School hol­i­days start on Mon­day and Hol­ly­wood is doing its bit to turn your kids’ brains to mush with Trans­form­ers, an enor­mo-bud­get extrav­a­gan­za about cars that turn in to robots (or the oth­er way around). Pro­duced by Jer­ry Bruck­heimer and direct­ed by Michael Bay, Trans­form­ers should give the boys plen­ty of bang for your buck (while the girls get to swoon over cur­rent heart-throb Shia LaBeouf). Play­ing all over town includ­ing Read­ings Courte­nay Cen­tral; Sky City Queens­gate; Embassy; Regent-on-Man­ners.

Sen­si­ble-shoe wear­ing girls may well get more out of the lat­est incar­na­tion of teen detec­tive Nan­cy Drew, this time star­ring Julia Roberts’ niece Emma. A slight­ly small­er release this one, at Read­ings Courte­nay Cen­tral and Sky City Queens­gate only.

After the jump: Heart­break Hotel, Starter for Ten, Francesca and Nun­zi­a­ta and The Iron Giant.

It’s as if the gurus in Hol­ly­wood know that here in Welling­ton the Film Fes­ti­val approach­es and they’re try­ing to get the pop­corn mate­r­i­al out of the way before it is over­pow­ered by more cere­bral delights. Actu­al­ly, that can’t be true, pret­ty much every week is like this…

The lat­est in the seem­ing­ly end­less series of Will Fer­rell sports movies in which our the star improvs him­self a fea­ture film while play­ing an emo­tion­al­ly stunt­ed man-child is Blades of Glo­ry and the sport this time is — Ice Skat­ing! Fig­ure Skat­ing to be exact. Fer­rell is joined by Napoleon Dyna­mite’s Jon Hed­er as the two pair up to be the first all-male Olympic Ice Danc­ing cham­pi­ons (Read­ings and Sky City Queens­gate).

After the jump: Fan­tas­tic Four: The Rise of the Sil­ver Surfer, Paris je t’aime, Eden and Break­fast at Tiffany’s.