a doozy: It's set in the 1960s, and Fanning will star as (ready?) "a precocious girl who overcomes the negative effects of abuse by singing and dancing like Elvis." Oh. My. God. Could anything be more difficult to pull off? Seriously, this is the sort of thing that, on the 95% chance it doesn't work, could be a career killer -- within a matter of days, our Dakota could go from being the greatest child actress since Jodie Foster to "the girl in that awful Elvis movie." That said, of course, if it works we will all be bowing down and welcoming our new ruler, Queen Fanning.

Starring alongside the hopefully sideburned, jumpsuited (though I fear the 1960s is too early for that Elvis) Dakota will be Robin Wright Penn and David Morse; the movie just started filming under the direction of writer-producer Deborah Kampmeier.

It took me a long time to appreciate the western. I had no interest in John Wayne or "The Man with No Name" or gunfights at high noon. It all seemed a bit hokey to me. I think the first time I actually gave it fair attention I was in my mid-20s, when I pretty much forced myself to watch the classics, such as The Searchers, High Noon, Stagecoach and The Wild Bunch.

The same is or would be true for most people of my generation. The western has little significance to anyone born in the last 35 years, not just because the genre was pretty much invisible from the mid-70s to the early 90s and has been scarce still since, but also because its conventions have become more clichés than standards, and because new perspectives on its subject matter have weakened its glorification. Today films set in the same time period are more likely to be categorized as and have the appeal of historical fiction rather than that dead brand of "cowboys and Indians."

• Bukowski: Born in to This - There is a morbidly fascinating fly-on-the-wall vibe that pervades John Dullaghan's profile of the late Beat writer Charles Bukowski, a base familiarity that parallels the Ham On Rye author's own inimitable hard-lived life and style. Epic in scope (and length), first-time director Dullaghan compiles dozens of meticulously screened hours of archival footage, coupling the best of it with new interviews with Bukowski survivors to present a terrifically real character study of a little-studied real character. The watchable Chuck-alike Happy Hour, starring Anthony LaPaglia as a booze-addled writer, is also just out.