Too Late

Dennis Hauck’s “Too Late” is the coolest movie to come down the pike in ages. It bleeds cool. It’s the kind of movie you groove on the first couple times you see it, but even then you know it’s gonna be part of your collection – part of your life – forever.

The Playroom

John Hawkes has had some of the strongest roles in the 2010's (my favorite being his work in "The Sessions"), but there's nowhere for him to take his lawyer father of four with a drunk for a wife in "The Playroom," a poor man's "Ice Storm" in which Hawkes and Molly Parker spend the evening with their friends Clark and Nadia (it's clear the wrong couples are married) while the kids construct elaborate fairy tales upstairs and occasionally spy on the grown-ups.

Lincoln

“Lincoln” is a competently made, watchable excuse for unsophisticated audiences to choke on their own virtue and applaud themselves for making it through a two-and-a-half-hour prestige drama. It’s dry as dirt, endlessly self-congratulatory, and totally lacking in intellectual and emotional depth and resonance.

The Sessions

The lightest, sweetest movie at the multiplex right now is the one about the polio-stricken poet and writer confined 20+ hours of the day to an iron lung. In a departure from his villainous roles in "Winter's Bone" and "Martha Marcy May Marlene," John Hawkes plays the writer, Mark O'Brien, who after a rejected marriage proposal to one of the Berkeley coeds he employs as caregivers, decides to hire a sex therapist to experience physical intimacy with a woman. It turns out to be Hawkes' best work to date, a performance of abiding humanity, by turns smart, self-deprecating, naïve, almost schoolboyish.