Warner Bros. is relying on bankable star Denzel Washington with The Book of Eli, while Alliance Films and Lionsgate will curry favor with families in bowing Jackie Chan’s The Spy Next Door.

Alliance is sending Spy, about a former CIA agent who has to babysit his girlfriend’s three kids, to 168 screens in Canada on Friday, while it bows on 2,800 screens stateside. The post-apocalyptic Eli will settle on a reported 3,000 U.S. screens, and follows a lone man as he fights to protect a sacred book that holds the secrets to saving mankind.

Countering Spy and Eli is Peter Jackson’s big-screen adaptation of Alice Sebold’s best-selling novel The Lovely Bones, which expands to 2,400 screens via Paramount. The drama stars Mark Wahlberg, Susan Sarandon and Stanley Tucci, and follows the aftermath of a young girl’s murder as she watches her family and killer from heaven.

Also opening Friday:

• Mongrel Media bows 2009 Palme d’Or winner The White Ribbon from Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke at Toronto’s Cumberland and Sheppard Grande theaters. The film, about strange events in a northern German town pre-World War One, expands to Vancouver next week, followed by Calgary, Edmonton and Montreal on Feb. 5.

• Union Pictures has Winnipeg director Gary Yates’ heist film High Life, which bowed at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, playing on one screen each in Toronto and Winnipeg, with plans to expand to Kelowna, Montreal and Calgary in the coming weeks.

• Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu’s drama Police, Adjective will play at Toronto’s Royal courtesy of Films We Like. The film also screened at TIFF, and follows an undercover cop who refuses to arrest a young man for offering drugs to his friends.