Nobody wants to say a disparaging word about an experimental reverie on Allen Ginsberg from the filmmaker who hit The Times of Harvey Milk out of the park. But just as directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s not-quite-docudrama thrills us with Ginsberg’s brilliance, so does it manifest the peculiar difficulty of trying to make a movie about same.

As man-against-nature stories go, 127 Hours is a bit of a detour: no fending off wolves or grizzlies, flash floods or blizzards. Aron Ralston’s foe is, instead, the inert but somehow malevolent boulder that falls—along with Aron—into a narrow crevice in the earth, pinning his arm and Aron himself.

In an era when sex is everywhere, how does a film about serious issues get blacklisted while a popcorn flick about fuck buddies getting mooshy feelings for one another is deemed a breezy romp?

Watching the latest installment in the Harry Potter franchise, one might occasionally feel transported to the post-apocalyptic bummer landscape of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Fair Game is the kind of film that expects to incite passion and outrage. By every token, it should. It centers on two gravely wronged people—Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson—whose careers were destroyed when their opinions conflicted with the George W Bush administration’s agenda.

The season of serious films is upon us. It’s time again for the earnest, honorable pictures that like to quiet the room, just when you’re in a good conversational groove, to say, “Ladies and gentlemen, may we have your attention, please?” Which means, “May we have your award consideration, please?” It’s the major studio idea of autumnal dignity.

In this film based on a true story, brother and sister Kenny (Sam Rockwell) and Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank) have the kind of fierce devotion to each other more often seen in movie lovers or mafiosi. Their connection is undoubtedly forged in a difficult childhood: a negligent mother and a painful separation, courtesy of the foster care system.

It’s strange to think that the famously adamantine Clint Eastwood would be so easy to brush off nowadays but, somehow, his movies have become overwhelmingly wishy-washy. It’s fitting, then, that a tsunami should be the inciting action of Eastwood’s Hereafter, a blundering and archly Babel-esque melodrama.

In RED, oldness is of the essence. Apparently, it is a movie about patronizing the elderly. RED stands for “Retired, Extremely Dangerous,” and refers to a once-elite team of aged and variously cuddly, trained killers who endure betrayal, conspiracy, brutality and infirmity.

When did we first register the greatness of Philip Seymour Hoffman? Was it as early as his turn on that old Law & Order episode in 1991? Was it not until he’d worked his way up to playing the raucous rock scribe Lester Bangs in Almost Famous? Or Truman Capote in Capote? It probably wasn’t when he played Robin Williams’ med-school roommate in Patch Adams.