Fans of Korean cinema had very high hopes for Stoker, Park Chan-Wook’s English language debut. Thanks to his reputation on the international film festival circuit, in particular with his cult Vengeance Trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance), Park had seeming first choice of talent and assembled a stellar cast in Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode and Nicole Kidman. (Interestingly, none of the three principals is an American.)

True to form for Park, Stoker is both visually stunning and psychologically and physically brutal. The cinematography is painterly and the framing sculptural. Every frame merits notice and every still a work of art. In fact it’s safe to say that Stoker is Park’s most strictly art-produced film. Every color and detail bears evidence of obsessive attention, from the color of characters’ hair to the color of the walls, from the stitching on a collar to the scuffing on a shoe.

In large part this magnification of detail effectively reflects the psychological and somatic experience of India Stoker (Wasikowska), whose hypersensitive observations of the world make ordinary life an ordeal for her. On the day India turns eighteen her father Richard dies in a horrific accident. We see her first at his funeral. Relations between her parents have evidently been strained for some time. Her mother, Evelyn Stoker, seems hardly bereaved, nor does she attempt to comfort her shattered daughter.

Figures it would take David O. Russell to come up with one of my favorite rom-coms of 2012. I’m not ashamed to admit that rom-coms are maybe my favorite movie genre, even though the genre is, as a rule, a pitiful one. Good rom-coms come along once in a blue moon and the bad ones are not only plentiful but painful. In fact, the last really good one I remember is last year’s Bridesmaids, which wasn’t even technically a rom-com, but did have as one of its many virtues a very believable and sweet love story between the Kristen Wiig character and the nice Irish cop.

Russell’s genre is family wackadoodle, which (with the notable of Three Kings) he’s explored in every major film project he’s written/directed: Spanking the Monkey, Flirting with Disaster, I Heart Huckabees, and now the new Silver Linings Playbook. The wacky family in Playbook are the Solitanos of Philadelphia: Pat, Sr. (Robert De Niro), an extremely superstitious and OCD Philadelphia Eagles fan who’s been barred from Eagles stadium for life for brawling with supporters of opposing teams.

It’ll be interesting to see how audiences who haven’t read Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s 2001 novel respond to director Ang Lee’s vision of the colorful tale. Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel is a twice-strangely-monikered, religiously insatiable 16-year-old Indian boy immigrating by freighter from Pondicherry to Canada with his parents, brother and the animal inhabitants of their family zoo who finds himself the sole human survivor of a shipwreck at sea.

The book is a rare hybrid: gripping survival thriller crossed with metaphysics and theology. That hybrid paid off in spades: it was both a runaway best-selling and massive award winner, starting with the Man Booker Prize in the UK. The story is bold and fantastical, yet as I remember it also dwelled for long, engaging stretches on the tedium and loneliness of sole survival at sea, with the world narrowed to Pi’s all-consuming counting of the cans of potable water and the packets of sea biscuits.

At numerous points in the watching of Lincoln, Steven Spielburg’s new ode to America and Americana, I was reminded of Tableau Vivant, a kind of staged group charades that was a popular entertainment of the 19th century. In Tableau Vivant, costumed enactors wordlessly enact a story, freezing in a series of familiar scenes or attitudes.

And so is the same in Lincoln, in which actors, led by an astonishingly physically like Daniel Day Lewis, enact the last several months of Abraham Lincoln’s life, frequently freezing in scenes or postures that seem designed to recall all the many paintings, daguerrotypes, statuary and coinage with which we are all so familiar and that pay homage to the man whom most agree is our country’s greatest president.

Despite the dramatic build-up around the central accomplishment of Lincoln’s severely truncated second term—the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery—and the political sausage-making this necessitates, the film feels less story than hagiography. Spielberg seems determined to convince us that Lincoln was a great president, and I buy it, but was it ever in question? Is this biopic or is it a nearly 3-hour Franklin Mint commercial? There’s been a lot of press about Lewis’s voice in this movie, but to me his entire performance, voice included, is problematic.

Based on the life and autobiographical writings of Mark O’Brien, a California journalist and poet who sought the full range of human experience despite being mostly confined to an iron lung, The Sessions tells its remarkable story with humor, frankness, little fanfare and no sanctimony.

Born in 1950, O’Brien was paralyzed by polio at age six and thereafter unable to breathe on his own. However, at times in his life he was strong enough to survive for several hours at a time outside the iron lung by means of a portable respirator. With the aid of this device, he enrolled at age 28 at UC Berkeley, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s in journalism, traveling around campus on an electric gurney that he controlled with a stick held in his mouth.

He began contributing articles on his quest for independent living as a disabled person to periodicals, and writing poetry. (Before his death in 1999 he participated in a documentary, Breathing Lessons, by Jessica Yu, that won the Oscar for Documentary Short Subject in 1996.)

The James Bond franchise celebrates its 50th anniversary in spectacular style with Skyfall, the 23rd film in the series and Daniel Craig’s third outing as 007. Skyfall takes every hallmark of the series and pushes them farther than ever. It’s all there—exotic locations, incredible action sequences, a fascinating arch villain, gorgeous women, the best new Bond song (by Adele) since Shirley Bassey’s “Diamonds Are Forever,” some interesting personnel surprises (my advice: don’t read the spoiler reviews!), and of course, the car.

The locations (Turkey, Shanghai, Macau) are especially stunning, thanks to director Sam Mendes’ (and the Coen Brothers’) go-to man, Roger Deakins, whose painterly, watchful cinematography continually captures moments of beauty and stillness in the midst of danger and frenetic action. As for the villain, you can easily learn the actor who plays him, but as I think in this case it’s much better to be surprised, I will only say that he is as terrifying and charismatic and sad as Hannibal Lecter.

Naomie Harris gives almost as good as she gets as Bond’s field associate. And Bérénice Lim Marlohe’s Sévérine is as gorgeous and tragic as a Bond woman has been, with a sadly all-too-relevant real-world backstory.

What can’t Denzel do? He can stop a train, he can land a plane, and in the case of the latter, which he does on Flight, Robert Zemeckis’s first live motion movie since 2000’s Castaway, he can elevate a disappointingly conventional disaster-movie-of-the-week/addiction drama to compelling watching all by the force of his charisma.

Flight starts as the story of Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington), a hero pilot who manages to land a badly malfunctioning plane under extreme circumstances no other pilot could have done. They know this because the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Bureau) task force that investigates the crash (a routine procedure for all plane crashes) puts ten veteran pilots into a flight simulation mimicking the exact circumstances Whitaker suffered, and found that none of them could land the plane safely as Whitaker did.

But we the audience knows what the public does not, that Whitaker is a drunk, and drank heavily not only the night before the flight, but the morning of, and even during the flight itself. So the movie quickly evolves (or is it devolve) into an addiction drama. For the question begs to be asked: Does the addiction story ramp up the plane crash story, or drag it down to a commonplace redemption tale? The answer is: both.

Well, if the Wachowski Siblings ever wash out of the movies, they can always turn to knitwear. Their inimitable line of deconstructed post-Apocalyptic Steampunk sweaters, wraps and bodysuits made a big impression in its debut—1999’s The Matrix—and continues strong in their brand new Cloud Atlas collection. Fans will find the irregularly rustic stitches, bold asymmetry, and moody hand-dyed Neo-Gothic palette they love, cast in intriguing new shapes. Tom Hanks’ hooded cape and Susan Sarandon’s stone- and macrame-ornamented dress with matching fingerless wristlets are particularly arresting.

Which is to say that Art Direction is as important in the epic, sweeping, wildly ambitious Cloud Atlas as it has always been in the Wachowski oeuvre, as obsessively thorough and as effectively world-making. The movie is based on a 2004 novel of the same name by David Mitchell, a book so bulky and complex it took several years for the movie’s three directors—the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer of Run Lola Run—to work out the script and logistics.

If it weren’t for the fact that writer/director Martin McDonagh is every bit as handsome as his favorite leading man, you’d think he was going down the Woody Allen vanity route, casting Colin Farrell as his obvious surrogate—a screenwriter named Marty M—in his second feature film, Seven Psychopaths. Fellow Irishman Farrell was also the star of McDonagh’s 2008 sleeper hit In Bruges, which also wove its story around a band of incompetent low-level criminals who accidentally get into the crosshairs of a big time criminal sociopath, played very winningly in that first film by a rewardingly cast-against-type Hugh Grant.

The tone of Psychopaths feels very much the same as Bruges in that Farrell again plays a likable fuck-up (this time an alcoholic screenwriter who is finding it hard to produce a follow-up to his first success) whose loser friend Billy (Sam Rockwell, playing very much TO type here) makes his living through a sloppy dog kidnapping operation that he runs with his mysterious elderly pal Hans (Christopher Walken). Unfortunately, Billy nabs a cute little Shih Tzu who happens to be the darling of his owner, mafia overlord Charlie Costello (Woody Harrelson), and thus begins the chase. A shaggy dog story, indeed.

I should be a millionaire right now. Thirty-five minutes into this purported suburban romantic comedy, I muttered to my companion, “I’ll bet you a million dollars this movie was written by a couple of middle-aged guys.”

Fifty-five long minutes later the movie was finally over and there were the writer credits: Ian Helfer and Jay Reiss. I don’t know anything about them but I do know this: they don’t think much of women (mother issues, big time) and they aren’t too clear about the definitions of either “romantic” or “comedy.” Anyway, I called it and I want my money. At least the million dollars would make me feel better about 91 minutes of my life wasted on The Oranges.

So here’s the deal: there are these two families who live across the street from one another in identical white Colonial houses in a pleasant tree-lined neighborhood in West Orange, NJ. The couples (Allison Janney and Oliver Platt are the Ostroffs, Katherine Keener and Hugh Laurie are the Wallings) are best friends who do everything together, including jogging, weekends and holidays. They have children close in age. They live the perfect lives.

You’ve seen enough of these suburban take-downs to know that everything—yes, EVERYTHING—is a lie. A fucking lie. American Beauty has nothing on this movie.

Once a little-known subculture of the collegiate world, with rites and names as arcane as any secret society (Whiffenpoofs, anyone?), a capella is enjoying a bright moment in the spotlight, thanks in large part to the popularity of Glee and reality TV competitions like The Sing-Off. And now in Pitch Perfect, it has made it to the romantic comedy big time, starring Anna Kendrick, best known for her Oscar-nominated portrayal of the uptight young executive opposite George Clooney in Up In The Air. Here she’s still sulky, playing Becca, a mildly goth college freshman who yearns to leave college and pursue a career in music production.

Based on a nonfiction book by GQ editor Mickey Rapkin about the competitive collegiate a capella scene, the messy screenplay by Kay Cannon (Emmy-nominated 30 Rock writer/producer) suffers flat notes, sour chords and predictable harmonies, but thanks to a tight cast and fresh, energetic performances, delivers an enjoyable concert experience just the same.

If you’re a fan of sci-fi stories set in a dystopian, Dickensian future of rampant immorality and violence, or have simply been wondering why M. Night Shamalayan doesn’t meld Twelve Monkeys with Rambo and bring back Bruce Willis to help him do it, you’re in luck. Looper stars an intense Joseph Gordon-Levitt, nearly unrecognizable in prosthetics, contacts and distractingly heavy makeup that renders his face nearly 2D, as young Joe, a 25-year-old looper in the year 2042, and Willis himself as Joe 30 years into the future, in the year 2072.

If it weren’t futile, I’d try to give a summary of Looper‘s extremely intricate, convoluted and possibly hole-ridden plot. Suffice it to say that it involves fate, paid killers, Chinese mafia, secret bunkers, telekinesis, good-hearted prostitutes and the toddler tantrums to end all toddler tantrums. And that after the screening I attended, critics stood around in heated discussion for quite a while, trying to work it all out.