This should be the final week of utter insanity on the screening front, as publicists try to jam in as many opportunities to get their movies in front of critics before we all start running into our deadlines for year-end wrapup stories in the week after that. I've got six screenings scheduled at the moment between today and Friday, and I'll probably add a few more; plus there's a pile of DVDs I have to get through, movies I missed during their theatrical releases or would like to watch again. Next week, there'll be some last-minute mopping up, but it shouldn't be anywhere near this crazy.

So, as my December movie madness continues, here are the movies I'll see on Monday, and what I hope -- and fear -- for them:

Rocky Balboa: Oh, man, this sounds bad enough to be fun, fun, fun. A virtual Rocky beats out a champion boxer in some sort of CGI simulation, and now he has to beat the flesh-and-blood version in the real world? Take the blue pill, Rocky ... take the blue pill. Milo Ventimiglia from TV's Heroes is in this, as Rocky's son, so there's a little bit of hope for it; but on the other hand, Mike Tyson appears here as himself, which crushes all that hope again.

Little Children: How wonderful Kate Winslet is in the half-awful The Holiday [my review] reminded me that I still haven't watched my screener of this suburbia-is-full-of-secrets drama. I adored director Todd Field's In the Bedroom [my review], and I'm dying to see what he does with Winslet and Patrick Wilson, who was so creepily charming in Hard Candy [my review] earlier this year -- surely, they must make a sublime pair.

Idiocracy: I had totally forgotten about this science fiction satire -- which was unceremoniously dumped into a few theaters, none of them in my hometown of New York City, in late summer, only to quickly disappear -- until a preview screener ahead of its upcoming January DVD release landed in my mailbox. I'm not too hopeful that this will end up on any of my best-of lists for the year, but the fact that it comes from the brilliant mind of Mike Judge, of Office Space [my review] fame, prevents me from ruling out that possibility entirely.

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