Cross ‘Bones’

Directing his first feature film since 2005’s King Kong, Lord of the Rings honcho Peter Jackson brings to the screen an adaptation of Alice Sebold’s afterlife drama The Lovely Bones. After a 14-year-old girl is murdered in suburban Pennsylvania, she remains the film’s narrator, Desperate Housewives’ style, as she watches over her grieving family and spies in on the twisted man who took brutally took her life. Atonement’s Saoirse Ronan plays the murdered Susie Salmon, and in a dark turn unlike anything he has done before, Stanley Tucci stars as her loathsome killer. After the murder leaves her mother Rachel Weisz and father Mark Wahlberg in a state of shock, the family’s alchoholic grandmother, played by Susan Sarandon, tries to seize control and right the ship as they try desperately to find the missing girl’s body. Rated PG-13.