Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has had innumerable radio, TV and movie adaptations, from silent films, to musicals to being performed by The Muppets.

Now, this year’s Christmas movie season gets off to an impressive start with the newest adaptation being an animated version featuring Jim Carrey as not only Ebenezer Scrooge, but the three ghosts as well.

Other actors who also play multiple characters include Gary Oldman, Cary Elwes, Robin Wright Penn and Bob Hoskins.

It is directed by Robert Zemeckis, who also made The Polar Express and Beowulf using the process of Performance Capture to create very detailed and realistic animated characters.

It is also presented in 3-D at the Grand 10 Cinemas.

The Men Who Stare at Goats not only has one of the most unique titles of any movie in recent memory, but it is actually based on the book by Jon Ronson, who investigated attempts by the US military to use psychic powers.

The title refers to attempts to kill goats by simply staring at them.

In the movie, Ewan McGregor plays a reporter who gets more than he bargained for when he comes across a Special Forces agent (George Clooney) who reveals the existence of a secret psychic military unit whose goal is to end war as we know it. The founder of the unit has gone missing and the trail leads to another psychic soldier who has distorted the mission to serve his own ends.

The trailer for the movie is fantastic and makes the movie look very funny and entertaining.

A few years ago, writer-director Richard Kelly created Donnie Darko, one of the most compelling mind trips ever made into film. Unfortunately his follow-up, Southland Tales, was just as trippy, but was far from being a classic. His third effort is The Box, starring Cameron Diaz and James Marsden as a financially strapped couple who receive a box that has a button. A mysterious, disfigured stranger (Frank Langella) tells them that they will receive $1 million if they press the button, but someone in the world whom they do not know will die.

It is based upon a short story by Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) and if it sounds like a Twilight Zone episode, it was.

The Fourth Kind takes its title from the level of alien encounter that involves abduction. The movie claims that the story is based on actual case studies by a psychologist whose videotaped sessions of patients in Nome, Alaska revealed the most disturbing evidence of alien abduction ever documented.

Milla Jovovich plays the psychologist and the movie uses re-enactments and the actual videotaped footage to expose the terrified revelations of multiple witnesses.

Clive Owen stars as a widower struggling to raise his two sons alone in The Boys are Back. Scott Hicks (Shine) directs this poignant and sometimes comic story adapted from a novel by Simon Carr. It is showing at the Paramount Theatre.

Rick Davis is the manager of the Capitol Theatre in West Kelowna.

capitol_wes@landmarkcinemas.ca