WHAT'S NEW: Want it or not, Michael Bay's reboot machine has spit out Friday the 13th for a new generation — the one for whom the 1980 original's quaint, arrow-through-Kevin-Bacon's-throat charms no longer do the thrilling trick. And while director Marcus Nispel is likelier to perpetrate even more crude, quick cuts than Jason Voorhees himself, there's no denying he'll be rewarded with a No. 1 opening somewhere around $36.9 million for the long President's Day weekend.

Trailing a distant second will be Confessions of a Shopaholic, Isla Fisher's troubled, mildly anachronistic ode to retail profligacy fiscal responsibility; it faces competition from He's Just Not That Into You, but should nevertheless ride its PG-13 counterprgramming boost to $23.9 million. Clive Owen rounds out the wide releases in the bank-intrigue actioner The International, which is tracking like shit but still has enough muscle to surmount Taken with $17.9 million and a top-five finish.

Also opening: Warner Bros. gives us ocean life as God intended it — in nausea-inducing IMAX 3-D — with Under the Sea; the Oscar-jilted, critically lauded Italian mob epic Gomorrah; the Indian tandem of Billu Barber and Dev D; and the Roman Polanski biopic (!) Polanski Unauthorized.

THE BIG LOSER: Again, we're not hearing especially promising things about The International's prospects, but hey: It's a holiday weekend, nothing is roundly reviled, and unless you count last week's loser Push dropping to $5 million, things look relatively rosy out there. Of course, there's always...

THE UNDERDOG: Two Lovers, which is just as vulnerable to a Joaquin Phoenix backlash as it is to his batshit momentum. On one hand, it did botch its best outreach opportunity Wednesday night on The Late Show — not necessarily by thrusting its aloof star onto national-TV and YouTube infamy, but by airing one of the film's most unappealing clips. On the other, it's hard not to like director James Gray's moody melodrama about a suicidal 30-something Jew holed up with his parents in Brighton Beach, where he wrestles with romantic devotion to both the clinically crazy shiksa upstairs (a great Gwyneth Paltrow) and the sweet daughter (Vinessa Shaw) of his father's business partner. In their third collaboration (after The Yards and We Own the Night), Gray and Phoenix finally take real advantage of their rapport, trading crime-flick conceits for a more humane, way less self-serious survey of love's utter impossibility. We'd say, "More like this, please," but, well, you know. It deserves better.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD's this week include Barry Levinson's beleaguered Hollywood satire What Just Happened, Spike Lee's even more beleaguered war epic Miracle at St. Anna, the ultimate indie Oscar underdog Frozen River, your parents' seventh-favorite film of '08, Nights at Rodanthe, Oliver Stone's W., and the autistic martial arts milestone Chocolate.

The first we heard after the screening got out, one critic didn't do much to counteract a colleague's avowed conventional wisdom that "Opening Night film equals shite" — largely on the basis of a script that "sounds uncomfortably like samples pulled at random from a bag of fortune-cookies." But we found our heavy weaponry in Todd McCarthy's arsenal at Variety:

The International scampers all over the place, but it's alternately frantic and a little slack, with a hole in the middle where some interesting characters ought to be. [...]

Owen's Salinger is clearly designed to be the counterhero, a scruffy, stubbly, ornery maverick who's let the rest of his life slide, in his often bumpy pursuit of justice. The basic notion behind the character is fine, but insufficient psychological detail is provided to back up the exterior sketch. [...] Salinger's spirited tag-along crimefighter Whitman is one of the few roles to which [Naomi] Watts hasn't been able to bring anything special, because there's nothing remotely suggested about her inner-life or past.

The good news, per THR: "[Director Tom] Tykwer's cinematic virtuosity has often exceeded his narrative grasp. But if he has little instinct for relationship or conversation, he has a keen eye for visual metaphor." Like all those guys blowing the shit out of the Guggenheim Museum, reducing soundstage art replicas to bullet-riddled shambles? Now there's a metaphor. Get your tickets now!

• 'The International' [Variety]

• Film Review: 'The International' [THR]