What do you get when you cross the best parts of Footloose with your favorite Australian popcorn flick, a slightly startling aural aesthetic, and several engaging performances? Well, I don’t know what you’d get, or what I’d get, but second-generation writer/director Dagen Merrill gets Broken Hill, one of the most engaging teen melodramas I’ve seen in a long, long time. In a wondrous treat for the audience, Merrill’s script brings us into Tommy McAlpine’s conductor-wannabe mind through creative orchestration and unexpected visuals. I won’t say more than that… but sometimes cinematic magic is just about connecting certain familiar dots in ways that are engagingly fresh and off-beat—leveraging and exploiting expectations, rather than defeating them outright.

I enjoyed Rain not so much for its creativity, “freshness,” or daring (of which you may find plenty), but simply because it took me—in a convincing and non-distracting fashion—into a different and interesting world. Better, Govan opts for subtlety in many of the plot details (such as the backstory behind Coach Adams’ rift with her own father, or putting the story in the proper sub-tourist context) rather than a sledgehammer. The information you’re after, in just about every case, is there if you care to pay attention, but Govan isn’t going to lead you by your nose. If Hustle & Flow, as just one example, left you feeling like you’d been conned a little bit—like the “hard life” didn’t seem as hard as it should have—here’s the slice of life you might be looking for… sans the hype.

For the most part, the script makes all the right moves, and the direction strikes the proper tone in emulation of The Princess Bride. The visuals are also appealing. But The Princess Bride also succeeded because it was refreshingly original—and because it was directed by Rob Reiner. Instead, clever as it is, Jack and Beanstalk often feels like a retread. Ten minutes in, I was thinking Jack might be turn out to be a minor low-budget classic—and my wife and I enjoyed it well enough. But the film simply doesn’t sustain that level of ingenuity. As Jack and Jillian, however, Colin Ford and Chloe Moretz turn in very solid performances. (The latter will soon be a household name, I expect.)

Here’s my opinion on remakes: If there’s no obvious way that a movie can be improved, let it be. It’s for that reason that I haven’t made any kind of effort to see Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho, and why I’m wary of the upcoming Karate Kid remake. On the other hand, if a movie has a glaring weakness—say, some very out-of-date special effects—then by all means, Hollywood, go to town. I consider the original Clash of the Titans to be a personal favorite, but I’m the first to admit that many of its effects are just plain awful. Therefore, I was excited for the CGI-laced remake, even if the end result just left me longing for original.

Repo Men is based on the novel The Repossession Mambo by Eric Garcia. Although the novel was not published until 2009, work on the screenplay had actually begun as far back as 2003. The final script by Garcia and Garrett Lerner makes it to the big screen less than a year after the book’s release with a couple of movie stars and a first-time feature director. The result is a movie that had me changing my opinion about it multiple times throughout. Anyone who dislikes gratuitous violence will like the movie less and less as it goes on, but for those who can put up with it, the film has cool enough leads and enough interesting things going on to maintain your interest and keep you entertained.