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Can a 3-D horror movie be a thing of beauty? In the case of the remake of "Fright Night," the answer is "Yes!"

This violent and violently funny vampire tale covers no new ground, sporting the same jokey tone as the original. But there's a quirky sensibility that we might attribute to director Craig Gillespie, who gave us the gently twisted "Lars and the Real Girl."

"Fright Night" can also boast of having the best vampire-villain in ages: The bushy-browed Colin Farrell was born to wear fangs.

But hiring Javier Aguirresarobe, who shot "Goya's Ghosts," "New Moon" and "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," also was a coup. His 3-D camera sweeps into smoky, shadowy rooms, lit only by candles or a flickering TV screen, through the empty streets of a Vegas suburb and into the garish neon of Las Vegas itself.

Yeah, the screen hurls blood, guts, shattered glass, arrows and crucifixes right in our face. It is a 3-D horror movie, after all. But the look here is as striking as any film to use 3-D.

The story? Kids and adults are disappearing. But the economy's bad and foreclosed houses are everywhere. And besides, as Charley (Anton Yelchin) says, "Nobody lives in Vegas, they just pass through."

That makes this the perfect spot for a vampire killing spree. Charley pays no attention to the warnings of his nerdy friend, Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). The kid reads "too much 'Twilight,'" just one of the reasons Charley abandoned him as a pal. He can't impress the stunning Amy (Imogen Poots) if his geek past is right there in front of her.

But Charley soon has reason to become just as suspicious of their new neighbor as Ed. Jerry (Colin Farrell) is a hunk who seems to do a lot of home repairs on his tract house - at night. Charley can't tell the cops or tell his mom (Toni Collette) or even Amy. Who would believe him, even as the truancy list at his high school grows by the day?

The bulk of the movie is Charley trying to outrun and outsmart a very clever, ruthless vampire, a bloodsucker who deals with the suspicious the same way he deals with everybody else - with a bite.

We know all the "rules" for fighting vampires, thanks to pop culture. "Fright Night" adds smartphones to the vampire hunter's tool kit, right next to stakes of holly, holy water and crucifixes.

Former "Doctor Who" David Tennant is the drunken, oversexed Peter Vincent, star of a Vegas stage show about fighting and killing vampires, a show called "Fright Night." Roddy McDowell played this campy role in the original film - a fraud who passes himself off as an expert, but is given a put-up-or-shut-up choice when the kid comes to him for help fighting real vampires.

The vamp-transformation effects are quite good, the gimmicky uses of 3-D lots of fun. But perhaps the most special effect of all is Farrell. Pardon the pun, but he chews this movie up.

As we've seen in films from "Captain America" to "The Help," spending the money on landing a very good, very menacing actor to be your villain makes the difference, especially in a movie that otherwise is a entirely too familiar to keep us awake all the way through one long night of fright.

Review

Fright Night

***

• Rated: R for bloody horror violence, and language including some sexual references.

• Director: Craig Gillespie.

• Cast: Anton Yelchin, Colin Farrell, Imogen Poots, Toni Collette, David Tennant, Christopher Mintz-Plasse.

• Running time: 105 minutes.

No one ever turns into a giant snake in the new "Conan the Barbarian."

That, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with this remake: The knowing sense of big, ridiculous fun that marked the 1982 original is gone, and in its place we get a self-serious series of generic sword battles and expository conversations.

Fight, talk, fight, talk, fight, talk, then an enormous throwdown followed by a denouement that dangles the possibility of a sequel (dear God, no) - that's the basic structure here.

And yet, despite seeming so simplistic, director Marcus Nispel's film is mind-numbingly convoluted. The fact that it's been converted to a murky, smudgy, barely-used 3-D doesn't help matters. At one point, I scrawled in my notes: "Incomprehensible underwater serpent attack." There you have it.

The script is credited to three writers, based on Robert E. Howard's Conan character, but everyone involved would probably prefer that you not think of this as a remake.

Remakes have become Nispel's bread and butter in recent years. The longtime music-video director also made the 2003 version of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and the 2009 version of "Friday the 13th." But while the original "Conan" - the movie that signaled the arrival of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a bona fide movie star - looks extremely dated nearly 30 years later, it still functions just fine as both an epic adventure tale and an admitted guilty pleasure.

There's very little that's pleasurable in this new "Conan," aside from allowing us to ogle the muscular, 6-foot-5 physique of up-and-coming action star Jason Momoa. If you're into that kind of thing, that is - he is a spectacle to behold, albeit in a romance-novel cover-model kind of way.

"I live. I love. I slay ... I am content," Conan says to the innocent Tamara (Rachel Nichols), whom he's been tasked with protecting. Not quite as poetic as one of Schwarzenegger's most famous lines: "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women," but at least we know he's confident enough to avoid suffering an existential crisis. Good for him. He also doesn't evolve, though, which doesn't make him terribly compelling. It didn't seem possible for there to be even less characterization than there was in the original "Conan," but voila.

Once again, the Cimmerian warrior is on a mission to avenge the deaths of his father (Ron Perlman, who's in no way being put to his best use) and the rest of his village. He's after the evil warlord Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang), who's after the Mask of Acheron, which resembles a dried-up octopus. But it can spring to life and provide unlimited power to the wearer with the help of some drops of pure blood - which Tamara has. Hence, she's in demand.

Khalar Zym is aided in his quest by his half-witch daughter Marique, played by an over-the-top Rose McGowan in the kind of daring, skin-baring outfits she used to wear on the red carpet when she was still dating Marilyn Manson. Marique tries out her burgeoning supernatural powers in a battle with Conan himself, but when it comes time to fight Tamara as part of the film's climax, it's all mano-a-mano. Why? Because it's sexier for them to be writhing around on the ground with each other.

If only the rest of the movie had such an unabashed sense of camp, we might have been onto something.

Review

Conan the Barbarian

*

• Rated: R for strong bloody violence, some sexuality and nudity.

• Director: Marcus Nispel.

• Cast: Jason Momoa, Rachel Nichols, Stephen Lang, Rose McGowan, Ron Perlman.

• Running time: 102 minutes.

Not a lot of love affairs, real or cinematic, can have it said of them that they end better than they begin. But "One Day" ends with a heartfelt flourish that was sorely missing from its first 90 minutes.

This episodic romance works in fits and starts, and captures a bittersweet faux British turn by Anne Hathaway, plainly mismatched in being paired with real-life Brit Jim Sturgess ("The Way Back").

The conceit in novelist-screenwriter David Nicholls' tale - two friends drunkenly tumble into bed on the night of their graduation from college. But nothing happens - so they say. He's game, then she's game, then he isn't. So they talk, instead.

"Where will you be when you're 40?"

Since they are both Brits, they note the date - July 15 - St. Swithun's Day. The book and film catch up with them over the years as they catch up with each other on St. Swithun's Day. Emma (Hathaway) settles into a waitress job at a Mexican restaurant, resisting the overtures of the clumsy would-be-comic Ian (Rafe Spall). Dex (Sturgess) takes on the guise of the "one who got away" and who keeps getting away. He travels. He lands TV host jobs.

And over the course of the next 18 years, they do-si-do around the idea that they should be together. He flails about through fame, then infamy, shallow affairs and addictions, and she "settles" - letting her low self-esteem hem her into a life of quiet doe-eyed desperation.

They still flirt. She comes on a little desperate, for instance, when she takes a London flat and Dex helps her with the move.

"I'll bet this bed could tell some stories," he cracks.

"Short stories," she cracks back.

The banter is pleasant enough, but there's a funereal air hanging over the would-be affair. Her routine settles in - "Head home, cup 'o tea, weep." He's meant to build her up, save her. "You can't throw away your life just because you think it's funny."

But there's just no magic in any of this. For a movie seemingly designed to have this wistful, romantic arc to it, "One Day" never quite reaches that opening "meet cute" moment.

She reads the popular novels of the day ("Unbearable Lightness of Being" at one point), and he pleads with her to "be spontaneous," never once suggesting that he's the sort of chap she'd want to be spontaneous with.

Hathaway is an old hand at British accents and is convincingly demure, uptight and English. Patricia Clarkson, playing Dex's mmom, doesn't have to play the first two and fails at the third - a rare off-key off-accent performance for her.

It's a frustrating film, never light enough on its feet to be cute, never heartfelt enough to achieve "You had me at 'Hello.' " Lone Scherfig ("An Education") can't find the pulse of this story, the romance.

It's a British adult version of "Flipped" in which the guy doesn't seem self-aware enough to realize in any decent interval of time how special the girl is and how he should stop letting her down.

Dex and Emma have their ups and downs, but it's never obvious why she carries a torch for this guy after she's aged out of her girlish "he's so handsome" attraction.

That results in a romance that is wistful, half-hearted and melancholy, a love affair without the spark that ignites such love affairs. And if we can't root for the couple, what is the point of the couple?

Review

One Day

**

• Rated: PG-13 for sexual content, partial nudity, language, some violence and substance abuse.

• Director: Lone Scherfig.

• Cast: Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess, Patricia Clarkson, Rafe Spall.

• Running time: 108 minutes.

A caravan of marriage-minded pioneers was the premise of the sitcom "Here Come the Brides" and the musical "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers." But the Dutch film "Bride Flight" is a melodrama set in a different place and time.

It's 1953, and scores of young women are flying to New Zealand to marry Dutchmen who have moved there. One of the few male passengers is handsome Frank (Waldemar Torenstra), who hopes to start a vineyard there. His funeral 50 years later will reunite three of the women, whose connections to him are traced in flashbacks.

Ada (Karina Smulders) is seated beside Frank, but she's traveling to marry a devout young man who impregnated her before moving to New Zealand. During a brief fuel stop in Pakistan, Ada and Frank feel the heat of their mutual attraction, but they realize they can never be together.

Esther (Anna Drijver) is a forthright fashion designer who prefers Frank to the Jewish suitor who is a reminder of the family she lost in the Holocaust. And cheerful Marjorie (Elise Schaap) is the born homemaker who soon discovers that she and her new husband cannot have children of their own.

What ensues is a soap opera that pits passion against parenthood. All three women engage in dubious behavior - infidelity, denial and lies - that a tougher film would scrutinize instead of romanticize. Even the potentially fruitful theme of immigrant culture shock goes mostly untapped.

The soft edges do make the implausible plot easier to swallow, and there are lush backdrops and attractive performers to distract us. Drijver, who has the assertive sensuality of a young Elizabeth Taylor, is a particular standout.

"Bride Flight" is a tearjerking romance that belongs to another era, when female moviegoers wanted to be transported, not grounded in grim realities.

Review

"Bride Flight"

** 1/2

• Rated: R for a strong sex scene and some graphic nudity. In subtitled Dutch and English.

• Director: Ben Sombogaart.

• Cast: Waldemar Torenstra, Anna Drijver.

• Running time 2 hours 10 minutes.