The Homesman

"The Homesman" is as much a head-scratcher as its title, a two-hour exercise in the pointless prolongation of miserablist material.

The Family

If you've seen the trailer, you've seen the two decent minutes of Luc Besson's "The Family," a painful exercise in paycheck cashing by Robert De Niro, as a former Mafioso who ratted out his colleagues, and Tommy Lee Jones, as the Witness Protection Program agent assigned to watch over him and his family.

Emperor

Tommy Lee Jones has been dining out for so long on his likable screen persona, it's hard to remember the last time he made me feel an honest emotion ("In the Valley of Elah," I suppose). He's joined that club of old-timers - Jack Nicholson, Maggie Smith - whom audiences come to see chest-puff and wisecrack their way through mediocre material (including "Lincoln," where his "performance" consisted of knocking down a bunch of straw-man Southern racists).

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.

Hope Springs

MGM has falsely advertised the Meryl Streep-Tommy Lee Jones vehicle “Hope Springs” as a laugh-a-minute sex romp for the 50+ demographic. What it is, at its best, is a somber, often sad portrait of a marriage in long, slow declension, with a few small chuckles interspersed for comic relief. Director David Frankel – fresh off the ornithological Jack Black-Steve Martin-Owen Wilson bomb “The Big Year” – never commits to either the drama or the comedy, leaving “Hope Springs” in a state of limbo that produced queasy discomfort among my audience, who clearly didn’t get what they expected.