Shawn Levy

Because nothing says 'holiday fun' quite like an intellectual struggle between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung peppered with a few vivid episodes of S-&-M sex, voila A Dangerous Method.

It's a bit precious, yes, but its earnestness and joy carry you along, and its climax simply delights.

Never quite as resonant as Spielberg's earliest "Indiana Jones" films, in which, for all the clamor, it often feels like something real and vital and human is at stake. But at its best, this film is as joyful as anything in those movies, and that is something of a movie miracle.

There's powerful craft here, and Larsson's story has more than proven its ability to grip. But missing almost entirely is a sense of urgency and discovery.

Resembles an amusement park ride -- a visit to a house of horrors that ends, more or less, where it begins.

"Juno" was accused (wrongly, in my view) of having things both ways: being cute and cynical, edgy and sentimental. Young Adult, despite the fun afforded by Theron and Oswalt, seems content to have things neither.

It's fast, it's sure, it's violent and it's fun, even as it sometimes pushes the limits of ready coherence or dramatic plausibility.

It's a film that casually mixes comedy with dread more or less deftly until faltering near the end. Up to then, however, it imparts the sensation that, along with Lonnie, you are being cooked alive in a pot of water that's slowly but steadily heating up toward the boiling point.

It might have poked a bit more into Clash's personal story, but as a story of man and puppet it's grand.

You can find movies with better scripts, direction, acting, songs, and jokes than The Muppets -- but you won't find one that's nearly so much fun.

There are ample opportunities for the film to soak in pathos, righteousness, farce, or pictorialism, and Payne manages to nod at those pitfalls without falling into them. In a way, it's just like Matt King's world: enviably plush but filled with the real pain of real life.

The performances are universally good, the 3-D is utterly gorgeous, and the nutshell history of the early days of movies is inspiring.

The result is a handsome but deeply fractured tale.

There's plenty of freshness and skill here, both in front of the camera and behind it.

Eastwood never manages to bring the past to life, even as DiCaprio and company dive gamely into the material.

Doesn't demand much of the audience, sure, but it doesn't provide much, either. It's as if an all-star gang of would-be crooks got together to rip off...moviegoers.

And while it may be true that Almodóvar doesn't have Hitchcock's way with terror, it's not clear that Hitchcock could leave the real world behind so wholly and convincingly as Almodóvar does here.

It's easy to imagine that some folks will find the film rapturous, but it's equally clear that there are others whom it will drive crazy.

It may not add up to a narrative, but it's a fascinating compilation -- a mixtape you may want to hear more than once.

It's a horrific tale, filled with fear, confusion, anger, disfigurement, and loss. Weissman and Weber don't milk the pathos and they don't have to. Their interview subjects are brilliantly chosen, not only for their specific vantage points on the events but for their eloquence and depth of feeling. Time and again, the spoken and visual record of what happened overwhelms you.

It hardly needs to hang its head around the original, and it bolsters Brewer's standing as a talent of note.

Despite the film's claim to be an anatomy of a pop culture craze, it's deeply parochial and has an opportunistic feel at its core.

Genuinely breathtaking.

It's a sports story, yes, because without baseball there's no Beane. But it's far more a tale of a man's triumph over himself and his doubters. And you don't need math to make sense of that.

The result is a gripping film about a subject almost too good to be true.

As the film accrues intensity and awakes the demon lurking inside its protagonist, you can see it as something more than a retro-cool crime story. Rather, it's a parable of good and evil and the nature of man.

It's never more than an intro to a man who merits volumes.

The film is enthralling, even as the tale becomes more and more dire, with scores of millions dead and societal upheaval imminent. The circumstances depicted in Contagion are terrifying, but the power with which the film is made blends the horror, as only the best art can, with beauty.