Who wouldn’t want to see a movie starring the dream cast of James McAvoy, Emily Blunt, Michael Caine and Maggie Smith, with cameos by Ozzy Osbourne, Dolly Parton, Patrick Stewart and Hulk Hogan? They had me at James McAvoy.

Throw in some Shakespeare source material and music by Elton John, and one would think we were set. But Gnomeo and Juliet does the seeming impossible—takes all of these phenomenal elements and churns out a movie that’s only sporadically entertaining and completely forgettable. Unlike its durable garden decoration characters, this movie will wash out of your brain with the first drizzle.

Gnomeo and Juliet’s first and biggest problem is its lack of original, engaging characters. Gnomeo, Gnomeo, wherefore art thou, Gnomeo? Who knows, but he’s just your standard love-stricken youth determined to prove himself to the world and win his girl, while Juliet is your standard spunky heroine who’s trapped in a narrow female role but has the ninja skills to fight out.

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It’s the cycle of nature. Every year, the studios serve their finest for the holidays, projects chock full of high tone and blue chip casts. This year there was the usual deluxe assortment: literary adaptation (True Grit), drug addiction (The Fighter), madness and artistry (Black Swan), and physical disability, historical drama and royalty (The King’s Speech).

Then comes January. The good stuff runs out and they bring out the cheap wine, hoping we’re too drunk to notice. So we get the likes of Country Strong, Season of the Witch, The Green Hornet and The Dilemma.

Starring the peculiarly charmless Vince Vaughn as Ronny and Kevin James (The King of Queens) as Nick, his purported bosom buddy/business partner/mechanical genius (more on that later), The Dilemma also features as Jennifer Connelly (Beth) and Winona Ryder (Geneva) as their respective love interests, both actresses dark-haired, kohl-rimmed, wraith-thin and hard-faced.

Of course it’s totally preposterous that either woman would ever go out with the likes of Vaughn or James, and pigs will scrapbook before we see the likes of Jude Law movie-dating the likes of America Ferrara (the only female star under 50 who comes to mind who’s remotely overweight). But hey, that’s the glorious misogynistic magic of Hollywood.

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Fast, fun and stylish comedies are in short supply this year, so I was really looking forward to I Love You, Phillip Morris. But for all its wackiness, witty editing, colorful production design and terrific performances, by the end it was a movie I had suffered through more than enjoyed. That sounds worse than it is. I liked ILYPM a lot. I just wished I’d loved it.

Which is not to say the movie is a failure. I think it may have beeen the intention of co-directors John Requa and Glenn Ficarra to tell a dark story all along. And the increasingly troubling gap between the protagonist’s inner reality and the flashy filmmaking may be a brilliant device to unease us. If so, it worked.

The true story of a devoted husband, father and deputy cop, I Love You, Phillip Morris begins just before the moment of this upright citizen’s transformation to outrageous gay conman. The outrageousness is not the gayness, but the audacity of the frauds he perpetuates. Even more outrageous are his legendary escapes from jail—four times in five years, all on a Friday the Thirteenth (because his boyfriend, Phillip Morris, whom he meets in prison, was born on a Friday the Thirteenth).

Jim Carrey gives a balls-to-the-walls performance as Steven Jay Russell, the church organist-turned-gay-felon, attacking the character with his usual terrier-like zeal, but also with a deep infusion of darkness. Carrey has always been able to tap into a certain twisted place, and in the past it has divided critics and box offices, most notoriously in The Cable Guy, which, coming on the heels of the wildly popular Ace Ventura, left audiences reeling.

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Literary adaptations are always a tricky thing, especially for those of us who love the source material. Beloved books can be ruined forever by a film version gone wrong. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy wasn’t even all that bad of a movie in and of itself, but it was obviously nothing as good as the book, and ever since, my warm memories of the book (which I read several times as a teen and listened to in the BBC radio version many times more) have been discolored by the movie.

And that’s hardly the worst literary adaptation there has been. When things look especially unpromising, I make it a point not to see even the trailer.

But when everything goes perfectly, from casting to art direction to all the important details of story and theme—very rarely, in other words—a film version can equal and even in some ways exceed the book. Such is the case with this third in the Chronicles of Narnia series, a breathtakingly beautiful and thrilling envisioning of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Skandar Keynes and Georgie Henley return as Edmund and Lucy, and Keynes in particular has grown into his own as the courageous and clear-eyed warrior king. Ben Barnes is even hunkier than before, as Prince-turned-King Caspian should be. He makes a puffy shirt look desirable, and that isn’t easy.

Liam Neeson voices an Aslan whose CGI being is incredibly convincing and impressive, down to the mane rustling in the wind and the mysterious, majestic eyes. Tilda Swinton must have put in all of four hours on set, as she appears for a total of 45 seconds, and that only as a misty green vision in the green mist. Simon Pegg takes over from Eddie Izzard as the voice of Reepicheep, the valiant little mouse who will be a clear favorite for the under-13 crowd.

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Obviously the title leaves much to be desired, but in every other possible way, Anton Chekhov’s The Duel is everything a costume drama should be—filled with stellar acting by winsome British and Irish stars, beautiful costumes and set dressing, gorgeous cinematography and breathtaking scenery—all blue skies, peach-roofed villas and deep, mesmeric, ink blue sea.

Even better, all of these pleasures complement a gripping story propelled by carefully placed moral weights and counterweights. The whole is brilliantly orchestrated by a director who absolutely understands both Chekhov’s subtle wit and deep humanistic sympathies.

And just who is this director? Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I found out it was the same man responsible for the 2001 contemporary Israeli drama Late Marriage, but on consideration it shouldn’t be surprising. Although it was only Kosashvili’s second feature, Late Marriage was remarkable for its deft, uncompromising storytelling, rich depiction of character and relationships, and masterful control of tone—always somewhere between comic and horrifying—qualities it shares with Anton Chekhov’s The Duel, and indeed all of Chekhov.

Furthermore, what seems an unlikely choice of material, given the contemporary Israeli settings of his earlier films, makes a lot of sense when one learns that the Israel-dwelling Kosashvili was actually born in Georgia, on the coast of the Black Sea, exactly the location of this longest of Chekohov’s stories (although the production was actually shot on the Croatian coast).

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The 88-year-old Alain Resnais’s latest film, WILD GRASS, shows him remaining true, all these decades later, to the principles of the French “Nouvelle Vague” of which he was a leading proponent:  anarchy, whimsy, visual antics, nonlinear and nonsensical story lines, abrupt endings, randomness and deliberate artifice. Although many of these devices, so revolutionary in their time, have now become part of mainstream film vocabulary, in Resnais’s hands they are played full-force, making his work unlike anything else made today.

It’s hard, or at least feels beside the point, to give a plot summary of a movie in which plot—which is also to say, any ethical underpinning—matters for little. Suffice it to say a lost wallet incites a meeting between the world’s least likely dentist, the wildly flame-haired Marguerite (the elegant Sabine Azéma, Resnais’s muse and companion in real life) and the dour,  possibly homicidal and unemployed but somehow wealthy Georges (André Dussollier), whose yellow chickie fluff hair somehow makes his deeply lined and frowning face appear even more sinister.

Aided by a deeply humanistic policeman (Mathiu Almaric, in my favorite performance in the movie), the two connect and reconnect in a wobbly spiral of obsession, fantasy, and counter-transference.

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One of the few documentaries ever to show at Cannes, granted a private screening for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the agitprop activist documentary Countdown to Zero delivers a blast from a collective past when the threat of nuclear annihilation loomed like a gigantic mushroom cloud over the horizon.

Nowadays that threat feels obsolete, something left behind long ago with duck-and-cover drills, double-knit polyester pants suits and Charlie’s Angels posters, existing in the 21st century only as a creaky plot device in action movies. Countdown to Zero flattens that misapprehension to the ground, presenting an all-too-vivid picture of our still insanely nuclear-weaponized world. If that doesn’t sound so appealing, be assured that the filmmakers have sweetened the medicine with incredible access, footage, graphics and visual effects that make the message gripping, even (although one hesitates to use the word) entertaining.

The film begins with footage of Robert Oppenheimer, the director of WWII’s “Manhattan Project,” the brilliant theoretical physicist who let the genie out of the bottle, the eternal bearer of the awful epithet “father of the atomic bomb.” His desolate eyes haunt the film like a specter, bearing witness to his post-war advocacy of nuclear disarmament (which got him the thanks of security clearance stripping and blacklisting).

This gravity is quickly countered by the jubilant celebrations of country after country who thereafter develop nuclear weapon capability for themselves. Crowds cheer, strangers hug, de Gaulle crows, “Our national glory is restored!” Walter Cronkite intones the phrase “membership in the nuclear club,” and it’s a club everyone wants to join. “We will make the bomb even if we have to eat grass,” Pakistani leaders vow, and when they succeed, devout citizens rejoice, “Allah is great!” Sobering and terrifying as it is to see the world map click into the nuclear red country by country, it’s hard to counter with much conviction when Irani president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad argues against western hypocrisy, “Why should only you have it?”

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The fourth offering from the comedy team of Will Farrell (star) and Adam McKay (director, writer), The Other Guys doesn’t reach the zany heights of their earlier hits Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, but still gives Farrell plenty of opportunities for the inspired silliness and extended surreal bits that are his strengths.

Will Farrell plays Allen Gamble, a police forensic accountant with a hidden dark past, now partnered with Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg), a disgraced detective who has been relegated to a desk job after making a catastrophic error.

The movie opens with the hot shots of the department, played with patented swagger and bombast by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson, but when they unexpectedly leave the force, so to speak, Hoitz jumps at the chance to get back on real cases. The only hitch is that he has to convince the reluctant, conscientious and safety-loving Gamble to join him.

Meanwhile, Gamble’s painstaking forensic accounting and obsession with unpaid scaffolding permits has actually turned up a real case, a financier (Steve Coogan) about to pull off a $32 Billion heist. It’s classic bumbling cops versus cool, efficient and ruthless mastermind criminals with MBAs and meat-head body guards, but the sometimes creaky plot does its job—that is, set up lots of hilarity involving Priuses, hot Broadway shows, the pitfalls of hyperbole and more.

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In the previous millennium, when I was an idealistic young thing attending Barnard College, the women’s college affiliated with Columbia University, there was a lot of talk about who before us had walked the hallowed halls: anthropologist Margaret Mead, writers Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zora Neale Thurston, Francine du Plessix Gray, Patricia Highsmith and Ntozake Shange, recent United States ambassador to the U.N. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, musicians Laurie Anderson and Suzanne Vega (whose song “Luka” was then on all the airwaves), NPR’s Susan Stamberg, nationally syndicated columnist Anna Quindlen, choreographer Twyla Tharp, pre-Omnimedia Martha Stewart, whose daughter had also recently attended.

We students looked up to these women, our heroes. No trivia about them was too slight to swap and discuss. But I can only remember a couple of times when the name Joan Rivers was mentioned, and then only with a smirk. It seemed unbelievable that someone like her—brash, crass, undignified, disfigured by plastic surgery even then—could have once been part of our very serious undertakings in academia and feminism. Above all, we were earnest, and serious, and she was not.

The truth is that we failed to recognize Rivers for the pioneer she was. Those were the early days of “Seinfeld.” The backstage world of stand up comedy was still a mystery. There was no Comedy Central. We had no idea how brutal the world was in which she had risen. What a boy’s club. We were feminists, but we still thought we had to be ladies, or at least decorous. We disapproved of Joan Rivers.

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The Kids Are All Right opens with shots of 18-year-old Joni (a wonderful Mia Wasikowska) playing scrabble with friends and 15-year-old Laser (Josh Hutcherson) sniffing a crushed Sudafed with his skateboarding buddy Clay, all to Vampire Weekend’s “Cousins.” Joni and Laser are gorgeous, smart and nice. Despite the minor drug use and usual teenager angsts, they are, for the most part, very much all right.

But this movie is really about their parents—their mother Nic, a perfectionist, workaholic OB-Gyn (played by Annette Bening, who has made a career specialty out of wound-tight women), and their other mother, easy-going, nurturing earth girl Jules (a very fine Julianne Moore), who has maybe let her life slide past her. A long-married couple, Nic and Jules have, as parents do, put their kids first for so long that they have lost touch with themselves and each other.

And yet they remain very self-aware and caring people. When they question Clay’s rightness as a friend, it comes couched in a language of earnest self-actualization and higher consciousness that is both insightful and ridiculous: “It’s just that he seems… untended.” And “Is he the kind of friend who will help you grow?”

Untended Joni and Laser certainly are not. Nic and Jules are extremely conscientious parents, and a great deal of the humor in the early part of this film comes from the overmothering Joni and Laser endure. Nevertheless, Laser feels the lack of a male role model and it is at his urging that Joni, having recently turned eighteen, the age at which she can legally request contact, learns the identity of their sperm donor and gets in touch with him.

The sperm donor is Paul, played by the miraculous Mark Ruffalo, who can shade a dozen layers of feeling and thought into a single moment. I’ve sometimes found that his extraordinary openness can come off as ambivalence, but his characterization of Paul is founded on a bedrock of emotion. Paul is not only open to contact with Joni and Laser, he welcomes it.

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