A culture-wars lump of coal tucked into a bright Christmas stocking, Gift packages familiar holiday and Christian-niche tropes in an inoffensive but unconvincing manner. Jes as metaphor stands in for the whole. He’s supposed to be a wandering handyman who’s good with a hammer—yet he’s everything but. An afternoon-sized project stretches out over several days while Jes wields a nail-puller as if he’s tapping at ice sculptures, not driving steel. If we can’t take Jes seriously as a craftsman, why should we take him seriously as a stand-in for The Carpenter?

Lukewarm acting, recycled characters and plot we’ve all seen before. It doesn’t really add up to a promising result. Clancy isn’t completely painful to watch but you’ll likely spend most of the film anticipating what comes next, and you’ll probably be right most of the time. This is another example of a Christian film that wants to be dramatic and meaningful but doesn’t manage to say anything new. Honestly, the thing I like most is the advertising tagline: “Pain is inevitable. Misery is optional.” But that’s not really news either, is it?

New York, I Love You is the follow-up to Paris Je t’aime, the 2006 film that features about a dozen short vignettes about love in and for that romantic city. They are the first two films in what hopes to be a series, uniting top directors and performers from around the world. The action here is transposed to the Big Apple, the city one of the characters dubs as “the capital of everything that’s possible.”

As the title suggests, Coco Before Chanel is the story of the world famous women’s fashion designer Coco Chanel and the events that shaped her life long before her name became a brand. Chanel was a powerful woman who rose out of a life of nothing to create an empire, but there is nothing really spectacular about her life… at least her life as shown in this film. Still, that should not dissuade those interested from seeing it.

The night after watching the recent horror release Paranormal Activity, I found myself having some difficulty getting to sleep as every sound in the house roused my attention. While Law Abiding Citizen is not the kind of film to stick with you like that, there is a moment involving a cell phone that will have me thinking twice before answering for a couple of days. That may be the only thing about this thriller that will leave any kind of lasting impression on me, but it did succeed in keeping me thoroughly entertained for a good two hours.

The new comedy Couples Retreat appears to be the result of a couple of buddies who were looking for an excuse to spend some production time in paradise. The screenplay was written by stars Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau (along with Dana Fox), two friends who have been cinematically related since they took off for “Vegas baby” in 1996’s Swingers. Meanwhile, the film is directed by Peter Billingsley, a good friend of Vaughn’s since they met as two young actors on an after school special. I’m not sure if the thought of spending a good deal of time on a beautiful island was the actual inspiration for this film, but fortunately for the audience these guys are funny enough that we could care less of their intentions.

Joel and Ethan Coen have been among cinema’s most prominent filmmakers since Blood Simple first exploded onto movie screens twenty-five years ago. Just two years ago, they were at their peak, taking home directing and screenwriting Oscars for their best-picture winner No Country for Old Men. Now comes A Serious Man, and their fourteenth feature film is already being called their most personal. Fortunately for audiences, it’s also one of their most compelling and entertaining.

Even though there is nothing particularly seasonal about the story at the center of this Tinker Bell tale—she goes off in search of a magic mirror lost in the hold of a sunken pirate vessel—the setting for Lost Treasure has autumn stamped all over it, with ripened fruit and the harvest season invoking everything that’s great about October and November while leaving out all the usual seasonal spookiness and Thanksgiving solemnity. Thank you for that, Disney, and for a film with real morals and lessons. It’s nice not to have to focus on Christmas yet, and this season-appropriate alternative to Halloween is nicer yet.

If there is a movie subgenre that has been beaten to death over the last five years, it would have to be the zombie flick. Still, every few years it seems like a movie comes along to make zombies, well, fresh again. A few years ago the Dawn of the Dead remake and the comedy Shaun of the Dead brought the genre back to life, if you will, and the latter in turn served as the inspiration for first time director Ruben Fleischer to make Zombieland, the latest zombie flick to revitalize the undead genre.

There was never really a question of whether controversial filmmaker Michael Moore would tackle the current economic climate or not; it was only really a question of when. In true Moore fashion, he attacks the crisis using old film clips (including some from his own films), interviews with political figures and economic victims, and a few brazen, publicity-seeking stunts. It’s a formula that makes Capitalism: A Love Story another entertaining documentary, but also one that needs to be taken with a grain of salt.