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Heading to the movies this weekend? Find out what's worth your time according to the top women film critics at the nation's best publications. Every Friday morning we'll give you the female perspective on what to expect when the curtain rises.

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Hide and Seek
Stars: Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning, Famke Janssen
Director: John Polson
Rating: R

Much has been written about why an Oscar winner, an already wealthy Oscar winner, like Robert De Niro would sign up for a popcorn thriller like Hide and Seek. Is it all about the Benjamins? Or perhaps the script was so provocative that Mr. De Niro just couldn't resist? He should have consulted with our female critics, who found plenty to resist in this story about a nine-year-old with an uber-creepy imaginary friend...

TV Guide's Maitland McDonagh says director Polson and screenplay writer Ari Schlossberg "scare up some authentically chilling atmosphere" but fall down with the film's finale, which "devolve[s] into a tedious slog through the kind of pointless, predictable running and screaming that give horror movies a bad name." The New York Post's Debra Birnbaum says the movie is "a schlocky thriller choking under the weight of its own psychobabble," and that De Niro is in "just-give-me-the-paycheck mode." And the New York Daily News's Jami Bernard says the "minor thriller" has an "intriguing beginning, a middling middle and an increasingly silly end."

Manohla Dargis of the New York Times finds a small bright spot in preteen female lead Fanning, saying the actress "has both chops and a preternaturally intense screen presence," but Salon's Stephanie Zacharek says the "movie's ultimate dumbness is more than a minor insult."

Female consensus: What was De Niro thinking?

Alone in the Dark
Stars: Christian Slater, Tara Reid, Stephen Dorff
Director: Uwe Boll
Rating: R

Not only will you have a hard time finding a critic with anything positive to say about this thriller based on the popular video game series, but very few of our Leading Ladies bothered to see the movie at all.

Of the ones who did, the Boston Globe's Janice Page says you should "think of the lamest horror movie you've ever seen. Now think of Tara Reid in the lamest horror movie you've ever seen. See how much worse it could have been?"

And the Washington Post's Ann Hornaday says that, at times, the movie "veers tantalizingly close to being one of those movies that is so bad it's good, but in the end, it's so bad it's just... bad."

Female consensus: It's just bad.

In limited release: Coming-of-age drama and Berlin Film Festival winner Lost Embrace delights Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum, who singles out the "brightly observed vignettes from mall-society life, captured with a low-key, on-the-run visual style," that bring out the screenwriter's "best stuff and deadpan wit." A comic touch lightens up the dramatic journey through the Bhutanese Buddhist culture of Travellers and Magicians, which the San Francisco Chronicle's Carla Meyer calls "visually accomplished and loads of fun." Entertainment Weekly's Schwarzbaum is also a fan of Titanic director James Cameron's aquatic IMAX documentary Aliens of the Deep, which she calls "a voyage that makes use of the very grooviest of scientific and technological advances." John Turturro's turn in the psychological thriller Fear X results in what TV Guide's Maitland McDonagh calls "a profoundly disagreeable guide down the rabbit hole of hallucinatory
paranoia."