I’m off to Los Angeles this afternoon — don’t worry, I’ll be back before you know it — but it’s still a Friday and there are still movies opening, so I’m doing right by you all. See?

“Down Terrace“: Ben Wheatley’s impressive feature debut plays like an episode of the grim Britcom “Early Doors”, if the characters were all psychopaths with hair-trigger tempers. That’s a good thing.

“Monsters“: If someone saw “Cloverfield” and “District 9” and decided to make a politically aware giant-monster movie on the cheap … well, there’s no “if” about it. That’s exactly what Garth Edwards did. And it kinda sucks, I’m afraid.

“127 Hours“: Danny Boyle’s frenetic survival story casts James Franco as Aron Ralston, the hiker who spent five days trapped under a boulder in a Utah canyon before escaping in a particularly horrible way. Franco is terrific; so is the movie.

“Skyline”: Aliens use space hypnosis to pull people into their hovering ships, or something. No press screenings, and it’s from the guys who made “Alien vs. Predator: Requiem:, so I think we all know what’s going on here.

“Unstoppable“: Look, every Tony Scott movie since “Man on Fire” has been a runaway train in some form or another, so this whole affair seems kinda redundant. Spoiler alert: It’s stoppable.

And don’t forget “Morning Glory“, “I Wish I Knew” and “Kisses“, which also opened this week and all have their strong points. Okay, a strong point for “Morning Glory” is that it’s passable instead of terrible, but even so.