By PHIL VILLARREAL, Arizona Daily Star

I sort of like you, man.
Squandering its potential to become something special, the inconsistent guy-on-guy romantic comedy "I Love You, Man" cranks out just enough laughs to keep you from squirming in your seat.

You're pretty sure you've seen "The Class" before. A driven, upbeat teacher takes on a class of low-income, zero-expectation hellions. Through patience, persistence and ingenuity, he shapes their dangerous minds and stokes their will to learn.

Making a movie out of the comic-book-miniseries-turned-graphic-novel "Watchmen" is like trying to carve a sculpture out of a glass of water.
It's a foolish, unnecessary task, but sizzling-hot director Zack Snyder ("Dawn of the Dead," "300") tamed comic writer Alan Moore's labyrinthine, flashback-laden work into an intelligible action film.

Muddling through Steven Soderbergh's 4-1/2-hour "Che" is often as much of a struggle as spreading revolution throughout Latin America.
But if you're a sucker for gritty, documentarylike filmmaking or epic tales of hopeless war, it's a fight with your bladder and attention span worth waging.

"Waltz with Bashir," the front-runner for the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar, was shot on location in the mind of Ari Folman, a writer/director and former soldier.

It always happens this way: You find a secret portal to a seemingly perfect parallel dream world and its residents demand you replace your eyes with buttons.
So it goes for Coraline, the title character (voiced snarkily by Dakota Fanning) of this stop-motion visual feast.

Set in a grimy New York subway system plagued by a meat-tenderizer-wielding serial killer, "The Midnight Meat Train" goes full speed on ultra-gory rails before slamming to an abrupt stop.

Before "Yonkers Joe," Chazz Palminteri was just a paper cutout of a mobster cliche.
He was a good cutout, an Oscar-nominated cutout, even, but every time out you knew exactly what you'd get from the one-note character actor.

Stories about Richard Nixon, Batman, Benjamin Button, Harvey Milk and a kid from the Mumbai slums are likely to be front and center in the race for the 81st annual Academy Awards. Nominations will be announced Thursday, Jan. 22.
Here's how I see things playing out:

BEST PICTURE

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"

A flat tale of middle-age romance, "Last Chance Harvey" is a textbook example of how strong performances rarely make up for lackluster scripts.
Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson do everything they can to get you to buy into their characters and cheer for their obvious, artificially stymied romance.