Happy Christmas, which is set around Christmas, shares several plot and thematic points with “Neighbors,” but without the aggression or belly laughs.

It’s a fascinating period in music and an equally fascinating story of promise, talent, expectations and failure. But you can’t help but feel that Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me won’t settle the most important argument of all to the unconverted — Were they as good as the hype?

As slight as Venus feels, it’s just titillating enough to matter, just twisted enough — Really, casting your wife and a guy who looks like you? — to suggest that even in his 70s, even with virtually no budget, Polanski can deliver a compelling walk on the kinky side.

Potter’s film is at is most artful in the painterly ways she composes the wordless scenes of the girls testing cigarettes, hitchhiking with the wrong boys and Rosa exploring heavy petting with another boy, showing off for Ginger.

Sweet, cute to the point of cutesy.

The Drop is a simmering thriller from the writer who gave us “Mystic River” and “Gone, Baby Gone,” a tale heavy with the weight of violence we know is coming.

A darker-than-dark British comedy.

The Conjuring is like a prequel to 40 years of demonic possession thrillers.

It’s a beautifully shot and reasonably balanced film, but one that struggles to find a hopeful note to end on.

Jones tells this story with care and a lack of hurry, a pace to fit an age when people traveled no faster than two mules pulling a wagon could carry them. It’s “True Grit” and “The African Queen” with a moment of “Lawrence of Arabia,” period-perfect and a total immersion in this world.

It’s too much a movie of “types,” and loses track of story elements that would seem important enough to warrant further exploration. The whole Christian conservative law-and-order mantle feels like a fuzzy afterthought on Jane, forgotten far too soon.

In Spanish with English subtitles, has a lovely, big budget sheen (Shlomo Godder was the cinematographer) and a cast that plays this as documentary real.

It’s gorgeous, intimate and beautifully photographed. And it’s cute and kid-friendly, with just enough jokes to balance the drama that comes from any film that flirts with how dangerous and unforgiving The Wild actually is.

It adds bubbles to the show, but doesn’t change the essentially deadpan, amusingly banal nature of this journey and the two charming old men who take it.

Director Sebastian Cordero — he did the John Leguizamo journalism thriller “Chronicles” — serves up chilling and all-too-real ways to die in space and maintains tension even if suspense is in short supply in a tale told in flashback.

Fort Bliss is a solid tough-adjustment-coming-home melodrama built around a superb performance by Michelle Monaghan.

Reeves animates the action and the filmmakers surround him with wonderful co-stars; the quietly menacing McShane, the chop shop operator (John Leguizamo), the dapper “cleaner” (David Patrick Kelly of “The Warriors”) and the spitting, hissing Nyqvist.

The performances and the ready supply of one-liners make this an amusing look at a new generation getting lost down memory lane.

Chef is Favreau’s most personal film since “Swingers,” an overlong comedy full of his food, his taste in music, his favorite places and a boatload of his favorite actors.

Eisenberg, perfectly, pliably put upon, is the engine that drives this picture.

Unwieldy, overlong and overly reliant on melodramatic coincidences, A Place in the Pines is still better than it has any right to be, thanks to its cast.

Radice has delivered an engaging portrait of a loose cannon back when professional sports still produced such unfiltered creatures, a man who lived by his own rules, said what he thought and wore curlers to practice when he felt like it.

The fun is supposed to build from the elaborate plots the marrieds and the bros engage in to foil each other. Only, it doesn’t.

It isn’t “The Ten Commandments” and Crowe is no Charlton Heston. But Noah makes Biblical myth grand in scope and intimate in appeal. The purists can always go argue over “God Isn’t Dead.” The rest of creation can appreciate this rousing good yarn, told with blood and guts and brawn and beauty, with just a hint of madness to the whole enterprise.

An often hilarious/generally irreverent comedy.

There’s more than a hint of the ‘90s Roddy Doyle adaptation “The Commitments” in all this – people far removed from Memphis and Detroit connecting to soul music on a spiritual level.

Rosewater was the name Bahari gave his persecutor (Kim Bodnia), a cunning, perfumed older man charged with getting a confession from this Westernized Iranian, a confession that discredits his reporting and the bad light Iran is in since the election, with its ensuing violent government crackdown on protesters.

A Mexican-accented kids’ cartoon so colorful and unconventionally dazzling it almost reinvents the art form. As pretty as a just-punctured pinata, endlessly inventive, warm and traditional, it serves up Mexican culture in a riot of Mexican colors and mariachi-flavored music.