Spy

You'll laugh your head off at "Spy," in which the team of star Melissa McCarthy and director Paul Feig, who've given us "Bridesmaids" and "The Heat," again prove to have their fingers on the pulse of contemporary comedy. "Spy" is at once familiar and fresh, profane and tender, slapstick and subtle. It's richly conceived, with a heaping handful of memorable characters inhabited by gifted actors.

Black Sea

A close call for me on Kevin Macdonald’s “Black Sea,” about Robinson (Jude Law), a submarine captain fired after eleven years by Agora, a faceless maritime salvage firm that comes in for much of the film’s impotent critique of corporate greed. (I want five bucks from the first crossword constructor who replaces the ancient Greek marketplace with this reference in a clue.)

Side Effects

The protean director Steven Soderbergh, whose "sex, lies, and videotape" snuck the Palme D'Or out from under Spike Lee's "Do The Right Thing" at Cannes in 1987 (earning him a permanent soft spot in my heart), has in the subsequent quarter-century given us terrific films as disparate as "King of the Hill," "Out of Sight," "Traffic," and "Ocean's Eleven." For his self-labeled swan song, though, he's chosen a convoluted and supremely silly thriller that, with its one-car crashes, lesbian therapists, and involuntary institutionalizations, ends up bordering on camp.

Anna Karenina

I had Joe Wright’s “Hanna” on my top-ten list last year, and he’s done all he can to bring visual flair to Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” (by way of Tom Stoppard), imaginatively transposing the Russian love story to an elaborate, ever-shifting, multi-layered stage set. And Keira Knightley, who’s become highly reliable and occasionally (as in last year’s “A Dangerous Method”) quite bold and risk-taking, puts passion into the title role of a government minister’s wife cast out of society by virtue of an injudicious affair before ever really entering it.

"Contagion": Come on in, the water's fine...

Steven Soderbergh would seem to have the right impersonal, clinical detachment required to make "Contagion" taut, gripping and seminal - the kind of issue movie that makes the cover of Time magazine. (Certainly the thought of a biological weapon such as the film's mutant bat-pig virus strain is deeply frightening.) Unfortunately, cinematizing even the most epidemic subject matter involves some choice of characters through whom to tell the story, and Soderbergh has created several uninteresting ones.