Tobey Maguire loves his Pleasantville and Seabiscuit director, Gary Ross, so much that he's teaming up with him yet again for The Crusaders.

It's not about the actual Crusaders, as in Christians who took part in the Crusades. It's about the landmark Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education. Maguire will play Jack Greenberg, a young idealist lawyer who helps the NAACP win the case that made segregation in schools illegal.

There are many ways to describe Baz Lurhmann's directing style, but "restrained" sure as hell isn't one of them. From Strictly Ballroom to Australia, each of the Aussie auteur's films embrace emotional and cinematic excess in grand, borderline ridiculous ways. That makes him an unlikely, but also inspired choice to tackle an adaptation of a Great NovelTM like F. Scott's Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, a text so revered that movie versions can become ossified by their own self-importance. That's what happened to the last Gatsby flick, the 1974 Robert Redford/Mia Farrow tour-de-boredom that was so respectful of Fitzgerald's text that it transformed his vibrant novel into a pretty, but inert soap opera.

According to the trailers for The Amazing Spider-Man -- Sony's attempt to reboot their lucrative Spider-Man franchise in the wake of their high-profile split with the series' original director Sam Raimi -- this new take on the iconic Marvel Comics hero is supposed to explore heretofore untold secrets about who the teenage wall-crawler is and how he came to be. As it turns out, the movie's biggest secret is that it's the exact same origin story you already know from Raimi's 2002 original (not to mention the five decades worth of comics), just played in a slightly different key. But if they told you that in the ads, there's probably little chance that anyone would fork over good money to see what's essentially a remake of a ten-year old movie. And they'd be right.

It's been ten years since Sam Raimi showed us a man could swing. How does the original Spider-Man hold up? Quite well, thank you for asking.

The multiplex isn't the only place that's crowded with movies this fall movie season. Deadfall, starring Olivia Wilde and Charlie Hunnam, is one of many titles available right now on most video-on-demand service.