Sandrine Bonnaire’s performance in Queen to Play is incredible. As Héléne, Bonnaire fully embodies the yearning and regret of a stifled cleaning lady, eking out an altogether boring existence on the impoverished and culturally uninspiring modern Corsica. The character spends her days cleaning the very nice apartments and hotel rooms of international guests, and her nights attempting conversation with her boorish manual laborer husband, a man who’s seemingly devoid of libido and only interested in playing backgammon with his friends from work.

Bertrand Tavernier’s The Princess of Montpensier sets a personal conflict against the backdrop of the tumultuous religious wars in late-16th-century France. This blend of history and fiction is very much a Tavernier film, with all his standard virtues and faults: effortless evocation of a time and place, pacing that walks a fine line between deliberate and slack, and more nourishment for the mind than the heart.

Since screenwriters Seth Lochhead and David Farr couldn’t be bothered to make the whole ‘genetic modification’ angle of Hanna in any way believable, I can’t be bothered to explain it in profuse detail or even accurately, so… just think Fifth Element but without any aliens or eschatological prophecies, okay? Indeed, Hanna (Saoirse “sow-orse/say-o-urse” Ronan) is another Leeloo, but even more bad-ass, so much so that she doesn’t even need Bruce Willis to help her out.

Badmouthing a film as modest as Meeting Spencer seems almost churlish. It aspires to be nothing more than a silly farce. But it fails to achieve even that goal, which might not be so modest after all — farce is harder than it’s supposed to look. The film isn’t completely awful, but not one element works. That humdrum title is only the beginning of its problems.

With Pixar in mind as the golden standard for both CGI and kids movies these days, it can be either a depressing or kind of a heartening experience to sit through another in the glut of sub-Pixar material that competing studios keep churning out.

The titular character of Cat Run is Cat (Paz Vega), a single, working mom and high-class prostitute who, you guessed it, is on the run. What happened was, Cat was working a rich-person party in Eastern Europe when one of the guests, a Very Important Person named Krebb (Christopher McDonald) who turns out to be the US Secretary of Defense, decided to choke to death one of the two women he’s having sex with. Then all of Cat’s naked coworkers are rounded up and shot, mostly in the head. I think it’s to ensure that there aren’t any witnesses, although none of the male guests are executed.

When a movie is based on a play, the story tends to dwell on a topical issue or a dinner party that goes painfully wrong. While a Halloween meal gets ruined late into Trust, it’s definitely an “issue” flick, with director/co-writer David Schwimmer (Friends) forcing the audience to ponder internet child predators and the families scarred by them.

From what an adult can tell, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules is indeed about a kid whose main (and, sadly, only) character trait is wimpiness, and who is therefore having a tough time in seventh grade.

In tone and style, Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier’s Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning film In A Better World could be a Hollywood film, but its provenance (and subtitles) consign it to the foreign film category. There it kept strange company with the likes of Greek filmmaker Giorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, a bizarre, twisted, and formally rigorous film about an isolated family. Bier’s films are far more freewheeling and epic, marked by both nuanced characterization and a flair for melodrama.

In her seminal 1992 text, Men, Women, and Chainsaws, feminist film theorist Carol J. Clover characterizes the horror genre as being perpetually concerned with the clash of two competing ontological systems: that of “White Science” (Western rationalism) and “Black Magic” (spiritualism) — terms borrowed from ethnobotanist Wade Davis’ controversial “real life zombie” book, The Serpent and the Rainbow. In Clover’s formulation, virtually all modern horror films share a similar moral: that White Science cannot explain all of life’s mysteries.