Amy Biancolli

It is pure, retro-cinematic joy.

Any movie that features a character calling herself Fat Amy has a pretty firm grip on irony. It helps that Fat Amy is played by Rebel Wilson ("Bachelorette," "Bridesmaids"), my favorite eccentric Aussie practitioner of lip-curled comic timing.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower hurts. It hurts because it depicts the loneliness, anxiety and all-out quivering mess of adolescence in a manner not often seen since John Hughes' heyday.

The cutest darn thing in Hotel Transylvania is the way Count Dracula spazzes into a brilliant red devil-face when provoked. The second-cutest thing is his annoyed response to being misquoted by idiot humans.

When the screenplay sticks to the tricky business of living - trying, then screwing up, then stumbling forward anyway - it hits its mark with confidence, and the big ensemble cast responds with tight little performances of affecting vulnerability.

When it's over, this documentary lingers as a testament to extraordinary human bravery. It stands as one of the most heartbreaking and suspenseful sagas of the year.

The best scenes are filmed inside the cruiser, dashboard shots that face inward instead of out, catching Gyllenhaal and Peña in moments so playful and true they make all other buddy cops look bogus by comparison.

It all adds up to a fine, funny exercise in disheveled self-deprecation: a self-portrait of a guy who can't control a major portion of his life. Which, when you get right down to it, could describe almost any of us.

Some films are harder to watch than others - not because they're bad, which makes for a different sort of painful viewing, but because they touch on areas of such profound moral discomfort that the mere act of watching makes us feel complicit. We feel like gutless witnesses to a crime. And that's what makes Compliance such a hard thing to stomach.

What makes this whole thing work is, first of all, Wilee's ride, an elegant machine that lacks any gears or brakes.

As for Butler's screenplay, it's less beguiling than preachy.

The kid is a charmer, the message is heartfelt - love your kids while you can - and, OK, the ending might jerk a few tears, even from a crank like me. OK, it did.

The resultant spoofery is nonpartisan, or at least vague - we never learn which of these flesh-pressing idiots is the Republican and which is the Democrat - and raucous in its send-ups of the moral, financial and sexual peccadilloes of the common political animal.

The film is its own beast, and it's a rare one.

Make no mistake, this is advocacy cinema; interviews with Defense Department and military officials notwithstanding, there's not much effort, on Dick's part or anyone else's, to consider any point of view besides the victims' and those who love or speak for them. That's what makes it difficult to watch. And that's what makes it necessary.

Sweet and serious as it is, the second chunk of Seeking a Friend is the lesser of the two - and hard to reconcile with the more acidic comic outlook in the film's first half. The obvious movie referent is Lars von Trier's "Melancholia," a much nastier film in a much lovelier wrapping: This one lacks an eight-minute Wagner montage.

Doesn't require anyone to love metal, or even like it. It only requires us to laugh at it - and other exemplars of bloated '80s pop, from Starship to Journey - and it does so with a campy and attitudinous spirit that's hard to resist.

The formality of Moonrise Kingdom - the orderly structure and dreamlike perfection of it all - is as poetic as any film I've seen this year.

If you're looking for cinema verite, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a fun, fizzy sequel in a franchise left for dead 10 years ago, have at it.

The Dictator's over-the-top rant against the rank lunacy of authoritarianism deploys comedy like an act of violence; it's outrageous, quick and leaves us breathless, whether from laughter or shock.

One can argue the movie's finer points, but in the end, there's no escaping its creeping pile-up of evidence that Mother Earth is critically dehydrated - and we need to do something, fast.

There are moments of genuine pathos, genuine humor, genuine surprise. As much as the film adheres to the strictures of the standard comic-book movie, it also pops with a knowing, loving, Whedon-world jokiness that keeps everything barreling along.

The results are often comical, but Pickering who made the film in tribute to his mother, the real Linda White - imbues them with faith in something, maybe dignity, maybe love, maybe just the simple human urge to keep on moving.

That the film happens to be in 3-D, with digitized settings and backgrounds, doesn't detract from the timeworn charm of watching blob-like characters lurch erratically through harebrained comic pratfalls.

Israeli writer-director Joseph Cedar imbues his tale of academic maneuvering, misunderstanding and mystery with the zest of passion and the zing of intrigue, It's a vivacious film, having its little fun with suspense-flick conventions (including Amit Poznansky's bouncing score) that build to a climactic finish.

This is better than any of the "Twilights." It features a functioning creative imagination and lots of honest-to-goodness acting by its star, Jennifer Lawrence.

The film's emotional complexities don't allow for much of the canned sentiment that normally gets dished out in romantic dramas; what emerges instead, over several reels, is endearingly tender and complicated.

What's missing is any real menace - the signature Miyazaki freak factor that turns spirits into monsters and parents into pigs.