Paris, 1962: Jean-Louis (Fabrice Luchini) and his wife, Suzanne (Sandrine Kiberlain), have white-people problems, namely the family housekeeper. She’s a nasty old French bitch who won’t let Suzanne clear out her dead mother-in-law’s room.

Kirsten Dunst’s dimple-pointed smile lights up the opening scenes of Melancholia. She exudes such happiness that we don’t suspect an impending cosmic catastrophe, though we do begin to sense that she feigns happiness for the benefit of others.

Here’s something you don’t often get at the movies: genuine surprise. Take Shelter, however, offers plenty, not just in its story, but also in the idea that a deliberately paced family drama can entertain while serving up liberal doses of economic allegory and psychological thriller.

The Descendants opens with a boating accident. It follows with a George Clooney, as the character Matt King, voice-over: “My friends on the mainland think, because I live in Hawaii, I live in paradise. Are they nuts?”

Weekend pulls viewers in so deeply that I felt I needed a shower and a nap afterward. And I mean this in the best possible way: I will remember this film as one of the sweetest, most sincere love stories of the decade, as well as a revolutionary gay love story.

It’s back. No, not the practical, affordable consumer electric car—despite the claims made in Chris Paine’s Who Killed the Electric Car?, such a thing had never really existed. No, the most prom

Margin Call is a tough sell. The film—about the 24 hours after a New York investment firm dumps its rapidly devaluing mortgage-backed securities—comes along while too many people across the country continue to deal with the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis. Who needs fiction when the prospect of losing a job, a home or one’s life savings is reality?

Strange visitor with assimilation challenge shakes up local status quo—we could be talking about Footloose, but we’re in fact referring to The Thing, another recently renewed early ’80s movie memory.

Promoted as a teen suicide awareness film, Archie’s Final Project comes off as a gratuitous exploitation of teen angst, made for the attention-deficient, packaged in elaborate production. The irony of this movie is it seems derived from the very same self-indulgence it aims to illuminate.

If you are a 12-year-old girl who has never seen Harold and Maude, you may find yourself in some kind of heaven watching Restless.