According to Box Office Mojo, Avatar has made over $2.5 billion worldwide to date. it made over $77 million domestically opening weekend. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland has been out since Friday. It made over $116 million opening weekend, over $210 million worldwide.

When cinema first became a commercial enterprise, it was completely innovative. People would go to the movies just to see the moving pictures. For a little while, there was a tension – would cinema develop a narrative structure or would it become a purely visual art form? Obviously there is a lot of art in cinema, but the narrative won out to be the dominant commercial structure.

But with the box office smashing releases of Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, spectacle is again becoming a huge audience draw. 3D isn't a new technology. But Avatar was the first movie that audiences felt they would not have had the same viewing experience if they didn't see it in 3D. Alice in Wonderland is continuing the trend of movies that are MEANT to be watched in 3D as opposed to movies that are made and then made into 3D.

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The way films are promoted and marketed has been dramatically changed by the prevalence of film clips & reviews of top indie movies on the internet. The number of web sites and blogs devoted to independent films has grown. There are no longer barriers to entry in starting such an internet presence. With this new paradigm, the convergence of personal computers, cell phones, and portable media players have replaced the studio marketing department.

It used to be that an independent film would need a marketing campaign designed and implemented by professionals to promote a film. Expensive advertising in print media and television would be purchased. Actors would make the rounds of the late night talk shows. Now independent film makers leverage the popularity of film festivals, social networking web sites, and web blogs to generate a buzz about a film. The buzz is essentially the best advertising that money can't buy.

Making a movie no longer requires large crews with very expensive equipment. Digital technologies allows anyone with the ambition to make a movie. Of course, this is no guarantee the movie will be any good. Then again, there are many studio films that are not very good either. The larger point is that the barriers to entry have been removed.

Each player in the independent film industry has a role and creates a synergy that have made the studios irrelevant. Inexpensive equipment allows a film to be made for a few thousand dollars. Films festivals show the film and the film festivals are promoted on blogs and internet sites. The film maker then gets a distribution deal and the film is marketed on the blogs and social networking sites.

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Anticipation has been high for Robert Pattinson's first major post-'Twilight' role.

After wrapping filming on "New Moon" in May 2009 and before beginning the shoot for "Eclipse" that August, Robert Pattinson headed to New York to shoot his first major post-"Twilight" role:  the lead in the romantic drama "Remember Me"
opposite Emilie de Ravin of "Lost." He plays Tyler, a headstrong and slightly lost kid who falls in love with de Ravin's Ally, a college student from a much different cultural milieu.

Anticipation is high for the film (out Friday, March 12) as fans look forward to seeing Pattinson not only as a human rather than a vampire but also as part of an onscreen couple that doesn't include "Twilight" co-star Kristen Stewart. MTV News has been following every development of the production — from casting moves to footage from the film to interviews with the stars — and we've gathered it all together as part of our "Remember Me" cheat sheet. Here's everything you need to know before hitting the theater this weekend.

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THE most striking thing about “The Runaways,” a new film about the trailblazing bad-girl rock band from the 1970s that spawned Joan Jett, is how authentic it feels. The clubs are properly scuzzy. The dialogue is properly raunchy. The actors can properly sing. The hair is fried and feathered, the skin spotty from weeks of running on little but potato chips and estrogen. From the adrenaline rush of performing to the monotony of rehearsal, it’s a vivid snapshot of life on the road for ambitious teenagers who are constantly told that rock ’n’ roll “is the sport of men.” (And that’s their own manager talking.)

One reason may be that the movie is partly based on “Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway” (Harper Collins), a newly revamped autobiography by the group’s lead singer Cherie Currie, whose chillingly quick self-destruction is relived through Dakota Fanning. Another may be that Ms. Currie and Ms. Jett (played by Kristen Stewart) put the actors through hard-rock boot camp for several weeks before filming. And Floria Sigismondi, the writer and director, has “been around music all my life,” as she said in an interview in a hotel room in Midtown. Along with making videos for artists like David Bowie (Ms. Currie’s musical hero) and the White Stripes, she’s worked in clubs and gone on tour with her husband’s band, the Living Things. “I wanted it all to look real. I wanted bed head. I wanted freckles and pimples,” she said of the film, her first feature. The words she kept repeating on the set were “raw” and “gritty.”

The rock lifestyle has been notoriously difficult to get right on film. The mainstream fantasy — sex, drugs, hard-core partying — usually trumps the more tedious reality of musicians striving for success but often becoming trapped by it. The result has been films that end up either bloated and cartoonish (see the American Indian shaman following Jim Morrison around “The Doors”), sweetly sanitized (see the intercourse-avoiding groupies of “Almost Famous”) or as road-to-ruin predictable as “Behind the Music.” But since 2002, when the hyperactive “24 Hour Party People” captured the dance-oriented music scene in ’70s and ’80s Manchester, England, there has been a trickle of rock biopics that get the milieu and the music just right, like “Control,” the story of Joy Division, and “What We Do Is Secret,” the story of the Germs.

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KATHRYN BIGELOW’S two-fisted win at the Academy Awards for best director and best film for “The Hurt Locker” didn’t just punch through the American movie industry’s seemingly shatterproof glass ceiling; it has also helped dismantle stereotypes about what types of films women can and should direct. It was historic, exhilarating, especially for women who make movies and women who watch movies, two groups that have been routinely ignored and underserved by an industry in which most films star men and are made for and by men. It’s too early to know if this moment will be transformative — but damn, it feels so good.

No matter if they’re a source of loathing and laughter, the Oscars matter as a cultural flashpoint, perhaps now more than ever. All those Oscar viewers might not be ticket buyers, but when they watched the show this year they would have heard, perhaps even for the first time, the startling, shocking, infuriating or uninteresting news — pick your degree of engagement — that Ms. Bigelow was the first woman in Oscar’s 82 years to win for best directing. Real discussions about sexual politics don’t usually enter the equation during the interminable Oscar “season,” which is why her nomination was almost as important as her double win.

Even before the nominations were announced on Feb. 2, as she picked up one award after another, including from her peers at the Directors Guild, people who don’t usually talk about women and the movies were talking about this woman and the movies. Uncharacteristically, the issue of female directors working — though all too often not working — was being discussed in print and online, and without the usual accusations of political correctness, a phrase that’s routinely deployed to silence those with legitimate complaints. I don’t think I’ve read the words women and film and feminism in the same sentence as much in the last few months since “Thelma & Louise” rocked the culture nearly two decades ago.

Written by Callie Khouri and directed by Ridley Scott, “Thelma & Louise” galvanized critics and audiences on its release in 1991. Time magazine put them on its cover and one very smart entrepreneur put them on T-shirts (“Thelma & Louise Live Forever.”) Some critics embraced its portrait of a powerful female friendship, while others denounced it. In U.S. News & World Report a male writer accused the film of having “an explicit fascist theme, wedded to the bleakest form of feminism.” Commentators seemed as interested in policing the women’s behavior, their hard-drinking and driving, as their criminal actions. Ms. Khouri insisted that Thelma and Louise were outlaws not feminists, though they were both.

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The last monster to run wild through Bong Joon-ho’s imagination was an enormous creature from the watery deep. A different menace storms through “Mother,” the fourth feature from this sensationally talented South Korean filmmaker, though she too seems to spring from unfathomable depths. Unlike the beast in “The Host” — a catastrophic byproduct of the American military — the monster in “Mother” doesn’t come with much of a backstory, which suggests that she is a primal force, in other words, a natural.

She is and she isn’t as Mr. Bong reveals through a kinked narrative and a monumental, ferocious performance by Kim Hye-ja as the title character. Written by Mr. Bong, sharing credit with Park Eun-kyo, “Mother” opens as a love story that turns into a crime story before fusing into something of a criminal love story. Nothing is really certain here, even the film’s genre, and little is explained, even when the characters fill in the blanks. Though richly and believably drawn, Mr. Bong’s characters are often opaque and mysterious, given to sudden rages, behavioral blurts and hiccups of weird humor. But it’s this very mystery that can make them feel terribly real.

None are truer, more disturbingly persuasive than Mother, who lives with her 27-year-old son, Do-joon (Won Bin), in cramped quarters adjoining her tiny apothecary. Beautiful and strangely childlike, Do-joon doesn’t seem right in the head: he’s forgetful, seemingly naïve, perhaps retarded. (When he tries to remember something, he violently massages both sides of his head in an exercise that Mother, without apparent irony, calls “the temple of doom.”) But if he runs a little slow, Mother runs exceedingly fast, as you see shortly after the movie opens when, while playing with a dog one bright day, Do-joon puts himself in the path of an oncoming BMW, which leaves him dazed if not particularly more addled.

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Ratings and running times are in parentheses; foreign films have English subtitles. Full reviews of all current releases, movie trailers, showtimes and tickets: nytimes.com/movies.

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Ivy (Zoe Kazan), present in virtually every frame of “The Exploding Girl,” Bradley Rust Gray’s sweet and tentative new film, is home from college for the summer, back in a New York suffused with leafy green in the daytime and red neon at night. Her life is fairly uneventful — she hangs out, works with some children, talks on her cellphone, goes to a party or two, visits a doctor who monitors her epilepsy — but nonetheless complicated.

Ivy’s boyfriend, Greg, is somewhere else, and his sporadic calls and awkward pauses suggest emotional as well as physical distance. An old friend named Al (Mark Rendall) is staying in the apartment Ivy shares with her distracted mother (Maryann Urbano), and a tiny current of sexual possibility — to call it tension would be false to the film’s studious slackness of tone —connects these two timid young people.

Since Ivy’s emotions are, for the most part, muffled and indirectly expressed, the movie’s title may seem ironic, even as it clearly refers to her medical condition. The threat of a seizure hovers over the movie, as does the specter of an outburst of pent-up, half-understood feeling. Both things happen, but the film is driven less by plot than by a desire to explore, intimately and yet from a tactful distance, the quiet moods and quotidian interactions of its characters.

Influenced by the contemplative, observant strains in Japanese and European cinema — Hirokazu Kore-eda’s example is especially strong here — “The Exploding Girl” is a companion piece to “In Between Days,” which Mr. Gray wrote with his wife, So Yong Kim, who directed it. Both movies follow a young woman through a period of indecision, and both respect their main characters’ lack of direction almost to the point of sharing it.

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Restraint proves a virtue of — and a shrewd if necessary choice for — “Children of Invention,” a modestly scaled, quietly effective independent movie about a struggling single mother and her two children. Directed and written by Tze Chun, making a fine feature debut, the movie offers both a familiar tale of immigrant striving and a topical look at what it means to be working and poor in America while hanging onto a badly frayed thread. Yet while the politics are there, you might be too busy choking back tears to notice.

Set mainly in suburban Boston, in a present tense that feels as immediate as last week, the movie tracks the steady, seemingly inexorable downward spiral of Elaine Cheng (Cindy Cheung), a single mom eking out a near-sustenance existence. When she’s not trying (and apparently failing) to sell real estate, Elaine spends a lot of energy chasing after dubious-sounding networking prospects, the kind that promise riches in exchange for peddling lotions and paying a hefty fee to the company. Although she looks solidly middle class, with her heels and business casuals, Elaine has stumbled badly, as the sheriff who serves eviction papers soon proves. Forced out, the family stumbles even further.

Taking advantage of a real estate contact, Elaine and her children — a solemn-faced Raymond (Michael Chen, then 10), and Tina (Crystal Chiu, then — move into a condo in a vacant building. It’s a model apartment, just for show, with no character and a fake phone: a poignant way station for a dislocated family. The condo, like many of the movie’s low-key details, feels just right. Mr. Chun, who himself grew up outside Boston, was the child of a scrambling immigrant single mom who sold stuff like Herbalife, which probably helps account for the movie’s realistic texture, from the condo’s bleak anonymity to the shabby chaos that nearly engulfs the family’s two nearby relatives, neither of whom can be counted on for help.

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When the liveliest character in a movie is the heroine’s pet turtle, you know you’re in for some seriously stately filmmaking, and “Delta” does not disappoint. Set in a village on the edge of the Hungarian Danube, this visually demonstrative, emotionally constipated drama observes the fallout when a towheaded prodigal son (Felix Lajko) and his frail younger sister (Orsolya Toth) decide to become better acquainted.

Under the frosty gazes of Mom (Lili Monori) and her fireplug boyfriend (Sandor Gaspar), the brother and sister, barely exchanging a word, begin construction on a house along the river. Their developing intimacy, however, rouses the Cro-Magnon villagers from their pig-slaughtering and vodka-inhaling, and as the film crawls toward the doom heralded by the very first frame — a flaring sunset — the siblings’ Edenic existence becomes ever more fragile.

Somewhat indebted to Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven,” the Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo displays a near-pathological moroseness and a fierce devotion to symbolism. (He: “Do you want me to make a fire?” She: “No, it’s colder when it dies out.”)

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