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Some horror movies send you off into the dark night giddy with fear and pleasantly reeling from revulsion. Others give you a glimpse of something so dark and bleak that you’re left with a queasiness in the pit of your stomach. What you witnessed was not in any traditional sense enjoyable (outside of the momentary thrills one can get from the exhilaration of shock), yet you’re moved. It managed to burrow to a place not only grim but to which you hadn’t really considered going before.

When The Grey finally trips up, after about an hour’s worth of well-executed outdoor-adventure-movie moves (kudos to DP Masanobu Takayanagi for his muscular camera moves and gray-scale palette), it’s on its own attempts at profundity. As the numbers in Ottaway’s party decrease, the survivors are increasingly moved to contemplate their own mortality, leading to lots of sensitive-bro conversations that sound less like the spontaneous reflections of traumatized men than the deep thoughts of filmmakers using them as their frostbitten mouthpieces.

It’s worthwhile to ask why Manhattan looks so beautiful, why Allen went to the trouble (a processing lab had to be built to handle all of the black-and-white 35mm film) for this story and these characters in particular. Does the style suit the subject, or is it just distracting handsome packaging? I think it is a success of contrasts, between the lush visuals and the flawed, mostly mean and cunning characters’ words and deeds.

Tran clearly relishes the unconventional edges of the scenario―unreality infuses every frame. His Norwegian Wood is a film of sensations, of artfully arranged compositions of the lovers in nature, harsh winds blowing at their hair as crisp Foley work overwhelms the soundtrack. It’s a film where some sex is merely penetration for pleasure, and other sex is a true intercourse between beings. And, most Murakamian of all, it’s a film in which characters can change their entire bearing without warning, in an instant.

The monomania of the performer, stuck on the role, holding his character up to the light and inspecting it from every angle, permeates Fiennes’s intense directorial debut. In other hands, the character Coriolanus can come off as a thesis with a sword or a Chigurh-esque cartoon. But Fiennes privileges this slab of granite with a soul. The play complicates our understanding of politics, democracy, leadership, and war; the movie is first and foremost a study of a man.

Up until now, Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo’s movies have seemed more devoted to energy than content. Earlier efforts like I’m Gonna Explode were brash and callow little things, translating the primal diegetic rebellion of Jean-Luc Godard into Spanish, enchanted by method, indifferent to message, positing his characters in a guerrilla war against the echoes of a distant history. But Naranjo’s new film, Miss Bala―among the toasts of this year’s Cannes Film Festival―may reveal his early work as the efforts of a revolutionary filmmaker killing time until his revolution.

After a year overstuffed with cinematic bounty like 2011, isn’t it somewhat churlish to spend time and energy meditating on the various failures, idiocies, lapses in judgment, and taste that marred the silver screen over the past twelve months? Why yes, yes it is!

The images run the gamut from street signage to abandoned grocery stores to a long, meditative moment with a tractor in a wheat field, so many quotidian artifacts of life that are dramatically recast as Keiller-as-narrator-as-Robinson makes extrapolations about everything from local governance and census statistics, to the global economy, to Neo-Darwinism, to the struggle of nature, to the ruination left in the wake of the industrial age. Keiller manages to construct a film that, while comprised entirely of images of the near past and present, creates a foreboding sense of our dystopian postindustrial future.

Most Underrated Overrated Film, Worst and Weirdest Homages, Best Establishing Shots, Biggest Cutesy-Poo, The Poughkeepsie Dinner Theater Medallion, The What Is Wrong with People Award, and much more! Goodnight, 2011.

In Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, infidelity comes to represent the highest, most irrevocable form of betrayal, the most persuasive case for one person’s essential remoteness from another, as well as a fault line between the sexes (2006’s Climates explored similar terrain, coolly anatomizing the aftermath of a breakup). This is just one of many irreconcilable binaries in Ceylan’s films: urban/rural, parents/children, movement/stasis.

The film keeps giving us things to think about: not only the twisty, surface-level stuff of the plot, but underlying questions that are both pointedly specific―like whether the same Iranian legal system that would deny two consenting adults a mutually wished-upon divorce is any clearer-eyed when it comes to looking at an accidental crime―and completely universal, as in the examination of how parents can impose, rather than impart, values upon their children―and also use them in pitched personal battles.

Brad Bird’s outing ditches the grimness of M:I-3 and returns to focusing on the Brookstone-catalogue gadgetry, mediocre-to-fair joke-making, and high-wire acrobatics that have become staples of the franchise. It’s not as idiosyncratic as any of the first three, but Bird’s clean back-to-basics approach is suitably human-scaled (the threat of mortality always hangs lightly over the series) in sea of oversized and impersonal spectacles. His overpraised The Incredibles struck a similar balance, and now seems something of a warm-up.

In many ways, this is the most fitting external environment for a Fincher film yet: whereas The Social Network’s dark greens and blues immediately betrayed his presence and even felt tacked on in a story largely taking place in college dorm rooms and, though certainly rife with greed and betrayal, hardly as sinister as something like Zodiac, here the moody color palette he uses is natural to the snowy locale. Aesthetically and thematically, there’s no mistaking who’s in control here or why the story appealed to the director to begin with.

It’s clear very early in this episodic, rangy film that Spielberg will not be investing in Joey as he did with his more expressive inhuman protagonists (for one thing, as he’s a horse, it’s often difficult to see catch both of his eyes in the same shot), and that he will be only as important to the tale as the humans he comes in contact with. In this sense, Joey is like a blockbuster version of Bresson’s Balthazar―a patient witness to joy and terror, who only gets dangerously excited when pushed to extremes.

Wasikowska’s repartee with Close, which ought to be the heart of the film, turns out to be its greatest deficiency―and the clue to the film’s essential timidity with its own sexual politics. Based on the suggestions of Hubert, Albert decides to actively pursue Helen as a possible wife, as a means to establish an identity and a sense of normalcy in the community before opening the little shop. Yet it’s never made clear whether Albert is being opportunistic or genuinely desires Helen, neither in the script nor in the timid, asexual performances of Close and Wasikowska.

The jaunty material feels not unlike the antics of Spielberg’s Indiana Jones movies, and one imagines the director, always concerned with wowing his audience (both his greatest strength and Achilles’ heel) relishing the opportunity of re-creating the boyhood serials he so loved as a youth, but now sans the burden of gravity. He largely succeeds, providing along the way plenty of high velocity adventure (his aptitude in this area makes the digitally enhanced chases in Hugo seem positively tepid) and more than a handful of images worth hanging onto . . .

Lest we accuse her of peddling what amounts to a demon-seed potboiler, Ramsay bombards us with chronology-scrambling narrative curlicues, ironic pop music interludes, and “artfully” elliptical montages that bludgeon the viewer into submission. Certainly, no film starring Tilda Swinton could be anything less than a meditation on evil’s banality and our inability to comprehend mass tragedy and those who perpetrate it . . .

After a decade or so of tuxedoed Sean Connery ordering martinis and cracking heads, the novelist John Le Carr?, whose own career within the British secret service (which he named the Circus, after the Cambridge Circus offices the real MI6 used to occupy) seemed to be more authentic, if substantially less exciting, than Fleming’s anecdotes, renewed our acquaintance with the traditional dynamics, via his 1974 bestseller, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The book’s success was helped along by a game-changing 1979 TV series starring Alec Guinness as veteran intelligence officer George Smiley―an adaptation and a performance so apparently definitive that no further attempts had been made to film the story until now.

Unmoored from Selznick’s ravishingly rendered black-and-white drawings (which tell the tale in a way that’s part flipbook, part storybook, part illustrated novel), the story of an orphaned boy living in the Gare Montparnasse train station in Paris, trying to repair an automaton he believes will give him a message from his dead father, loses some of its enigma and surrealness. On the page, young Hugo Cabret’s intimate journey unfolds for the reader as though it’s being unearthed piece by piece while rummaging through a treasure chest. Selznick’s approximation of a camera zoom over a series of flipped pages is more remarkable, in this case, than the real thing.

Steve McQueen’s Shame is the latest entry in what we’ll call the sad sex subgenre. In a sad sex film, partners don’t enjoy each other’s flesh, they rut. They bump uglies. They shudder. Their faces evince no enjoyment as their bodies try to make contact. Sometimes they cry during orgasm. Sex for the protagonists of these types of films is not merely unpleasant or temporarily uncomfortable, but rather a manifestation of their emotional infertility, an existential scream from the void. Their emptiness is exacerbated by the fact that they cannot seem to make physical contact with another human.