After eleven years the Roxbury International Film Festival looks like its going to expand its boundaries, and not just by adding the word "International" to the title. They've got around fifty titles in their program from several different countries and it runs from July 29 to August 1 at a number of local venues including the MFA, the Wentworth Institute, Mass College of Art, and others.

It's been a bad summer for winners of the Chlotrudis Society's Chloe Award for Career So Far. Tracy Wright, who won the Award in 2007 for her indelible roles in such independent movies as Miranda July's "You and Me and Everyone We Know," died on June 23 at age 50. She was the wife of actor and filmmaker Don McKellar, who won the Chlotrudis Body of Work Award, also in 2007.

Producers and dealmakers in Hollywood are kicking themselves for not rushing to get the rights to this surefire property. But the China Film Group Corporation and Beijing Filmblog Media Company beat them to making a film about Paul the Octopus, the amazing German cephalopod whose uncanny gift for predicting the outcome of World Cup soccer matches led to international celebrity (a lot of ink, one might say) -- but also attracted the kind of unwanted attention that goes with such success, namely public acrimony and death threats.

"New York Post" columnist Andrea Peyser has written an op-ed about "The Kids Are All Right" (cleverly titled "The Kids are NOT All Right") being yet another covert Hollywood attack against the traditional American family.

She might have a point. As she puts it: "this film is set to go down in history as the first major motion picture to make a family led by gay women -- A-lister Annette Bening, as the control-freak doctor Nic, ‘wed' to A-lister Julianne Moore, as the weepy, infantilized Jules -- seem not just normal, but close to godly."

I actually thought when "Inception" came out that I'd be the only one to come up with the idea of compiling a list of other dream and dream scene and dream-within-a-dream scene movies. Well, dream on. Nonetheless, I thought that our staff of cinema savants could still contribute something new and illuminating to the subject, so I asked my critic colleagues at the Phoenix to select some of their favorite film dream scenes or dream movies and dream up something to write something about them.

After a long fallow period, the swag front has picked up lately. The recent trend is for studio publicists to mail out something that is totally incomprehensible. Like a couple of weeks ago I got this metal, top-like, dreidl thing; turns out, of course, that it's a replica of the key mnemnonic device in "Inception

Not that it's ever not been a popular pastime, but beating women is really hot these days. On screen and off.

Mel Gibson's grotesque recorded obscenities are just the most recent and most highly publicized of such assaults. What we have going on in movies the past year is supposedly well intended violence against women.

It's been a couple of months since the last lugubrious screed by a film critic about the end of film criticism, and I must say I haven't missed them. So it was with weary resignation that I took a look at New Jersey Star-Ledger Stephen Whitty's "Why Critics Matter."

To my surprise, it wallowed in neither of the typical modes of previous such items - self-pity and self-loathing - but actually took an objective look (note extensive quotes from reputable sources like Tom Bernard of Sony Classics and David Gross of MovieReviewIntelligence.

Why the sudden recent spurt, for lack of a better word, of films about sperm donors and artificial insemination? J-Lo might not have done much to stimulate her career earlier this year with "The Back-Up Plan,"

and it remains to be seen how Jennifer Aniston fares with the upcoming "The Switch" (8/20),

PK: One of the themes of the movie seems to be that, as awful as this place is, there are some definite pluses, like the adrenaline rush of combat, and also the solidarity and brotherhood that you were describing. Can you talk about that in a little more detail? Do you think it's a bad thing because it encourages wars to continue? Or is it a necessary thing?

Yesterday flights of F-16s buzzed my neighborhood twice - just before the Red Sox game and at the start of the Esplanade concert - the earsplitting roar giving Bostonians a slight taste of business as usual for our troops serving in Afghanistan. For more of the same take a look at journalist/author Sebastian Junger and photographer Tim Hetherington's documentary "Restrepo," an account of some 14 months they spent with a unite of elite airbourne troops on the title base high in the Korengal mountains on the Pakistan border, perhaps the deadliest piece of real estate on the planet.

It's been one day since the opening of "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse" and so far it's grossed around $70 million (though that's still less than "New Moon"). My question: "why?"

It certainly isn't for any literary or cinematic merit, but it would be naïve to think that's ever the case. So it comes down to one painful truth: women of all ages love the vampires.