Resident Evil newbies may find the fourth installment of the film series lacking in backstory. Zombie fighter Alice (Milla Jovovich) confines explanations to brief expositions via a clumsy conceit of a video diary she’s recording for the sake of posterity.

For a rough idea of what was going through George Clooney’s head when he signed on to The American—apart from the set’s proximity to his Italian villa—look no further than the only other American face to appear in the movie. It belongs to Henry Fonda, shown on a flat-panel television in his entrance to Once Upon a Time in the West, at the moment when the beloved Hollywood icon shoots a defenseless ginger child. Clooney’s mug is getting nearly as rugged and weathered as Fonda’s was in 1968, and he’s also indulging in some subversion of his persona.

The Oath features a story so strange it feels more like fiction than fact. Few news programs or investigations of 9.11 and its aftermath have plumbed terrorism with this kind of insight. It is an eerie moment in Laura Poitras’ all-too-real documentary about the depths of anti-American anger and religious fervor that exist in the Middle East.

True story: Somewhere in the South during the Great Depression, an old man lived alone in the woods; one day, for reasons unknown, he decided to host his own funeral. Now, he has a movie, which asks: By what process does a man become a reclusive codger? How might he unbecome one?

Movies have begun to teeter toward the kinetic, mile-a-minute logic that mimics the heart-racing pace of video games. But with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the video game has finally and definitively entered the movie realm. Scott Pilgrim is the ultimate 21st century meta-text.

One of the funnier scenes in Michael Moore’s last intentionally funny polemic, Bowling for Columbine, imagined NYPD officers chasing down shirtless Wall Street criminals for a show called Corporate Cops. Will Ferrell’s new movie The Other Guys is essentially an expansion of this skit except, you know, it’s a Will Ferrell movie.

In the grand scheme of things, we should have known it wouldn’t be so long after Breakfast of Champions that we’d be having Dinner for Schmucks.

Like casualties, war movies keep mounting. Now here's Restrepo, for which square-jawed, thrill-addicted journalistic-T rex Sebastian Junger and fellow war-zone regular Tim Hetherington embedded among a platoon of American soldiers in Afghanistan's "deadliest place on Earth," the Korengal Valley.

All ye who enter the jaundiced world of the late writer Stieg Larsson, cast aside all notions of Sweden as the snow-draped kingdom of Volvos, IKEA and swimsuit models.

That it’s called “a Banksy film” could mean a directing credit for the adored, elusive British street artist or just that it was made in the best spirit of his work: prankish, double-take-inducing, immediately appealing.