Sep 23, 2005 By Lou Gaul Calkins Media Film Critic 4 min read

A Broadway adaptation (“Proof”), an airborne thriller (“Flightplan”), a teen comedy (“Roll Bounce”), an acclaimed thriller (“A History of Violence”) and an animated tale (“Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride”) are the top titles arriving on the fourth weekend of September. The new motion pictures (with release dates subject to change) playing at a theater near you include:

– “Flightplan,” with Jodie Foster (“The Silence of the Lambs”) in a claustrophobic thriller about a recently widowed mother whose 6-year-old daughter disappears on a jumbo jet during a flight from Berlin to New York. The woman is then told that her daughter never boarded the plane. Peter Sarsgaard (“Kinsey”), Erika Christensen (“Traffic”) and Sean Bean (“Patriot Games) co-star in the PG-13 picture.

– “A History of Violence,” with Viggo Mortensen (the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy) in Canadian director David Cronenberg’s highly anticipated adaptation of the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke. The plot concerns a former criminal who tries to hide from the past by working in a remote town and finds his family in danger when vicious old enemies discover his whereabouts. Ed Harris (“Pollock”) and Maria Bello (“The Cooler”) co-star. According to Film Comment, Cronenberg, whose impressive credits include “The Fly,” “Videodrome,” “Dead Ringers” and “Crash,” received $32 million – his biggest budget ever – to mount the R-rated picture.

– “Memory of a Killer (The Alzheimer Case),” with Jan Decleir as an aging hit man who starts forgetting things and discovers that his gangster employers are exploiting him. He then uses his lethal skills for revenge during this unrated import, which will be presented in Dutch with English subtitles.

– “Proof,” with Gwyneth Paltrow (“Sylvia”), Anthony Hopkins (“Hannibal”) and Jake Gyllenhaal (“Donnie Darko”) in a PG-13 adaptation of David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play. The story concerns a daughter who is emotionally devastated by the death of her father, a brilliant but mentally troubled mathematician She worries that the demons that haunted her parent may be hereditary. Hope Davis (“About Schmidt”) co-stars as the controlling sister of Paltrow’s sad-eyed character, and John Madden (“Shakespeare in Love”) directed.

– “Roll Bounce,” with rapper-turned-actor Bow Wow (“Like Mike”) in a 1970s’-set comedy/drama about a roller-boogie enthusiast emotionally connecting with his widowed father. Chi McBride (TV’s “Boston Public”), Mike Epps (“The Honeymooners”), Nick Cannon (“Drumline”) and Charlie Murphy (Comedy Central’s “Chappelle’s Show”) co-star in the PG-13 picture, directed by Malcolm D. Lee (“Undercover Brother”).

– “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride,” with the voices of Johnny Depp (“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”), Helena Bonham Carter (“Fight Club”), Emily Watson (“Angela’s Ashes”) and Christopher Lee (“The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”) in a stop-motion animation project, a la Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993). The marvelously morbid PG-rated picture, which sprinkles the charmingly macabre plot with themes about passion, greed, remorse and sacrifice, concerns a young man who mistakenly becomes engaged to a young woman’s skeletal ghost. Soon after, he’s introduced to the land of the dead, a place much livelier than the world of the living.

At the buck$ office

Love was in the air in theaters last weekend as the romantic-comedy “Just Like Heaven” took the No. 1 spot at the box office. The feel-good picture with Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo opened with more than $16 million. According to AP, the 10 top-grossing films last weekend were:

1. “Just Like Heaven” ($16.5 million)

2. “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” ($15.3 million)

3. “Lord of War” ($9.2 million)

4. “The 40 Year-Old Virgin” ($5.8 million)

5. “Cry Wolf” ($4.6 million)

6. “Transporter 2” ($4 million)

7. “The Constant Gardener” ($3.7 million)

8. “Red Eye” ($2.9 million)

9. “March of the Penguins” ($2.6 million)

10. “Wedding Crashers” ($2.5 million)

Coming soon!

The films scheduled to arrive on Sept. 30 include: “The Greatest Game Ever Played,” with Shia LaBeouf in a fact-based sports picture, and “Serenity,” with the cast of Joss Weldon’s TV sci-fi series, Firefly,” in a big-screen version of the show.