A sweet, if slight, documentary, Nénette turns its gaze on the orangutans of the Paris Jardin Des Plantes zoo. In fact, that is all we see — mirroring the spectators who visit the zoo, the fixed camera observes the captive apes as they live their quiet lives behind the thick glass. Of particular interest is the film’s namesake, Nénette, the matriarch who has spent most of her 40 years in the zoo.

In True Grit, the latest film from Ethan and Joel Coen, 14-year-old protagonist Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) is determined to see justice brought to the man (Josh Brolin as Tom Chaney) who killed (and robbed) her father. Leaving her home, she goes into town — what there is of it — to take care of burial arrangements (a booming business, the opening scenes’ hangings suggest) but stays to run a few errands of her own. First, arguing a settlement out of the man who was boarding her family’s horses, which were stolen.

Sofia Coppola takes up residence in LA’s Chateau Marmont for Somewhere, a mellow, quiet exploration of an aging movie star’s life. She resurrects Stephen Dorff as Johnny Marco, a caddish actor adrift in a senseless but coddled world. His blurry ennui is brought into focus when his daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) comes to stay with him. Much like her oft-chronicled adolescent girls, Coppola’s film manages to be awkward and graceful at the same time, a mood piece with European leanings that remains stranded in LA.

Casino Jack is the perfect film for an era where political scandals only confirm sad truths about our government that we already take for granted. Jack doesn’t comment on our malaise (or really anything), but by offering such a dull, pointless account of the corruption circling lobbyist Jack Abramoff, it certainly compounds it.

Mark Wahlberg has often said that his dream role is a professional boxer. He certainly seems made for it: muscular, dopey-faced, always carrying a pent-up rage, a sense that he’s out of his depth (as an actor) but ready to sock anyone who calls him on it. The Fighter, then, would seem to be his dream come true, a flagrant attempt to place himself — or rather Micky Ward, the real-life Lowell, MA fighter he portrays — in the canon of classic movie boxers, right up alongside Rocky.

I think Alfred Hitchcock would have enjoyed the premise of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Tourist. The film centers on a wrongly-accused man and an icily beautiful woman, two archetypes that the Master of Suspense revisited often. But a dearth of suspense and onscreen chemistry would likely stop Hitchcock from admiring this would-be romantic thriller. Despite an A-list cast and lushly romantic locations, The Tourist is disappointingly bland.

With the right amount of drug-fueled recklessness and wanton abandon, the gray area between adolescence and adulthood becomes a blur of hedonism and indifference. In retrospect, it’s a time of discovery; as it’s happening, it’s a muddled abstraction. Whatever it is — a heady mess of pleasure and disappointment, euphoria and heartbreak — sometimes it can’t be distilled down to anything substantial.

Is it possible for Hollywood to produce a picture relating to the common man anymore? Could they ever? What is the common man, exactly? In a film about corporate downsizing, where once-secure families are forced to make drastic cuts to their comfortable lives, wouldn’t one of said cutbacks be paying to see a Hollywood movie about corporate downsizing?

Rabbit à la Berlin, a 2010 Oscar nominee, is a clever and illuminating short documentary about the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall. Rather than focusing on the experience of the postwar Germans, the story follows the improbable fortune of the wild rabbits that were trapped between the deadly barriers separating East and West Berlin. A cheekily deadpan narrator helps weave together archival and newsreel footage with black and white scenes of rabbits frolicking.

Rotting skin, graceless movements, lack of vocal control, insatiable appetites — zombies and adolescents have so much in common, it’s a wonder that it took this long for a film to combine the two. In Make-Out with Violence, directors/writers Deagol Brothers have made a near-decent drama about the precipice of hormones and uncertainty that is high school graduation, and added a more-than-decent zombie to the mix. While it’s not quite peanut butter and jelly, the result is slightly better than the sum of its dismembered parts.