The Winning Season, in which a drunken wreck turns a ragtag group of kids into disciplined athletes and improves himself in the process, may not score high on originality, but it easily passes the Bechdel test: the outcasts in this movie are an under-practiced girls’ varsity basketball team in small-town Indiana, each with their own specific hurdle to overcome — only two of which concern boys!

I went into Winter’s Bone without having read or heard a word about it. I had high expectations because I’d seen the trailer once in the theater. Trailers are usually hard to watch because they telegraph everything that’s going to be bad about a film, but this one was different. It just made Winter’s Bone look gritty.

Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1, the second film in a pair chronicling the life of notorious French gangster Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel), starts like part one: with the death of Mesrine. Yet, unlike the first, the film doesn’t hone in on the complexities of the character. Despite providing a vehicle for Cassel’s fantastic performance, Public Enemy No.

For a few months in 1994, Bruce Brown’s Endless Summer II was my favorite film. The film, a sequel to the first installment in 1966, made a profound impression on me, due to its breathtaking cinematography and the sense of boundless adventure in search of the perfect wave. I was 13 years old, so I hadn’t seen many “classics” at that point, and my film knowledge was limited to Blockbuster Video shelves and a strip mall multiplex.

Fear can be a sort of disease, leading to irrational behavior and madness if not kept in check. Roman Polanski’s Repulsion showed how an irrational fear of rape distorts to a fear of sex and ultimately a fear of life itself. Similarly, Claudia Llosa’s The Milk of Sorrow (La Teta Asustada, and no, that’s not a literal translation; it translates to “The Frightened Teat”) takes the fear Polanski explored and reconstitutes it in a historical setting where rape was once a common instrument of terror.

It’s easy to see why writer/director Jean-François Richet thought Jacques Mesrine’s life story was ripe for cinematic treatment: 32 bank robberies, 4 prison escapes, and shot to death by a dedicated task force in the streets of Paris. He was in the papers constantly, writing letters to the press, doing photo shoots, and, later in his career, espousing a chameleon political agenda that journalists ate up. Indeed, Mesrine was one of the western world’s most notorious criminals, the less wholesome side of Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name.