For a film that touches on so many challenging and controversial topics — including sexual and mental/emotional abuse, teen pregnancy, HIV, and illiteracy — Precious is told with such energy, style, and conviction that it’s impossible not to be awed by the artistry of the film even when we’re shrinking away from the devastation taking place on the screen. Even when things get so grim that all hope seems lost, director Lee Daniels keeps us emotionally involved by merging documentary-style filmmaking with urban surrealism in a way that’s genuinely captivating and original. While some may argue that Daniels’ stylistic flourishes have no place in a story like Precious, it’s precisely his bold artistic choices that set the film apart from any number of inner-city underdog stories, and take us into the mind of a young woman whose devastating circumstances are preventing her from reaching her true potential.

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Considering that director Richard Kelly’s 2001 film Donnie Darko inspired such a ravenous cult following, you’d think that his 2009 thriller The Box would at least have to be mildly entertaining. And, in fairness, it is sometimes. But the cool moments scattered throughout this masturbatory extended Twilight Zone episode are way too few and far between — especially considering how high Kelly aims in the movie’s second half.

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It’s hard to imagine a movie about the U.S. military training soldiers to discover their psychic powers that wouldn’t be fun, especially if it’s played for laughs. And the first half of Grant Heslov’s directorial debut, The Men Who Stare at Goats, doesn’t disappoint.

The action begins when heartbroken reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) heads off to imbed himself with troops as the Iraq War starts, but Wilton can’t get himself into the country until he chances upon Lyn Cassady (George Clooney). It turns out Lyn spent decades as part of the New Earth Army — a platoon of men, led by Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), who lived a new-age lifestyle in an attempt to cultivate extrasensory perception that would allow the U.S. army to win wars nonviolently. Bill now has a secret mission in Iraq, and allows Bob to come along. As the duo gets into a series of misadventures, Lyn shares with Bob the colorful history of the New Earth Army and chronicles the nefarious machinations of Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), whose jealousy of Lyn’s remarkable skill brought an end to the group.

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A Christmas Carol is as much a part of the Christmas tradition as Santa Claus and mistletoe, so it’s no surprise that this year there’s yet another film version of the classic story. In Disney’s A Christmas Carol, the animated retelling of Charles Dickens’ classic tale of charity, redemption, and embracing the Christmas spirit, director Robert Zemeckis creates a visually stunning multi-sensory thrill ride that’s sure to please both kids and adults alike. The story centers on Ebenezer Scrooge (Jim Carrey), a penny-pinching miser who cares nothing for the people around him, least of all his hopelessly downtrodden employee Bob Cratchit (Gary Oldman) and infectiously optimistic nephew, Fred (Colin Firth). On Christmas Eve, after a frightening encounter with the ghost of his deceased business partner, Jacob Marley, Scrooge is visited by three spirits — the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come — who take him on an eye-opening journey to expose the truths he is reluctant to face.

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A Fire in the Sky for the post-Blair Witch generation, The Fourth Kind purports to present dramatized accounts of actual unexplained events. If only moviegoers were as gullible as they were back when that group of college filmmakers vanished in the Maryland woods without a trace, perhaps screenwriter/director Olatunde Osunsanmi’s sham shocker would have actually had us going there for a minute.

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Until the release of Collapse, Roland Emmerich has reigned as the king of the contemporary end-of-the-world film with offerings such as 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and Independence Day. But with this nonfiction film, director Chris Smith of American Movie fame has created an apocalyptic movie that is far more realistic in its predictions than any Hollywood production in memory. Collapse is the type of doom-and-gloom documentary that should have audiences running, but it’s so masterfully made and riveting that it’s impossible to look away.

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At its core, Adam Elliot’s stop-motion animated opus Mary & Max may well be one of the most despairing mainstream features ever made. That isn’t intended as a criticism of the film, but as an observation; despair is integral to the film’s worldview. In Elliot’s universe – a godless, a-humanist universe of chaos, random violence and meaningless, tragic absurdities – humans create their only real significance via intimate personal connections with one another. The earnestness of one such connection – a marvelous friendship at the center of this story – also gives the movie resounding levels of heart, soul, and hope, that effectively offset the maelstrom of suffering it perceives.

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The very existence of The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day is something of a cinematic miracle, and the fact that it received a theatrical release was yet more improbable. For those unacquainted with the history of this franchise, the making of The Boondock Saints was such a colossal disaster that it opened in only five theaters. In fact, the gargantuan ego of writer-director Troy Duffy, a supposed wunderkind who got a big deal from Harvey Weinstein, prompted Duffy’s former friends to make a lacerating documentary (Overnight) about how his attitude poisoned the whole production — not to mention any and all future career prospects. Or so it seemed at the time. But when The Boondock Saints gained a cult following on DVD — perhaps due to a morbid curiosity fueled by Overnight — a sequel was greenlit. And the second time out, Duffy’s war wounds seem to have granted him the wisdom to make the film he probably intended to make in the first place.

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