Any time any American talks about being spied on by the government, that person should be forced to watch Barbara, a tense and quietly paranoid drama that takes place in East Germany in 1980. 

It’s a documentary, sure. But it’s not really a documentary, if only because this magical night didn’t take place in one night, and these kids’ parents seem like the kind who would look for their boys if they didn’t turn up at curfew.

It’s 1979. Two men meet in Los Angeles and quickly fall in love. One of the men, Rudy (Alan Cumming), the transplanted New Yorker who’s out and proud, works as the lead lip-syncher in a drag show at a West Hollywood bar.

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.