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Based on Neil Gaiman's children's novel, this stop-motion animated fantasy film was shown in 3-D in its theatrical release. Coraline (voice of Dakota Fanning) is an 11-year-old who moves with her parents (voices of Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) to an apartment in a large Victorian house. She soon meets a boy, a cat, two retired actresses and a mouse-training acrobat. But most importantly, she discovers a door leading to a parallel world that is an alternate version of the real world where everything is much more interesting and the people have black buttons in place of eyes.

John Malkovich stars as the title character in this showbiz satire. Sean McGinly wrote and directed the movie based loosely on his real-life experiences working as an assistant to The Amazing Kreskin, a mind reader and hypnotist whose heyday was the 1970s, but who continued working well into the 21st century. In the film, mentalist Buck Howard has been on Johnny Carson's show 61 times, but his career is in decline, and he now plays mostly backwater auditoriums. Young Troy Gable (Colin Hanks, Tom Hanks' son) becomes Howard's road manager and tries to help him make a comeback.

This is a faithful adaptation of the acclaimed graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Set against the backdrop of the Cold War in an alternate 1985, the dense, complex story centers on a group of half a dozen costumed vigilantes who go by names like Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) and Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman). The film opens with the murder of one of the costumed vigilantes, and someone may be trying to kill all of them. Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) is the only character with superpowers, which he got because of a nuclear accident.