It's called Tell No One. It's out on DVD and Blu-ray today. And it's not to be missed. The film is based on a bestseller by Harlan Coben, the gifted mystery writer best known for a series of crime novels featuring sports agent turned investigator Myron Bolitar (Long Lost, just out today, is the ninth in the Bolitar series). Tell No One, a stand-alone Coben novel, was published in 2001 and involved a doctor who can't get over the murder of his wife eight years after the fact. Channeling Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo and the grief that twists the James Stewart character, Tell No One seemed a natural for Hollywood, what with its shocking twists, turns and reversals. But Hollywood dropped the ball, as usual. It took the French, in this case the young Gallic director Guillaume Canet, to see the potential in the material. The result on screen is a thriller that truly thrills. Don't be scared off because Tell No One is in French with English subtitles. You won't be able to resist the pull of the movie, which makes the trip from America to France without losing the riveting action and haunting romance that Coben instilled in the tale. The DVD offers the option of a version of the movie dubbed into English which is so bad it damn near kills the suspense. Skip it. Delete it from your consciousness. Pretend it's not there. This movie is too good to screw with its nuances. Canet packs the film with the pleasures of the unexpected. Francois Cluzet is the film's grieving heart as Alex, the pediatrician who is jolted by a video Web Site that seems to show his wife Margot (Marie-Josée Croze) among the living. An e-mail containing the link to the video contains a terse warning: "tell no one." Trust me, you'll be hooked. The acting is uniformly first-rate. Take special note of Kristin Scott Thomas as a lesbian married to Alex's sister, François Berléand as a sly cop, the director himself as a stud with dark secrets, and Jean Rochefort and André Dussollier as two fathers too devoted to their children. Tell No One, which looks vivid on Blu-ray, pays off in ways the current thriller, Duplicity, does not. Duplicity piles on tricks that lead to a limp climax. Tell No One races to an ending that will keep you up nights.

No one's surprised that Monsters Vs. Aliens is No. 1 at the box-office with a $58 million weekend take. 3-D movies seem to be getting audiences off their couches and off to the multiplex. The problem? Except for Seth Rogen's hilarious voicing of BOB the blob, 3-D is really all this movie has. Box-office is up a huge 40 percent over the same weekend last year. The economy is in the toilet yet people are going out to the movies in record numbers.

One major exception is Duplicity, the sassy caper that suffers from an overcomplicated plot. This was supposed to be the movie that brought back the Julia Roberts heat. Guess not. It took in a measly $7 million. Many pundits are claiming this marks the end of Roberts' power to open a movie and the end of her big paydays. What do you think?

The major surprise for me this weekend is the boffo $23 million take of The Haunting in Connecticut, a ghost story almost totally devoid of scares. Except for the scene with the eyelids being removed from dead bodies—that's a keeper! The mom and dad in the movie, played by Virginia Madsen and Martin Donovan (please, guys, fire your agents!) have moved their family into a house that used to be a mortuary. Every stupid scare tactic from The Amityville Horror to The Sixth Sense has been ripped off and sucked dry of all originality. I actually paid to see this crap on Friday. Did you? If you want to read about my experience with Haunting at the multiplex, follow me on Twitter.

Photo:The CW / Andrew Eccles

Confession: I love Gossip Girl. There, I said it.

I have film critic friends who love it too, though the loathsome snobs won’t admit they even watch TV. Screw them. Who doesn’t enjoy watching the rich enjoying their privileges? The economy is broken. We need the escape. GG is accused of being morally irresponsible. I should hope so. Blake Lively as Serena Van Der Woodsen (S, for short) and Leighton Meester as her best frenemy forever Blair Waldorf (B to intimates)—that’s them licking an ice-cream dildo on the current RS cover—negotiate their acrobatic teen hookups like oversexed Wallendas.

OK, Gossip Girl is not even in hailing distance of TV’s Top 10. So what? Thanks to rabid DVR-ing and a brisk business on iTunes, the show is the “one and only source into the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s élite.” Even when an episode stumbles by skimping on Ed Westwick’s deliciously vile, 17-year-old billionaire Chuck Bass in favor of the humdrum Humphreys tucked away in the gentile poverty of Brooklyn, GG always rights itself with fresh displays of conspicuous consumption.

Confession 2: What tickles me most about GG is its movie madness. GG is omfg orgasmic about film. Just look at the movie-crazy titles of the shows:

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Last week, in an unprecedented move, Rolling Stone's Peter Travers put the Nicolas Cage film Knowing in his garbage dump Scum Bucket based solely on seeing the trailer. However, one angry European reader emailed Peter at asktravers[at]rollingstone.com and complained, demanding, "Where's your seriousness?" Travers agreed with this reader and last week, because the studio wouldn't show Knowing to critics, Travers went to his local multiplex, paid $10 for a ticket and watched Knowing. And you know what? The film was even worse than the trailer, Travers says in this week's At The Movies, thanks mostly to a ridiculous plot and Cage's anti-riveting performance as an astrophysicist.

Having learned his lesson about not not rushing to judgment, this weekend's not-shown-for-critics horror film The Haunting in Connecticut sits on the precipice of instant Scum Bucketry, but Travers will once again shell out his hard-earned money to watch what promises to be somehow even worse than the Amityville Horror remake. Is the film as bad as Travers predicts? Find out next week in this spot.

But there is a faint bright spot in this weekend's openings, and that's the animated Monsters Vs. Aliens.

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I've had my say, now you have yours. The votes are in from readers of this blog, who don't like Dark Knight enough, and here's what you have chosen as comic-book movie heaven and hell:

BEST OF THE BEST

THE ROCKETEER

Really? I liked it, but can't share your deep love. It helps that director Joe Johnston (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids), a former art director, stayed true to the look of Dave Stevens' acclaimed Rocketeer comic books, which debuted in 1982. And I like that the movie tried to charm us instead of bullying us into suspending disbelief. One caveat: I still can't figure out how the hero's rocket pack can send flames shooting down his back without incinerating his ass.

ROAD TO PERDITION

Also, not on my list, but an excellent shoutout for an unfairly maligned movie. Director Sam Mendes and screenwriter David Self took the film's source material — a graphic novel by Max Allen Collins with illustrations by Richard Piers Rayner — and added their own vivid brush strokes to reveal something elemental about fathers and sons and the bloodlust that seems hard-wired into the American character.

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May the worst movie win. Yes, it happened again. On a box-office weekend where the race should have been between the silliness of I Love You, Man with Jason Segel and Paul Rudd and the sophistication of Duplicty with Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, the winner is Knowing! That's right, Knowing, the sanctimonious sci-fi parable starring a hangdog Nicolas Cage in a one-note performance as an astrophysics professor at MIT who learns that the world may be ending and damn soon. With tacky special effects, a scarily done plane crash excepted, Knowing drones on like a sermon that makes you root for the world to end just to put you out of your misery.

And yet Knowing raked in a kickass $24 million as opposed to barely respectable $18 million for I Love You, Man and a deadly $14 million for Duplicity, prompting a Variety headline to shout: "Nic Knocks Julia—Knowing Throttles Roberts' Return." Ouch! Which of the three big movies that opened this weekend do you think deserved to wear the box-office crown? And how about an even more pertinent question: How does Nic Cage do it? Once a powerful actor who delivered astonishing performances in films as diverse as Leaving Las Vegas, Raising Arizona, Moonstruck, Face-Off, Wild At Heart and Adaptation, Cage has been turning out a series of unwatchable flops—you trying staying awake during Captain Corelli's Madolin or The Wicker Man or Bangkok Dangerous.

Even worse are the lousy Cage films that score big at the box-office. I'm not just talking the National Treasure films that are at least fitfully entertaining. I'm talking junk, from Gone in Sixty Seconds to Ghost Rider, that manages to deliver big numbers despite a quality level so low it's barely measurable. Am I wrong? What did you think of Knowing and Cage's acting? What drew you to see Knowing in the first place? What titles represent the best and worst of Nic Cage?

It's March Madness time once again, and since you got all the guys together to watch some basketball anyway, Rolling Stone movie critic Peter Travers recommends the whole gang schedules a "man date" to see one of the first great comedies of 2009, I Love You Man. Starring Apatow regulars Jason Segel and Paul Rudd, the bromance comedy is about "a dude with no dude friends needs a dude to be best man at his wedding." Segel and Rudd form an odd couple, but as their partnership proved in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, they can carry any comedy.

Also worth checking out--on an actual date as opposed to a man date--is the clever suspense thriller Duplicity. Starring Hollywood thoroughbreds Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, the film suffers from being too smart, bouncing around cities and through time in a dizzying whirl.

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Photo: Eshelman/FilmMagic

I didn't know Natasha Richardson for long, but her vibrant joy in life hit me instantly. She was glamorous, gifted, deliciously theatrical, and sharp-tongued when she needed to be. Her eyes took you in, and if you passed the test, you were home. That vibrancy fueled her acting, though thinking of her right this minute is painful. Her tragic death yesterday in a freak skiing accident has left her family bereft. Their grief is inconsolable. The last time I saw her we were both speakers at a memorial service for a mutual friend who had died almost as unexpectedly. He was only 40. Natasha read a Rudyard Kipling poem with her customary eloquence and grace, fighting back tears.

Still, what struck me the most about her came later. She had invited a small group of us back to the Manhattan apartment she shared with her husband Liam Neeson and their young two sons. The group included several major names in the film industry, including Natasha’s mother—the legendary Vanessa Redgrave—and our friend’s parents and siblings. They could have been lost in these surroundings. They weren’t, thanks to Natasha. She surrounded them in warmth, but there was nothing morbid about the sympathy she offered. She gently coaxed them to talk, not about death, but the life of the man we were mourning. And, suddenly, he was there again, vivid in our memories. That’s the way I see Natasha now, making an exciting journey of her life, not just her career. My friend’s parents didn’t say goodbye after the service and never hear from her again. That wasn't Natasha's style. Loyalty was. Natasha stayed in contact, took them to dinner, continued the bond that comes with real connection. But what of our bond with her?

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"You're my own personal brand of heroin," Robert Pattinson's hunky vegan vampire Edward Cullen tells seventeen-year-old Bella (Kristen Stewart), the loner from Phoenix who goes to live with her police-chief dad in rarely sunny (hint! hint!) Washington state. My guess is that the two-disc special edition on DVD and Blu-ray of last year's movie sensation will be heroin to Pattinson swooners. They made the movie a box-office bellringer, $191 million in the U.S. and $350 million worldwide. To tease the hell out of fans waiting for the usual Tuesday release of new DVDs, the sadists at Summit Home Entertainment won't put out Twilight until this Friday night when retailers will stay open late and host release parties for the DVD. (Go to the Twilight website to find a store near you). I've got my copy, and despite my decidedly mixed review I have to say that the movie, from the Stephenie Meyer bestseller, works better on DVD than it did at the multiplex. Here's why:

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It's official. With a staggering drop of 67% from last week, Watchmen, bedeviled by mixed reviews, a punishing running time of nearly three hours and an ad campaign that seems to freeze out audiences who don't know or give a damn about the Alan Moore comic book, took in a scant $18 million compared to last weekend's solid-but-not-sensational $55 million. Translation: the blockbuster train has left the station. To add insult to box-office injury, Watchmen got whacked by The Rock, the former wrestler who now goes by his thespian name of Dwayne Johnson. The weapon The Rock (excuse me, Mr. Johnson) used to pound Watchmen is a puny Disney adventure flick called Race to Witch Mountain, a chunk of family pablum that took in $25 million. Disney reports that 18% of the audience consisted of adults NOT attending with children, a factoid that scares me deeply. Get a life, people. Or at least a better movie. Couldn't you have joined the folks at Sunshine Cleaning, which did surprisingly well in a limited run? Hell, there was more action watching Jon Stewart ambush CNBC's financial guru Jim Cramer on Comedy Central than you'll find in all of Witch Mountain. More point as well. But the question remains: Who really whacked Watchmen? The movie's enemies accuse director Zack Snyder of arrogance in going his own dark way. Supporters say audience taste is currently so debased that anything smart and/or ambitious scares away the escapist-hungry public. What's your final verdict?