Forget the brouhaha about Zero Dark Thirty’s politics. Any movie that can present events in which the audience knows the outcome and still have the audience holding its breath in anticipation succeeds.

The makers of Hyde Park on Hudson have a genuine head-scratcher on their hands. Their film about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the most fascinating figures in American history, is stupefying in its dullness.

A piece of highly charged, quietly angry political filmmaking isn’t what the name “Ken Burns” summons, but that’s what The Central Park Five delivers.

First, the cynical: One wonders whether making a movie that takes place in the pre-Civil War American South is Quentin Tarantino’s way of getting around criticism for using the n-word.

Les Misérables won’t go down as the worst movie of 2012, but it should go down as the biggest misfire. What this screen version of Les Misérables needs but doesn’t have is the artifice of theater.

Anyone who walked out of writer-director Judd Apatow’s previous movie, Funny People, thinking his next would tread a tighter narrative line will soon be set straight.

Each time I’m feeling cynical about our country’s future, along comes a documentary like Brooklyn Castle.

In the beginning, there was writer-director Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series, and it was good. There was Middle Earth, a magical world of elves, wizards, hobbits, dwarves and men. Even those who were not fans of the books on which those movies are based find themselves settling in to watch The Return of the King on a Sunday afternoon.

There have been so many addiction and recovery stories in the past decade that it’s entirely reasonable to think we don’t need another. As singer-songwriter Mike Doughty writes in his recent drug-filled memoir The Book of Drugs, the title of Caroline Knapp’s book, Drinking: A Love Story, says it all.