From the moment rookie cops Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) get their assignment to go undercover in a high school, because, according to their sergeant, the force’s higher-ups “lack creativity” and simply “recycle old ideas from the ’80s,” I knew I was in good hands.

Look, 21 Jump Street is hardly the first film to playfully acknowledge its own lame concept or to send up the buddy cop genre with a wink, but it certainly does it with style.

There are all sorts of clever recurring bits in this film, but among the best is the fact that, although Schmidt and Jenko are only seven years out of high school themselves—Schmidt was a brace-faced nerd and Jenko was a bullying big man on campus—all the rules have changed.

No one calls on the telephone anymore. (It’s all about texting now.) Not caring about anything, which Jenko tells Schmidt is a sure way to secure popularity, has been replaced by environmental and social activism. Nerds are now cool. Gay kids are celebrated.

“I know the culprit,” moans Jenko. “Glee.”

Another ingenious bit: Jenko is so dim-witted he has forgotten his undercover assignment name, so he ends up with the wrong identity. Now,...

Six years ago, I went on WBAL radio and boldly announced that if Brokeback Mountain didn’t win the Academy Award, I would eat my shoe.

Well, you know the rest: I was forced to blow 60 bucks on a chocolate shoe I found at an online candy store and was later mocked by a complete stranger at the dentist’s office: “Did you chip a tooth eating your shoe?” (For what it’s worth, the overrated Crash ended up getting the nod.)

Ahhh, good times. And times, I feel, that will no longer be replicated.

One of the many problems with this newish phenomenon called “Oscar season”—a season filled with not just a surfeit of award shows (including, full disclosure, one that I vote for: the Critics' Choice Award), but an endless chamber of mirrors of prognostication, analysis, praise, backlash, backlash against the backlash, Tweeting, and live-blogging—is that it has taken almost all the suspense out of the Oscar season.

Don’t get me wrong, there have always been people who were Oscar experts, who analyzed the trajectory of a particular actor or film’s chances the way brokers follow the stock market. But those were a somewhat rarefied bunch, insider types who subscribed to the...

With its found-footage aesthetic and regular-guys-get-super-powers plot, Chronicle will rightly be compared to Cloverfield or perhaps the TV show Heroes. But the film it really has the most in common with is Carrie.

As in Brian De Palma’s horror classic, our teen hero is a ticking time bomb, with a very dangerous weapon at his disposal. And like Carrie, we care about him more than we should and maybe even want to see him exact revenge on his tormenters—until we, well, don’t.

Then again, to call Chronicle a horror film isn’t quite right either. It’s a genre-mashup extraordinaire—seriously funny at times and exciting, too. For a little bit, it plays like a fantasy wish fulfillment picture—what if three regular high school kids found some sort of crazy radioactive cave (never explained, not that it matters) and emerged with super powers? What if they could control objects with their minds and then even fly? How cool would that be? (Cue Beavis and Butthead laugh.)

One of the things I loved about Chronicle is the fact that these guys have no actual clue what to do with their powers—in other words, they don’t immediately decide to don...

There is nothing cuddly about Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), the 9-year-old narrator of Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. He’s fretful, voluble, socially awkward—obviously brilliant, but not entirely pleasant company. He confounds his mother (Sandra Bullock) and doesn’t seem to have any peer friends. The only person he can really relate to is his father (Tom Hanks), who sends Oskar off on elaborate reconnaissance missions, all in a sly attempt to get the boy to interact with the world.

The movie is about one last mission his father sends Oskar on—how even in death, the father is still showing his son how to live.

Yes, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is that film—the 9/11 one—and it attempts to negotiate the massive scope of our national tragedy with the tiny world of a socially isolated little boy. A few critics have lambasted the film for being emotionally manipulative—and it certainly is heavy handed at times (this is the same Stephen Daldry who gave us the operatically depressing The Hours, after all).

But when an answering machine containing urgent messages from the World Trade Center left by Oskar’s father—delivered with escalating...