You probably know someone like Greenberg, a guy who had a band in the '80s that was this close to making it, and who never really amounted to much, but whose self-loathing is only matched by his general feeling of superiority to almost everyone he meets.

What you might not expect is that they’d make a movie about that guy, and then actually have the audacity to make him the (anti)-hero. But that’s just what master of misery Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) does.

Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) has just been released from a mental hospital after a nervous breakdown and he’s spending some time in L.A. house/petsitting for his brother, a successful businessman. Greenberg is now a carpenter, he works out of a co-operative studio in New York. “It’s very political,” he mutters at one point. (In that single line, we sort of get all we need to know about Greenberg’s life as a carpenter in New York—that he rationalizes his own lack of success by asserting that the system is political. He probably figures that the other carpenters don’t like him...

Can the pairing of a director and actor to a film be almost too perfect? Because Tim Burton is clearly the perfect man to direct a 3-D live-action version of Alice in Wonderland. And Johnny Depp, his partner in all things both innocent and grotesque, is the perfect man to play the Mad Hatter. So why was I left feeling so strangely ambivalent about the whole affair?

It certainly can’t be the visuals, which are as dazzling as you’d expect from Burton: Depp’s fright-wig-red hair and intricately painted white eye lashes pop from under his giant velvet hat; the Red Queen’s bulbous head, with its cupie-doll lips, is perched with comic perilousness on her tiny body; the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) is shimmeringly white except for a shock of garish red lipstick.

And it can’t be the performances, which feature voicework by the entire adult cast of Harry Potter (okay, it only seems that way); plus likable newcomer Mia Wasikowska as a more mature Alice (she’s 19 in the film); a miraculously restrained Crispin Glover as the Knave of...

A zombie film by any other name—say, The Crazies—is still a zombie film. And a pretty nifty one, at that, with an ample amount of scares and gross-outs and sly humor. But a zombie film all the same.

The film starts with a wink: a desolate, apocalyptic street scene of empty streets, burning cars, and blown out businesses. Then—cue the cheery music—we're practically in Mayberry. The words "Two Days Earlier" flash across the screen.

Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) is watching a high school baseball game when the town drunk, Rudy, stumbles onto the field with a rifle. Rudy has a glazed look in his eyes and David—cool and studly under pressure—can't get him to lay down his gun. Bye-bye, Rudy.

Eventually more townsfolk start acting strange and doing unfortunate things like bleeding from their eyeballs. (I don't want to tell you what one upstanding dad does to his wife and son, but it will make you think twice about hiding in a closet while being chased by a zomb. .  . I mean, a crazy.)

David begins to suspect there's a connection...

I love it when a brilliant director decides to make a good old fashioned genre film: Such is the case with Shutter Island, a twitchy, twisty, psychological horror film, directed with obvious glee by Martin Scorsese with nods to Alfred Hitchcock and the best traditions of film noir and pulp fiction.

In 1952, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardio DiCaprio) and his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) have been sent by ferry to the Shutter Island asylum for the criminally insane to investigate the escape of a prisoner.

Once they arrive, the "no exit" aspect of this island comes into high relief. And the island becomes its own ominous character—craggy rocks and cliffs, swaying trees, foreboding stone buildings. The patients, likewise, are hunched, toothless, menacing—exactly what the genre calls for.

A film like this is all about paranoia. "You'll never get off this island," one person after the next whispers to Teddy in conspiratorial tones. Does the hospital have secrets? Are they really conducting dangerous experiments on the patients for...