Reuters - The very high concept of "$5 a Day" -- good-for-nothing hustler Dad writes to estranged son to tell him he's dying of brain cancer -- immediately gives rise to fears of utter predictability and thus utter boredom.

Reuters - The current election season has brought with it many different, sometimes incompatible versions of the American dream.

Reuters - Hollywood can breathe a collective sigh of relief.

AP - There's something to be said for persistence, particularly when it's plied by actor David Pittu in his hilarious depiction of Jacob Sterling, a Broadway wannabe who has been "prominently up-and-coming for over 20 years."

Reuters - We've all seen this film before -- two hoodlum friends from the tough, violent streets of South Boston trying to cope with the lure of easy money and the offsetting threat of jail time -- but we've never seen it this well done.

Reuters - The first two days of "The Bonnie Hunt Show" make it instantly clear that Hunt was born for this deceptively difficult gig as a daytime talk-show host but may not entirely know it.

Reuters - A young American woman with a past invades an English aristocratic family already in the throes of disintegration brought on by World War I in "Easy Virtue," Australian filmmaker Stephan Elliott's impish reconstruction of an early play by Noel Coward.

Reuters - Throwing inconvenient truths out the window, Lifetime's new biopic of haute designer Coco Chanel is a delicious extravagance, a telefilm sometimes rapturous in the way it looks and feels.

AP - If director Todd Solondz were to bring a Judy Blume book to the screen, "Towelhead" would be the result.

AP - "We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the 200 Wild Animals That Change Their Lives Forever" (Weinstein Books, 261 pages, $24.95), by Benjamin Mee: We may have studied animals, we may love animals. We may hate zoos, we may love them. But who can actually claim to own one?

AP - It's a total goof, of course. A lark, a one-off.

Reuters - Oh boy. Another excruciating quasi-sports/game show travesty brought to us by network television.