Like Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, and Greta Garbo before her, Blake Lively has got the kind of glamorous, rarified Hollywood beauty that makes time stand still. In The Age of Adaline she plays Adaline Bowman, a young woman for whom time stands still quite literally, a freak accident in the early 20th century endowing her with the gift (curse?) of eternal youth. Set in present-day San Francisco, Adaline is a romance fantasy with a preposterous-but-amusing supernatural premise, a great cast, and a promising young director in Lee Toland Krieger (The Vicious Kind, Celeste and Jesse Forever), who’s made a conventional story feel new again not by reinventing the wheel, but by giving his all to make the best damn wheel he can.

While we’ve collectively, understandably developed a cringe reflex in the midst of the current Nicholas Sparks wave of cheesy rom-coms (a wave that shows no signs of receding, god help us), Adaline is a modern romance worthy of an honest look. Lively (and her stunning wardrobe) will catch your eye immediately, but it’s her moving turn as a girl time forgot that’ll keep you in your seat. Better still, the film gives you something to take home with you, a powerful message about the quality of time as opposed to the quantity of it.

When we first meet Adaline it’s the present day, and she’s actually not Adaline: she’s Jennifer Larson, a 29-year-old archivist living in San Francisco. In a series of flashbacks sparked by vintage newsreels she digs up at work, we learn her superhero-like origin story. Adaline Bowman was born in 1908 and grew to be a beautiful young woman, finding herself in a happy marriage and blessed with a cute-as-a-button daughter, Flemming. Then, the accident: Reeling from the sudden death of her husband, Adaline crashes her car in the middle of a rare California snowstorm, plunging into a freezing cold river. A lightning bolt saves her from certain death, and in addition to jumpstarting her heart, the jolt of electricity stops her body’s aging process. The science of the phenomenon is explained in storybook-style narration by Hugh Ross, who cites a thermonuclear law that won’t be discovered until 2035. It’s a funny little wink of a joke that helps the absurdity of it all go down the hatch much easier.

As time passes her by and her loved ones out-age her (present-day Flemming easily passes as her grandmother), Adaline is forced into a life on the run, mostly to stay out of the hands of the government, who’d most likely like to cut her open and exploit her unique immunity to aging. This brings us up to speed and back to Jennifer Larson, her cover for the time being until she moves to a new city and assumes a new identity.

While some may view the prospect of preserved youth as a dream come true (I’m turning 30 in about a month, so to me the idea sure doesn’t suck), Adaline’s found her life to be lonely and cold. She can’t start any long-term friendships. Adaline is constantly forced to deceive almost everyone around her, whipping up lies out of thin air so as to not give away her extraordinary condition. You can see the veiled torment on her face as she shoos people away, throwing to the wind what might have been beautiful human connections.

The worst part of the deal for Adaline is that she must avoid or stamp out any potential romances. Aside from one “moment of weakness”, Adaline’s managed to keep the boys at bay; that is, until she meets charming philanthropist Ellis (Game of Thrones‘ Michiel Huisman), whose dogged flirting (and dashing good looks) at a New Year’s Eve party earns him a spot in the back of Adaline’s mind. Though reluctant at first, she eventually can’t resist Ellis’ charms, and for the second time in her post-lightning bolt life, she has a “moment of weakness.”

The first half of the movie is mostly carried by Lively, as the proceedings are pretty conventional, running through a litany of rom-com clichés. When things start to get more serious between Adaline and Ellis, however, an unexpected twist shakes up the entire movie, changing the mood and upping the stakes way higher than one would expect. The sudden change in tone revolves around a contrivance that’s arguably more implausible than Adaline’s condition, but if you bought the car crash, you’ll probably be fine with it. The main cast doubles in size, adding Kathy Baker and Harrison Ford into the fold as Ellis’ parents. The movie gets really, really good from this point on, and the addition of the older cast members seems to light a fire under Lively and Huisman, who noticeably step up their game.

The film’s greatest gift might be that it harbors one of Ford’s best performances in years. You can never tell these days how invested he’ll be in any given project, but Krieger must have the magic touch. I can’t remember the last time Ford looked so invigorated. He’s not playing a grumpy man (himself) here, but rather a man who’s missing something deep in his soul and carries around a world of regret. Almost every scene he’s in threw me for a loop.

Even Ford can’t outshine the luminous Lively, though. Adaline is a complex role that poses several challenges: Lively is a 27-year-old actor playing a centenarian who’s playing a 29-year-old; she has to speak with a faint pre-war accent (she nails it); and she has to be the authority figure in scenes with Ellen Burstyn, an actor 55 years her elder, who plays her daughter. The blossoming actress pulls it all off effortlessly, and she looks like a zillion bucks doing it.

Screenwriters J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz’s dialogue is hit and miss (their talent is more evident in their broad narrative strokes), but Lively makes the words sing with her controlled, gentle delivery. She also looks jaw-dropping in the period outfits draped on her by costume designer Angus Strathie, but that’s just the (ridiculously expensive) icing on the cake. The best compliment I can give the Gossip Girl actress is that I’m genuinely excited to see what she does next.

The story takes place in modern-day San Francisco, but Krieger’s version of the city is one that mercifully ignores the tech boom that currently threatens to sand down the city’s odd, beloved idiosyncrasies. He and cinematographer David Lanzenberg instead accentuate the city’s eerie side, setting Adaline and Ellis’ courting encounters in forgotten underground tunnels, shadowy abandoned warehouses and old hotels. The foggy City by the Bay is a fitting setting for a story so hauntingly romantic.

After two movies worth of Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and his stubby dwarf friends trudging across Middle Earth to the lair of the fearsome dragon Smaug, Peter Jackson’s distended Hobbit prequels come to an end with The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, an action-packed last hurrah that sadly feels too reiterative and scattershot to chalk up the trilogy as anything but unworthy. Those who (understandably) come expecting a massive battle royale between hoards of dwarves, elves, men, and orcs will no doubt be satisfied, but those of us less inclined to settle for mindless decapitation, long battlefield camera swoops, and Orlando Bloom surfing on random objects will feel underwhelmed by the film’s lack of emotional depth.

Five Armies opens on a rousing note, with what could have (or should have) been The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug‘s climax: the vain, malevolent dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, whose voice booms out of the speakers like thunder) torches the village of Lake-town, whose ill-equipped denizens have been dreading his arrival, with fiery vengeance (and breath), threatening to reduce every inch of the seaside locale to ashes and embers. Smaug is a remarkable achievement in digital effects, almost on par with Gollum. After raining hellfire and brimstone on the poor villagers, a heroic family man and archer (Luke Evans) manages to best the beast in a one-on-one showdown. From here the film sadly takes a permanent dip.

The charismatic Smaug’s end is a fitting one (it’s the film’s most exciting sequence by far) but with him out of the picture, it leaves us without a lead villain. Dwarf leader Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) takes up the “Big Bad” throne, as he rescinds his promise to share the dragon’s treasure (whose dark properties seem to have corrupted him) with the survivors of the Lake-town attack, who desperately need the gold to rebuild what’s left of the village. They helped him get to the Lonely Mountain in the first place, after all.

The elven army, led by Thranduil (Lee Pace), shows up to claim a piece of the treasure, too, but Thorin’s having none of it, ordering his handful of loyal dwarf warriors to barricade the doors and calling for reinforcements from back home to fight the men and elf armies off for him. Then, a hoard of Orcs (and later, an army of…bats, or something; it isn’t really clear) shows up to crank the intensity up to eleven. It’s a massive, all-out skirmish for the rest of the film, and if you’ve seen The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, you’ll probably be hit with a big whiff of deja vu at this point.

It’s hard not to get caught up in all the sword clashing, giant military formations, grunting orcs and dwarfs (the elves don’t grunt as much), and other battle scene ridiculousness, especially if the thought of arranging five buckets of army men on your living room floor on Christmas morning and then smashing them all to hell in your pajamas still sounds fun to you. I’m still a kid at heart, so how could I resist a good melee? I can’t deny that I had a good bit of fun. The problem here is, it all feels very much like the open-field battle scene at the end of The Return of the King, and has inherited most of the same problems: it’s frantic, hard to follow (there are too many protagonists to keep track of), and way, way too long. It’s all so overblown that the (halfway decent) character work that builds up to the war almost feels like a means to an end, a 90-minute excuse to show you giant CGI orcs toppling over onto CGI warthogs.

There’s another issue I’ve had with Jackson’s Hobbit movies that’s as rampant as ever in Five Armies. The way Jackson films deaths, specifically when the good guys kill the bad guys, is so over-sensationalized and exploitative that at some points it feels as mind-numbing one of the Saw films. An orc vaults up toward Legolas, who’s standing on a higher platform in Lake-town. He uses his two short swords like scissors to behead the baddy and lets the severed head rest on his blades as the rest of the carcass falls to the water. I can understand how this can come off as pretty cool to some people, but to me, kills like this feel a little…trashy.

The Hobbit movies sure do look and feel like their Lord of the Rings big brothers, but there’s something off about them. It’s the little things: while some the original trilogy’s scenes glow with a majestic golden hue (like the ones in Rivendell), Hobbit‘s golden hues look more piss-yellow. (Gross, I know, but watch the films and tell me I’m wrong. Looks like piss.) But the larger issue here is that Hobbit‘s heroes and their plights aren’t all that compelling. Ian McKellen looks tired as hell in his sixth series outing as Gandalf; Freeman, who’s barely in the movie, can’t touch Elijah Wood’s brilliant turn as Frodo; Evangeline Lilly’s elf-lady has a crush on a dwarf that ends awkwardly; and Bloom’s just thrown in there to look pretty and perform unnecessarily acrobatic mass murder.

Five Armies‘ saving grace is Thorin, whose inner-struggle with his lust for power and gold is delivered incredibly well by Armitage. What bigger villain is there than greed itself? The war at the foot of the Lonely Mountain is nothing compared to the war going on inside Thorin’s mind and soul. It’s a great, intimate story told by a fine actor, but it unfortunately gets drowned out by all the noise.

Tonight, after the insanity of Black Friday shopping has passed and everyone’s Turkey-itis has subsided, the Another Hole in the Head Film Festival will be kicking off its three-week-long program, introducing San Franciscans to a whole new kind of madness, full of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy flicks that’ll delight fans of hardcore genre film (and likely make everyone else want to hurl. In a good way, of course.) The program, consisting of 54 feature films and 27 shorts, will be taking place at the Balboa Theater from today, November 29th, to December 5th. Then, the fest moves on to the New People Cinema in Japantown until December 19th.

For opening night, the festival is kicking off with Stalled, an interesting take on the zombie genre that places all the gory action in a tiny bathroom stall, The Battery, a zombie flick about two former baseball players navigating an undead-filled New England, and The Shower, about a twisted, homicidal baby shower.

Films we’re looking forward to at the festival:

All Cheerleaders Die–Lucy McKee and Chris Sivertson’s All Cheerleaders Die, the festival’s opening night film, is an ode to the slasher films of the ’80s in which the rebellious new girl at Blackfoot High convinces recruits her fellow classmates into the cheer-leading squad to combat a dark supernatural enemy. (Plays Dec. 5 at Balboa)

Face–Following a string of harrowing acts committed by college students that turned into the massacre of the Delta Chi Kappa sorority on Halloween 2012, Face looks to be a treat for fans of gross-out violence and…boobs? Sounds like there will be boobs. The film will be making its world premiere at the festival. (Plays Dec. 18 at New People)

Bath Salt Zombies–“Drugs, sex, & cannibalism!” Those are the three wonderful words the makers of Bath Salt Zombies use as a tagline for their zombie outbreak epic. I’ve seen the film, and I’ll just say it delivers on just two of the three promises. It’ll be interesting to see how an audience reacts to this frantic mess of a movie. (Plays Dec. 16 at New People)

Cheap Thrills–When a man (Pat Healy) loses his job and isn’t able to provide for his family, he teams up with an old high school buddy (Ethan Embry) to do dirty work for a wealthy couple to make extra dough. How far will he go to make ends meet? Here’s hoping he goes as far as the eye can see. (Plays Dec. 18 at New People)

Thanatomorphose–My pick for catchiest title of the festival (doen’t it just roll off the tongue?), Thanatomorphose is a Canadian film that follows a pretty girl as she wakes up to find her body rotting away (the title is a hellenic word that means “the visible signs of an organisms decomposition caused by death.” Sounds lovely! (Plays Dec. 16 at New People)

Senn–Making its world premiere as the closing night film of the festival, Senn follows the titular character, a worker on a forgotten world called Pyom, as he’s chosen by an alien being called the Polychronom for reasons that could spell doom for the humble factory worker. Sci-fi zaniness is sure to be abound. (Plays Dec. 19 at New People)

One of the biggest highlights of the festival for me will be the screening of two horror classics in gorgeous 35mm: Steven Spielberg’s textbook in suspense,  Jaws, and Stanley Kubrick’s legendarily enigmatic The Shining. In addition to these screenings, there will be a presentation of The Shining: Forwards and Backwards, which will probably drive me crazy, but will most importantly offer a fascinating new perspective on Kubrick’s classic.

Another very cool event will take place tomorrow at the Balboa Theater at 1pm, where the festival will screen two hours of Saturday morning cartoons and serve cereal and milk, all for FREE! The opportunity to watch “Jem & the Holograms”, “Looney Toons”, “He-Man” and more is one no self-respecting 90’s kid can pass up.

Another Hole in the Head runs from November 29th-December 19th. For scheduling and ticket info, visit sfindie.com. Stay tuned to Way Too Indie for more news from the festival!