A letter to the past explains this year's Oscars to the 1980s: Don’t worry. I’m not writing to warn you about some relentless cyborg death-drone coming back through time to wreak havoc on your world because the machines have taken over. It’s true that the machines have taken over, but we’re actually pretty cool with it. And we even elected the death-drone as the governor of California.

Shutter Island is somewhat hobbled by our sense that Martin Scorsese is directing a little beneath his talents and slumming in the schlock-fest psychiatric thriller genre. Whether the film works for viewers will depend on their tolerance for films they know are playing mind games, and their willingness to wait to see what mind games, exactly, are being played.

Unlike the short story upon which it is based, That Evening Sun begins at the retirement home where Abner Meecham (Hal Holbrook) has lived for several months. A few quick shots of elderly people dissolutely playing cards or taking their medication are all it takes to establish that life here is no life at all.

After finishing a two-night gig in Santa Fe, country legend Bad Blake lounges in the cab of his pickup truck, waiting for the reporter who’s going to interview him. When she arrives, Jean Craddock apologizes for missing his show, but does he have any idea how hard it is to find a babysitter at this time of night? “I get off work at one o’clock in the morning,” he drawls. “I know how hard it is to find everything.”

That vaguely hypocritical contradiction inherent in the public release of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee seems appropriate for the self-discovering and coyly self-revealing protagonist of writer-director Rebecca Miller’s adaptation of her own novel. From a few different angles, Miller shows us how settling down and settling in are just other ways of becoming unsettled.

If you want to see a movie about a family triumphing against the odds and glowing slightly, you are unlikely to do much better than Extraordinary Measures. If someone who has sex with you wants to see a movie about a family triumphing against the odds and glowing slightly, at least you’ll have an angry Harrison Ford to watch, and that helps a lot.

If anything seemed like a sure thing, it was the film adaptation of The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold’s mega best seller—it remained on The New York Times hardback best seller list for more than a year—directed by Oscar winner Peter Jackson, helmsman of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and, apropos of the dark subject of The Lovely Bones, Heavenly Creatures.

I don’t want to be one of those alarmist film critics always telling you how to live but, seriously, we are rapidly depleting the world’s supply of teenage sex comedies. If we don’t stop soon, there may be no boner jokes left for our children’s children.

When you live above the clouds, the forecast is always sunny. So that’s where George Clooney’s Up in the Air hero chooses to exist: in a mile-high club accessed by frequent-flyer platinum cards. As a means to this lifestyle, he soothingly executes mass layoffs for cubicle farms, confiscating the key-cards of the newly fired on their way out the door.

At last: The long-delayed, ambivalently anticipated, Viggo Mortensen-intensive adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, about a man and his young son wandering through a glumly gritty post-apocalyptic world, opens in Santa Fe. And just in time to kick off the holiday season!