The Loneliest Planet

For about 75 minutes, Julia Loktev's "The Loneliest Planet" enveloped me in its slow, sedulous trance. The young, affianced lovers Alex (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg) spend the summer before their marriage backpacking through the Caucasus in the country of Georgia. After a few nights in a village, they engage a local man, Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze), to guide them on a challenging course over perilous mountain terrain.

Cloud Atlas

"Cloud Atlas" is a love-it-or-hate-it movie for which the up-the-middle rating of 2.5 stars seems just right. It's one of the most structurally complex films of the year, but the Wachowskis juggle the narratives so well it's amazingly easy to follow. (You can even go out for popcorn and come back without losing your place.) It's eight minutes shy of three hours, but rarely boring. It spans continents and millennia, but lacks long-term resonance. In any fifteen minutes, you may see thousands of human bodies hanging in a futuristic slaughterhouse, followed by a chase scene out of a 70s blaxploitation picture, followed by Jim Broadbent in a farcical situation out of Monty Python. I've never seen a movie lurch so wildly in tone from moment to moment, and I liked that about it. "Cloud Atlas" only occasionally achieves its grandest aspirations, but we need more movies with its audacity and scope.

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.

Seven Psychopaths, Pitch Perfect

Seven Psychopaths

Pitch Perfect

Martin McDonagh's "Seven Psychopaths" is the latest in a seemingly endless stream of ultraviolent comedies with high-toned, non-sequitur dialogue between the bloody murders. Despite the presence of "In Bruges" star Colin Farrell, only rarely does "Seven" attain the farcical momentum or genial ingratiation of that, McDonagh's best film. Too often the writing aims for an epic, "Usual Suspects" grandeur while achieving only occasional absurdist laughs. Christopher Walken turns in a toned-down, effective performance, and Woody Harrelson makes an excellent psychopath-among-psychopaths, but "Seven" remains more a concept than a fully inhabited film.

Argo

Ben Affleck's "Argo" gets 4 stars the same way Barack Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize a few years ago: for future promise as much as for current accomplishment. To be sure, "Argo" is a terrific movie, a crowd-pleaser that seems to please every single person in the crowd. (It received an average CinemaScore grade of A+). It might well win the Oscar for, inter alia, Best Picture. But it's not perfect.

Smashed

"Smashed" is about a young elementary teacher who happens to be morbidly alcoholic. Kate Hannah (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) scours the cabinets of the Highland Park home she shares with her dipso husband Charlie (hirtellous Aaron Gray), a freelance music critic with family money, for the last swig from any near-empty bottle. She takes a nip in the school parking lot, where her colleague Mr. Davies (Nick Offerman), himself a recovering alkie, catches her and without pressure offers to introduce her to his AA meeting.

The Paperboy, The Oranges

The Paperboy

The Oranges

Both have been trashed by critics, but I'm going to recommend "The Paperboy" and "The Oranges," two films with nothing in common but a strong sense of self. They know exactly what they mean to do, and do it.