The scattered members of the Rodriguez family return to their parents’ home in Chicago to celebrate the holiday season, as well as their youngest’s safe return from combat overseas. But when old tensions surface, the pressure is on the individuals to truly come together as a family.

Formerly known as Humbolt Park (a Puerto Rican neighborhood in Chicago), NLtH represents director Alfredo De Villa’s (Washington Heights) first dabbling in mass-appeal filmmaking. With a Chi-town setting, such a likable cast, and a built-in audience, all it should take is an appealing trailer and savvy marketing to get this comedy to stand out during the holiday rush — though I imagine the mainstream press will be focusing on Four Christmases.

Rated PG-13 for thematic elements including some sexual dialogue, and brief drug references.

It’s 1964, St. Nicholas in the Bronx. A charismatic priest, Father Flynn, is trying to upend the schools’ strict customs, which have long been fiercely guarded by Sister Aloysius Beauvier, the iron-gloved Principal who believes in the power of fear and discipline. The winds of political change are sweeping through the community, and indeed, the school has just accepted its first black student, Donald Miller. But when Sister James, a hopeful innocent, shares with Sister Aloysius her guilt-inducing suspicion that Father Flynn is paying too much personal attention to Donald, Sister Aloysius sets off on a personal crusade to unearth the truth and to expunge Flynn from the school. Now, without a shard of proof besides her moral certainty, Sister Aloysius locks into a battle of wills with Father Flynn which threatens to tear apart the community with irrevocable consequence.

John Patrick Shanley adapts and directs the film version of his Broadway play, which can boast of the fifth-longest run in history. Meanwhile, producer Scott Rudin, who divorced himself from The Reader after a bust-up with Harvey Weinstein, is still in good shape to vie for some best-picture awards, since the buzz temperature here is climbing as December draws near. Look for Streep to extend her lead in the number of total Best Actress nominations, for Hoffman to rack up another nod (one of possibly two if Synecdoche, New York lives up to its avant-garde promise), and for Adams to probably walk away with her first Oscar. Then there’s the presence of Viola Davis, who has turned more than one critic’s head with her performance as the mother of the student who may or may not have fallen under the influence of Hoffman’s Father Brendan Flynn.

Rated PG-13 for thematic material.

Installed at a new home and school, all Thomas (Wakefield) hopes for is a normal adolescence, but being made responsible for his autistic brother, Charlie (Thomson), proves difficult. Will he, with the help of his new girlfriend (Ward), ultimately be able to accept his brother, and his unique life?

While Australia drives itself over the box-office cliff, Toni Collette, a former model, and a pair of Aussie TV charmers look to earn a smaller-scale, big-screen success. One of the differences between the two films? Elissa Down’s feature debut has earned good-to-great reviews. Another? It feels like a story to which people can actually relate!

Awards: 3 wins & 10 nominations

Hector(Karra Elejalde) is an ordinary man who’s moving to a new house with his wife(Candela Fernandez). One evening, while he’s looking through his binoculars, he sees what he believes to be a naked girl in the woods. He decides to go there just to find that same girl(Barbara Goenaga) laying on a rock. Suddenly, a man with a pink bandage covering his face, stabs Hector in his arm with scissors. Then a chase starts, leading Hector to a time machine that brings him back nearly an hour in the past. The young man in charge of the time machine(Nacho Vigalondo) explains to Hector (Hector 2) that he must not interfere with the other Hector (Hector 1) so he can go into the time machine again, leaving one Hector instead of two. Things complicate, and Hector 2 is hit by a car, injuring his face. To stop the bleeding, he covers his face with a bandage that turns into pink because of the blood. Then Hector 2 realizes he has to stab Hector 1 and chase him to the time machine, but things go wrong and his wife ends up dead by falling from the ceiling of Hector’s house. Hector 2 returns to the time machine and asks the young man to bring him back to the past a few seconds earlier than the last time (becoming Hector 3). Hector 3 hits Hector 2 with a car, so he can turn into the man with the pink bandage and go after Hector 1. After that, he returns to his house with the young girl from the woods, and hides his wife in order to save her from falling. Then he cuts the young girl’s hair to make her look like his wife, and convinces her to climb up the ceiling. Obviously, the girl dies instead of Hector’s wife. The film ends with Hector 3 (now the only Hector) and his wife waiting for the police to come.

It seems as though this year, more so than in any past year, any non-U.S. film that generates Stateside buzz is snatched up and put on the development track to Remakeville. That’s the case with short filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo’s feature debut, which is being handled by Children of Men screenwriter Tim Sexton as a potential project for David Cronenberg. While Timecrimes hasn’t received the same favorable-across-the-board reception as, say, Let the Right One In (which will be directed by Cloverfield’s Matt Reeves for a January 2010 release, FYI) it just might fare better with a slightly re-tinkered premise, if you believe one of the smarter online reviewers out there.

Rated R for nudity and language.

A young chemistry student (Hatosy) throws a wrench into the existence of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Eli Michaelson (Rickman) by first kidnapping his son (Greenberg), then exposing Michaelson to his family friends, and colleagues as the pompous, unscrupulous egomaniac he has become since his triumph.

Perhaps writer-director Randall Miller and his co-writer/producer Jody Savin deserve some sort of award for first delivering Bottle Shock as one of the true indie success stories of the year, then cranking up more buzz for Nobel Son, their 2007 project that has been lauded already as a fast, loose, and original caper flick. We all know that Alan Rickman, who stars in both films, is one of the most versatile contemporary actors, but what no one would have predicted in a year where the future of indie-movie distribution has been called into question is to have a filmmaking pair chart two hits in a crowded market without the benefit of A-list wattage. We’re stoked for the behind-the-scenes duo, and their wonderfully diverse cast — many of whom are in both Bottle and Nobel).

Rated R for some violent gruesome images, language and sexuality.