The ultimate praise given to sports movies is always, "Even if you don't care about sport X, you'll care about these characters," and that's certainly true of Undefeated (I don't, and I did).

At times this gritty, intermittently gripping police drama feels like a follow-up to "The Messenger" - not just because of the thematic overlap (both films deal with grief, substance abuse, and self-destructive masculinity), but because Rampart's main character, the cynical, drug-abusing cop played by Woody Harrelson, might be the long-lost twin of the alcoholic Army captain Harrelson played in the earlier Moverman film.

If, on the other hand, you're not above acknowledging the trans-historical creepiness of a good dusty windup-doll shelf (Come on! It includes one of those hyper-realistic monkeys playing the cymbals!), this pokey, modestly budgeted thriller isn't without its shivery delights.

Albert Nobbs is the rare double drag king bill you could plausibly take your grandmother to. It's genteel, well-crafted, mostly sexless and frequently dull - a movie that, like its title character, never quite dares to let itself discover what it really wants to be.

I pretty much loved this movie from start to finish - risible implausibilities, insufficiently explained premise and all. An admirably spare survival thriller, The Grey (nice title!) abounds in qualities that are rare in movies of its type. It's quiet, contemplative, and almost haiku-like in its simplicity.

Remember that scene from "Raiders of the Lost Ark," when a swastika-stamped Nazi crate explodes for no good reason (beyond the fact that the Ark hates Nazis)? Red Tails is like that, only less awesome, and considerably longer.

It finds a way to make the play's rich, dense literary language (just before the climactic battle, one character accuses another of "breaking his oath and resolution like/A twist of rotten silk") sound as terse and urgent as the dialogue in a tightly plotted action thriller.

Though Carano isn't without a certain glowering charisma, her flat line readings and apparent discomfort with dialogue-heavy exchanges make her seem like a refugee from a different, schlockier movie, the kind of low-budget, straight-to-video MMA rock-'em-sock-'em that might pop up on late-night basic cable and charm you with its rough-hewn amateurism and animal high spirits. As Haywire's long-seeming 92 minutes limped by, I found myself wishing I was watching that movie instead.

The kind of middling-but-watchable heist thriller that, days after seeing it, already feels like something you caught half of on a plane two years ago.

Asghar Farhadi's A Separation serves as a quiet reminder of how good it's possible for movies to be.

The Iron Lady is, to put it kindly, a shambles.

The realities that Crowe creates all seem like pleasant enough places to be, but you'd never mistake them for real life. The fuzzy, squishy world of We Bought a Zoo may be the Cameron Crowe-iest of them all.

Was The Adventures of Tintin a movie that I personally vibed with? Not really. It felt overstuffed and busy, its charm a little calculated, its outsized budget a tad too ostentatiously on display. But it's a rollicking yarn told with scads of invention and energy, not to mention a technical marvel of the first order.

Fincher is a master of mood and atmosphere, but this chilly, efficient movie never transcends the shallowness of its source material.

Stiff, talky, and airless, a textbook example of that not-always-true cliché about the unfilmability of theater.

Should you see Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol? By all means, and in the big, big, biggest theater you can find.

Even in the film's weaker stretches, the fierce presence of Tilda Swinton made it impossible to tear my eyes away.

The film's best moments are the quiet ones in which Oldman's ironically named Smiley provides the story with its wise, unsmiling soul.

Young Adult doesn't fully work, but it's still one of the year's most memorable movies.

Michael Fassbender's portrayal of Brandon, the rootless Manhattan sex addict in Steve McQueen's Shame, may lay claim to this year's title of most outstanding performance in a mediocre movie.

This slight but enormously likable picture seems destined to be an awards magnet.

Like Statler and Waldorf, older viewers may kvetch and cavil about the details, but when that red velvet curtain goes up, we wouldn't give up our balcony seats for the world.

Certainly the most genteel film Cronenberg has ever made, with period costumes worthy of Merchant/Ivory, no gore, and very little physical violence. But A Dangerous Method doesn't feel like a wimp-out or a sell-out at all. It's a fiercely thoughtful film, a movie of ideas that understands how powerful ideas can be.

Somehow, for me, this earnest, pretty movie never came to life on screen; it remained a curio in a cabinet, to be admired through a pane of glass.

One seriously sick little blockbuster.

It's such a disappointment that The Descendants isn't a better movie than it is. In this soap opera disguised as a comedy, Payne, who was always a master at balancing sharp satire with an essential humanism, has traded his tart lemon center for a squishy marshmallow one.

And yet - and yet - there's something about the solemn, gloomy, often overwhelmingly powerful experience of watching Melancholia. I'll give it this much: This is a hard movie to forget.

Whether unintentionally or by design, the movie never really makes a case either for or against the troubled figure at its center.