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With a promising beginning scene and dazzling credits, Mirrors looked like it was going to deliver. I was actually smiling and nodding to myself that this was going to be the horror flick I'd been waiting for. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland) an alcoholic cop on leave of absence for the accidental killing of his partner, living with his sister Angela (Amy Smart), separated from his wife Amy (Paula Patton) and kids, is somewhat unstable. To take his mind off his troubles, he takes a job as a night watchman at the Mayflower department store, a gigantic burned out but ornately columned building. The inside charred ruins manage to look pretty haunting with disfigured mannequins everywhere and a ton of mirrors. The history behind the store is textbook ghost story: a lot of innocent lives were lost in a fire. Maybe their spirits are trapped in the mirrors and want out.

The director (Alexandre Aja), who I HAD nothing but respect for, flounders badly here. His first two movies, Haute Tension and the re-dux of Hills Have Eyes were above par, showing extremely ground breaking vision, cool camera work, supreme editing and lots of mind-numbing gore. Mirrors seemed like it was going to take this path. Aja throws in R-rated risks, bloodletting like crazy, but then plays it safe reeling it in, like the stupid plot would hold its own. You'd think with gore, nudity and NYC you couldn't go wrong. Instead Aja falls back on tired old horror movie conventions: slow moving flashlights, investigating dark corners, looking into mirrors over and over and quick jump scare tactics.

Oh, to be that cigarette.Vicky Christina Barcelona continues what seems to be Woody Allen's never-ending introspective into the long and winding road of love's labors lost and found and lost again and forever talked about. The prolific and diminutive Woodman has been regurgitating his New York City neuroses across the screen on an almost annual basis for more than 40 years.

The film begins and continues with a narrator. Other than the name Chuck Norris in the opening credits, there is nothing that makes me cringe in dreaded anticipation more than voice-over. If I had wanted a novel on tape, I would have gone to the Bend Library. I was glad that VCB didn't have Allen the actor in it. He has become a sad caricature of himself. But there he was, taking over an early scene in a restaurant. The character Vicky, played by the Brit actress Rebecca Hall, was doing Woody better than Soon-Yi ever could. She had the same lines, tensions, the facial expressions, the fears, constrained tone, and probably the same NY shrink. Ten minutes, and the movie was burdened with a monotone narrator filling in this sketchy New Yorker short story pretending to be a movie, and a tall, female version of Allen. I moved against the wall separating my theater from the one showing Mamma Mia and pressed my ear deep into the dried popcorn oil stains in the hope that Meryl Streep's wailing ABBA tunes would drown out the nonsense Allen was forcing his actors to inflict on the six of us in the auditorium. I longed to be in the next theater with the middle-aged, cat-owning women singing along with Meryl and Pierce.

I eventually overcame Hall's imitation of Allen to marvel at her perfect American accent and ability to play a short, neurotic New Yorker, even at 5'9". Patricia Clark was perfect in her limited screen time playing a woman trapped in a loveless life of quiet desperation. Scarlett Johansson, I think she was saying something but I'm sorry. Anytime she's on the screen, I have this humming in my ears, and breathing and time both stop.