Taylor Hackford directs crisply, unpretentiously. Patti LuPone goes Latina, playing Lopez's soap opera-addicted mom, and Bobby Cannavale is a Palm Beach cop with an eye for Leslie. The action is fast and furious.

Amour arrives with plaudits and praise. But this is not hype, it is all deserved. This is a masterpiece.

And that, in the end, is what Quartet is about: determined engagement, embracing music and theater and the arts, and embracing the friends and loved ones you have around you.

An effectively spooky ghost story with Guillermo del Toro's imprimatur (he's executive producer), Mama is every adoptive parent's nightmare: What if the children you bring home start eating moths and toilet paper, and won't come out from under the bed? And when they do, it's only to do something hurtful?

Wahlberg does what Wahlberg does, bringing muscular conviction to his troubled, tough-guy role. The city may be broken, but the movie star's formula is working fine.

Almost certainly, The Last Stand will not be Schwarzenegger's last. For better or for worse (and this is somewhere right in the middle), he is back.

Penn's over-the-top tirades and bullying threats are still there - it's a wild and woolly performance that isn't always as menacing as perhaps the actor intended it to be.

A monumental achievement that documents a coordinated and complicated response to a monumental tragedy.

Mostly, Not Fade Away is a hit.

Promised Land is a frustrating film to watch. It should be better than this, smarter than this.

Parental Guidance is an engaging comedy that bridges multiple generation gaps, making it that rare movie that grandparents, their kids, and their kids can enjoy.

If you love Les Mis the stage musical, my guess is you will love what Hooper and his bustling company have done. But when you hear "Master of the House" and you think of the Seinfeld episode with Elaine's gruff dad belting the tune before you think of those shifty innkeepers the Thénardiers, then you may want to steer clear of this grand endeavor.

Is Django Unchained about race and power and the ugly side of history? Only as much as "Inglourious Basterds" was about race and power and the ugly side of history. It's a live-action, heads-exploding, shoot-'em-up cartoon. Sometimes it crackles, and sometimes it merely cracks.

Watts is extraordinary - she manages both the physical and emotional demands of the role, with soul-deep conviction.

The narrative at the heart of Rust and Bone is a vehicle for sentiment and over-the-top histrionics if ever there was one, but Audiard and his two stars deliver the exact opposite: a film thrillingly raw and essential, life-affirming, sublime.

At its best, Worlds Away is a parade of mostly attractive acrobats performing physically improbable feats. At its worst, it has the humorlessness of Ridley Scott plumbing the deeper meanings of an Esther Williams water ballet.

In short, This Is 40, in tried and true Apatowian style, mixes weighty issues about intimacy and cohabitation with astute and smart-alecky pop culture references, crude bathroom jokes, stoner riffs, boob ogling, and existential angst.

The violence is plenty, and pointless.

Murray and Linney are terrific together (and apart), their notes pitch perfect, and the supporting cast is good all around.

The takeaways of the film are horror and hope: horror that institutionalized homophobia was so pervasive, hope that that intolerance is a thing of the past.

This is not about a reluctant hero drawing courage from some deep personal well. It's not about dread and danger. It's about visual effects.

Starlet sneaks up on you. Set in the same sun-dried, strip-malled precincts of the San Fernando Valley where "Boogie Nights" took place - and set, in part, in that same porn industry milieu - Sean Baker's low-key, low-budget indie traces the relationship that develops between a young actress and an isolated, elderly woman.

This saga of a former soccer star coaching his son's team in order to worm his way back into the heart of his ex-wife aims to be warm and funny. Alas, it is mechanical and exhausting, like a windup toy of a monkey crashing together cymbals for 106 minutes while incrementally winding down.

Jessica Biel is Vera Miles, the star who had the nerve to get pregnant when Hitchcock wanted her for "Vertigo." He feels betrayed, and she feels relieved, consigned to a supporting role in Psycho as Marion's sister. And Toni Collette, in glasses and a dark wig, is Hitchcock's long-suffering secretary, Peggy. Both Biel and Collette are very good, engaging.

Jolting, suspenseful, full of twisted sympathy for its goons' row of characters, and wickedly amusing to boot, Killing Them Softly summons up the ghosts of "Goodfellas" and a whole nasty tradition of crime pics. And then it lets its ghosts go, whacking and thwacking away.

The shaggy, whimsical characters have a primal familiarity, as though they were developed by a tag team of Maurice Sendak and Walt Disney.

Hobbled by a laughably bad script and a uniformly uncharismatic cast.

Much as I was moved by the film, I have one reservation and one warning. The framing device of the older Pi recounting his story to the author (which worked so well in Martel's novel) is intrusive and significantly detracts from the story.