Inside Llewyn Davis revels in its own lyrical idiosyncrasies, each note a tuneful reminder that the songs we sing secretly to ourselves are oftentimes full of bigger lies than the ones we happily hum out loud for the rest of the world to mindlessly listen to.

Walking with Dinosaurs is an uneasy combination of scientific exploration, documentary and fictional adventure, and as visually marvelous as much of this is the emotional content is so prehistoric it might as well be extinct.

I didn’t care for Anchorman 2. But unlike its predecessor I didn’t outright detest it, either. While there are some funny bits, while many of the buried satirical sentiments do hit their mark, overall Ferrell’s latest scattershot comedic enterprise just isn’t my particular brand of Scotch.

[American Hustle] plays like some bizarre, retro 70s-style amalgam of Dog Day Afternoon, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Donnie Brasco and Ocean’s Eleven, Russell mashing up genres and styles with skillfully energetic enthusiasm. He and Singer use a real F.B.I. sting operation as basis to go hog wild, taking a gifted ensemble of actors and giving them complicated characters to inhabit where nothing is ever what it seems and anything can happen to the lot of them at any given time.

The Armstrong Lie is a nice film, at times even a fascinating one, it’s just not essential, and that’s as strong a truth as any to be found in any single one of this picture’s 124 investigative and observational minutes.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug plays more like a cliffhanger to a popular television show than it does a motion picture, and with that being the case I can’t imagine wanting to watch it on its own sans its two bookends at any point in the foreseeable future.

Not perfect, mind you, not supercalifragalistic….well, you know the rest…but wonderful all the same, this look behind Disney’s curtain a thoroughly entertaining enterprise worth flying kites to the highest heights in order to see.

Trap for Cinderella kept me at arm’s length, Softley crafting a motion picture I can in most ways respect even though it was also one I seldom, if ever, fully enjoyed.

Out of the Furnace is an understatedly powerful drama that’s almost impossible to resist and even more difficult to ignore. It is magnificently acted, especially by Bale, Affleck, Harrelson and Sam Shepard (playing the Baze boys’ uncle) and is filled with astonishing moments of barren beauty and visceral power that speaks to the story’s core elements, more often than not without any words at all.