Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Precious is that it isn't the most depressing film of the year.

It tells the story of 16-year-old Clareece "Precious" Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), who lives with her defiantly unemployed mother Mary (Mo'Nique) in a Harlem apartment. As the film begins, Precious is fat, painfully shy, functionally illiterate, and pregnant for the second time by the hand of her abusive father. Her first child, born with Down's Syndrome, is being raised by Precious's grandmother-Precious never sees the child save for a few staged house visits with the social worker (so Mary can collect the welfare check.) Instead of taking her daughter out of this hellhole, Mary sits in front of the TV all day, accuses Precious of "stealing her man" (mind you, she's been repeatedly raped by her own father), and orders her daughter around, hurling projectiles at Precious when she isn't immediately compliant.

What keeps Precious sane throughout all of this is her daydreams. When things are at their absolute worst, she dreams of being a model...

I think the thing I like most about Jenny (Carey Mulligan), the restless heroine of An Education, is how representative she is of a certain type of brainy teenager. Jenny, who lives in suburban London with her parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour), thinks she's worldly and sophisticated (she peppers her conversation with pretentious bits of French). She thinks her parents are oh-so-bourgeois (indeed, they sort of are). She thinks that her life hasn't really started yet-but maybe it will when she finally goes to Oxford.

She is, in a way, the perfect mark for David (Peter Sarsgaard), a conspicuously charming, much older (and Jewish!) man who slowly ingratiates himself into her life. How can she resist his sleek sports car, his glamorous friends (Rosamund Pike and Dominic Cooper), his jet-setting ways? Soon enough, she's going to museums and concerts with him, taking trips to Paris, and falling into his bed.

So where, you might ask, are her parents during all of this? They are equally flattered by David'...

2012 is like a 1970s disaster film on steroids. Instead of a towering inferno or a sinking cruiseliner, we have the whole planet Earth getting destroyed. Because that, ladies and gentleman, is how Roland Emmerich rolls.

2012 is a lot like Emmerich’s other apocalyptically-inclined gems—Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow—except the special effects are better and the film may even be more treacly.

Yes, buried amid the rubble (and the tsunamis and the giant earthquakes that cause whole cities to split in two—neat!) is a message about caring for your fellow man. Kumbaya, brother—and watch out for that flying Eiffel Tower.

2012 has everything you would expect from this sort of big budget, high-minded schlock. Some humor (much provided by Woody Harrelson as a conspiracy nutcase who just may be right this time), some serious-sounding scientific jargon (brought to you with appropriate “run the numbers again!” dismay by Chewetel Ejiofor), some familial bonding (still-lovable John...

When I saw the trailer for The Men Who Stare at Goats, I got pretty excited. A military satire based on a true(ish) story about a secret branch of the army that tried to develop human super powers, staring Jeff Bridges as its baked commander and George Clooney as a wild-eyed true believer? Count me in.

But here’s the problem: The trailer is better than the film. The trailer lays out the storyline and shows some of the film’s best jokes—men trying to rush through walls and drive while blindfolded; George Clooney giving a death stare to a goat; Kevin Spacey expressing his regrets about a couple’s divorce at their wedding—but the movie itself is glib and unfocused. Sad to say, it works better edited down to four minutes.

Ewan McGregor plays Bob Wilton, a recently divorced reporter looking to prove to his ex-wife just how macho he is. He goes to Kuwait where he meets Clooney’s Lyn Cassady who tells him about the First Earth Battalion, a classified military program started in the ’70s that practiced mind control...