Say what you will about Thomas Balmés’ documentary, but don’t accuse it of false advertising. Look at How Cute might also have worked as a title, but the director obviously wants some points for nonchalance. His film follows four babies through their first year of life.

Juliana Margulies looks terrific! Maybe it’s the way she’s grown into her 40s without trying to hide it, or maybe it’s the bangs or that Bronx dame eyeliner she’s rocking, but there’s something sexy and fascinating her in City Island, a new dramatic comedy. But that’s about all there is to see here.

Have you heard about that protracted, politically porky legal battle over moving a dead millionaire’s priceless, private early modern art collection from a wealthy Philadelphia suburb into a downtown tourist mecca? Perhaps a better question: Do you care?

Kick-Ass comes to us with a little bit of built-in controversy. Its title alone—at once an adjective, an imperative verb and a proper noun—might strike some joyless fussbudgets as a touch too syntactically cavalier or just plain impolite.

Director Floria Sigismondi has composed an artfully condensed cinematic snapshot that mercifully avoids most of the pitfalls of the celebrity biopic: herding the viewer through the predictable rote exercise of hitting biographical data as well as the rise, fall, and re-rise plot points—the CliffsNotes of a person, a summarized life.

There’s footage on YouTube of stop-motion animation maestro Ray Harryhausen, in 2006, first hearing about a possible Clash of the Titans remake. “Oh, I hope not,” he says. We all know where Harryhausen is coming from. His contributions to the 1981 film, although impressive for being more memorable than a performance by Laurence Olivier as the king of the gods, also had a way of making Clash of the Titans seem inherently pitiable

Hot Tub Time Machine is a movie with the courage to ask, “Man, what happened to us?” and to answer, “Oh, that’s right: We came of age as acid-washed coke fiends during a time of Reaganomics, heavy pastels and Poison concerts—not to mention more than a few grody assembly line abominations at the multiplex.”

Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid illustrated book series is an exception to our culture’s relentless trolling of high school. A graphic novel in training wheels, Diary of a Wimpy Kid suggests Ghost World or Howl for tweens—minus the nihilism. The Wimpy Kid series is an affirmation that degradation and quests for self-identity also consume those not yet able to grow facial hair or wriggle out from beneath their mama’s thumb.

It’s so frustrating to know that Roman Polanski makes great movies—at least in part because he’s such a creep. But so it goes, and here is The Ghost Writer: a classic-seeming new thriller with the recriminative gall to be an inside joke about how we’ve let the real world turn into something like a Roman Polanski movie.

Let history handle the business of judging director Tim Burton and Disney’s take on Lewis Carroll’s fantasy classic against all other film-adaptation attempts (which most notably occurred in 1903, 1933 and 1951). A more pressing question is whether Burton’s film will satisfy fans of his earlier work.