Dear Sex and the City fans: Cheers! Everything you could have possibly wanted in a sequel to the first film, as a continuation of the television series, has arrived. So slip on your strappy sandals, pour a cosmo (or two), change your outfit six times, and be prepared to have your every fashion craving satisfied.

Letters to Juliet is like a puppy. It’s sweet, cute, and relies on long looks from its big eyes to get away with being bad. And it’s so adorable that you don’t want to be mean to it, but sometimes you have to be stern so it knows that something is not okay.

It’s just too easy. When a film is titled The Greatest and it’s not the greatest, it’s just too tempting to make wordplay of it. But I’ll try to resist.

Attendees at SXSW 2010 were treated to a “super secret screening” of Centurion, directed by Neil Marshall, the man behind one of the best horror films in recent memory, The Descent. Marshall’s recent Doomsday was a bit of a miss, so I was anxious to see what Centurion might hold in terms of the director’s art and style this time around. The blood work and gritty sensibilities clearly mark this as a Marshall film, but the overall blandness does as well. Centurion, for all the booming, blood and promising historical context, is a pretty boring film.

Ed Norton takes a note from likes of Michael Cera (Youth in Revolt) and Sam Rockwell (Moon) in his new film, Leaves of Grass, playing the opposites side of the same coin — Billy, the academic, and his brother Brady, the stoner. The film, directed by Tim Blake Nelson, surrounds the Kincaid twins (again, both played by Norton) and the dark shenanigans that ensue when the hippie half tricks the other into returning to their small hometown of Oklahoma. If you’re a fan of Norton, Grass may be the perfect drug. The film is very much character-driven, and delivers two different helpings of Norton flavor. Beyond the stimulating textures of Billy and Brady, however, the plot is mostly mellow with occasional hits of complexity and violence.

My dark heart reflexively gives Tim Burton credit for turning Alice in Wonderland into a rich dystopian tale — one that favors weird over wonder, and changes the imaginary land’s name from Wonderland to Underland. It’s a typical Burton-ian film in a lot of ways. Fans of the wayward-haired director can enjoyably curl up to the familiar fraught palette and dreary sensibility, while welcoming Burton mainstays, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. But allow me to crush any optimism that Burton has conjured some sort of dark magic this time around in what is manifestly an underwhelming Underland. I imagine Lewis Carroll, author of the original Alice in Wonderland (1865), rests comfortably in his grave knowing Burton’s take is at best loosely inspired by his original tale.

There’s a sweetness to Alice Sebold‘s 2002 mega-bestseller “The Lovely Bones” that belies the story of a young girl’s brutal rape and killing. That same sweetness, so magnificently captured on the page, is missing from Peter Jackson‘s film adaptation of Sebold’s book.