Trio of 'Easy A,' 'The Town,' and 'Devil' vie for the box-office crown

By Sarah Sluis

Following up a quiet week at the box office, four wide releases and two hyped small releases enter the fray.

A snappy teen sex comedy with a chance at the top spot, Easy A (2,856 theatres) stars Emma Stone as a high school student who gets mistakenly slapped with a reputation for being "easy." Despite such misses as the "age-blind casting" noted by critic David Noh (the leads are in their early twenties), this movie has drawn comparisons to Mean Girls and Clueless. Screen Gems ran hundreds of advance screenings for the movie, a sure sign this comedy is expected to generate "oohs" and "aahs" from its teen and college base.

Ben Affleck stars in and directs The Town (2,861 theatres), the story of working-class bank robbers who wear chilling Halloween masks while on a job. Rebecca Hall makes a departure from her plain-Jane appearance in Please Give as a "toonie" (yuppie) bank professional Affleck sparks to after holding her

hostage during a robbery. While the movie doesn't break much new ground, "[t]he robbery and chase sequences are fast-paced, tense but not overly graphic, and crisply choreographed," according to critic Kevin Lally, and "the film is so well-cast, you happily go along with the genre ride."

What's worse than being stuck in an elevator? Being stuck in an elevator with the devil! M. Night Shyamalan's Devil (2,810 theatres) serves

up shaky elevators alongside some accidental shrieks.

Horror aficionados should turn out in force for its opening weekend,

putting it on similar footing with The Town and Easy A. But could an elevator really plummet to the ground? Have no fear: According to this unintentionally hilarious interview with a buttoned-up Otis executive and New York Magazine, elevators are very, very safe.

A B-list 3D animated film, Alpha and Omega (2,625 theatres), is expected to be the box-office loser this weekend. The cute premise centers on star-crossed lovers, one an alpha female wolf and the other a bottom-of-the-pack omega male. However, "the flat picture-book quality of its backgrounds has an old-fashioned appeal but might disappoint viewers used to more pop and dazzle," according to critic Sheri Linden, and the first third of the movie is "devoid of charm." Woof.

What the New York Times cleverly called "the other Facebook movie," Catfish (23 theatres in NY, LA, San Francisco and Austin) may be the first of its kind to document how the Internet, specifically Facebook, facilitates deception. After Nev Schulman meets a young girl and her family on the Internet, he develops a romance with her older sister. Like a true thriller, your imagination runs away with all the possible outcomes, but the truth is weirder and more painful than anything you can dream up as a viewer.

The spare and sad Never Let Me Go (4 theatres) opened on Wednesday to a $6,000 per-screen average,

and is poised to ring up additional business over the weekend. Featuring a "unique comingling of genres," the movie centers on three students (Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightly and Andrew Garfield) who have been raised to serve as organ donors in an alternate history version of Britain circa the 1970s. According to critic Rex Robets, it may just be the rare movie that is better than the book. Showing impeccable restraint, "the moral question at the heart of the story is unspoken�but loudly heard."

On Monday, we'll see which film landed as the box-office topper and if Catfish and Never Let Me Go wowed general audiences as much as festival crowds.