When Dorothy finally gets around to observing, “the minute it stops being fun, we stop,” I nearly hooted. In fact, I did, as this is a principle which my wife Jenn and I also have also endorsed verbatim since our own wedding. If only Sasaki had employed a suitably minimalist approach to her subject, I would have been more satisfied. But as both Herb and Dorothy would agree, art appreciation is very subjective. If you’re at all interested in the subject matter, by all means take a look. There’s a very good chance you’ll disagree with me.

Okay… so we all know what we get from a Harry Potter DVD release. We get the movie. And that’s what we came for, right? And as one who has never read the books, this is the first time I’ve felt like I hadn’t walked into a party to which I had not been invited—and it’s not just my developing familiarity with the characters and world of Harry Potter, I don’t think. It’s too bad Warner Bros. doesn’t have the courtesy to really pitch the DVD release as much fun. Instead, before the movie even starts, you get to find out how much fun you could be having doing something else.

Can holiday tearjerkers be formulaic? Yes. Can formulaic tearjerkers also be effective, both as entertainment and as much-needed cathartic therapy? Yes, absolutely. And thanks in large part to a surprisingly subtle and moving performance from Madeleine Stowe, this Lifetime TV movie delivers just the kind of emotional package a lot of people probably need this time of year. Yet this particular fantasy is not interested in depicting a sentimental world that doesn’t exist; it’s about allowing us to re-enter the very real, imperfect world in which we actually live. If Christmas is a painful time of year for you, take Mark Addison’s advice. Sometimes it’s just best to let the tears flow. Let The Christmas Hope help you do that.

When we are introduced to the homicide detectives who come as close to steering this story as anyone possibly could, Willem Dafoe’s Detective Havenhurst tells his partner, “I’ve driven half way across the country with one hand”—literally and figuratively. You kind of get the hunch that Lynch and Herzog might be referring to art in general, rather than driving, and setting up a comparison between establishment professionals and dangerous indies. That is, “professional filmmakers” are often no better than amateurs, and amateurs might be just as effective at what the professionals do. I’m just not buying it. When I’m having my legged pulled by philosophers and aesthetes, I don’t particularly care to be reminded that such critters exist.

As a movie buff, I’ve always been fascinated by the history of Hollywood personalities and few stand out from the pack like Orson Welles. As a wunderkind in 1941, Welles stormed into Hollywood and made Citizen Kane, a film many consider to be the greatest ever made. But before he invaded the movie business, Welles was a popular radio personality and had his own troupe of players at the Mercury Theater in New York. Director Richard Linklater’s new film Me and Orson Welles, tells the story of Welles’ famous 1937 stage production of Julius Caesar.

As a director, Clint Eastwood has aged like fine wine. It could be easily argued that he has reached his peak behind the camera in his seventies and his name has been synonymous with Oscar buzz since 2003’s Mystic River. Add to that the fact that his new movie stars Morgan Freeman as former South African President Nelson Mandela and Invictus just screams Oscar even without mentioning that Matt Damon co-stars. The movie is everything you’d expect from Eastwood: efficient, entertaining and well-acted. It is a very good movie, but it does miss a few notes that keep it from being great.

Robert De Niro is a legend and there’s little doubt he’s one of the best actors to ever grace the silver screen. His most famous roles tend to be marked by violence. After all, he was Travis Bickle, and he won Oscars for playing the young Vito Corleone and boxer Jake La Motta. His characters have done many shocking things, but perhaps it is due to his past roles that the opening scene in Everybody’s Fine may be the most shocking of all. Yes, Robert De Niro is vacuuming.

The promotional material for director Jim Sheridan’s new drama Brothers has been somewhat misleading. The film’s trailers suggest that the meat of the film is the love triangle between the three stars, only briefly touching on the post-traumatic stress suffered by soldiers in the Middle East that is the real guts of the story. Often, I’m in favor of trailers hiding possible spoilers, but here it seems more like a simple advertising ploy as producers know that the war in the Middle East is box office poison.

Writer/director Jason Reitman began adapting Walter Kirn’s novel Up in the Air in 2002 and intended for it to be his first feature film. He ended up setting it aside in favor of Thank You for Smoking and Juno, but the delay turned out to be something of a happy accident. As the movie centers around a man whose job it is to go from company to company and tell employees of those companies that they have been laid off, the story is much more relevant in 2009 than it would have been in 2002.

This is an ingenious, affectionate comedy of two-bit losers and four-letter words—and I enjoyed the heck out of it, even though I generally loathe heist comedies. Berger and co-writer Gabriel Tigerman were right to shelve the project as long as potential backers insisted on name actors like Topher Grace. This is fresh material which demands fresh faces. Never mind the apparent eleventh-hour thrust for “every day is a gift” sentimentality. That’s an idea that’s valid enough; but the real value of the film is in turning expectations on their heads and, like a Pegg/Frost collaboration, reminding you that comedy can just be fun.