Ratings based on four-star system.

‘Precious’
Rated R
★★★ 1⁄2
The first 20 minutes of “Precious” are so intense, you may not feel
like sticking it out. Stick it out. This is an exceptional film about
nearly unendurable circumstances, endured. The story is about a teen
living in 1980s Harlem, raped by her barely glimpsed father, abused by
her unfathomably cruel mother (Mo’Nique). Precious is illiterate but
bright, and she switches to an alternative school where she comes under
the life-saving tutelage of Ms. Rain (Paula Patton). There’ll be an
Oscar nomination or two in this film’s near future.

‘The Blind Side’
Rated PG-13
★★
Based on a book by Michael Lewis, this film fumbles a true story of an African-American product of the Memphis projects who ended up at a Christian school and in the care of a wealthy white family, then went on to NFL glory. The star is Sandra Bullock, whose character is conceived as a steel magnolia with a will of iron. Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), now a starting tackle for the Baltimore Ravens, has been sidelined in his own story. At its queasiest “The Blind Side” veers perilously close to the concept of poverty tourism.
 — Tribune Media services

‘Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel’
Rated PG
★
This is a kids comedy that screams “Direct to DVD.” It doesn’t help that it screams that in high, squeaky, three-part harmony. Whatever slim charms there were in the nostalgic, musically cute and slapstick-friendly first film of chipmunk mania are squished right out of “The Squeakquel” like so much rodent roadkill. The cast is cut rate, and the script needed a serious visit from a serious gag writer.

‘Avatar’
Rated PG-13
★★★
The first 90 minutes of “Avatar” are pretty terrific — a full-immersion technological wonder with wonders to spare. The other 72 minutes, less and less terrific. Director James Cameron’s futuristic story becomes intentionally grueling in its heavily telegraphed narrative turn toward genocidal anguish, grim echoes of Vietnam-style firefights and the inevitable payback time and sequel setup. Cameron nonetheless has delivered the screen’s most anticipated and persuasive blend of live-action and motion-capture animation to date.

‘The Book of Eli’
Rated R
★★★
The latest in a wave of post-apocalyptic films is this sly “Mad Max”-y sort of Western, pitting Denzel Washington as a high plains drifter with God on his side against Gary Oldman as the entrepreneur ruling a makeshift dirty town somewhere in what’s left of the Southwestern United States. “Eli” may traffic in familiar landscapes and archetypes, but it allows its cast the space and time to make the characters breathe. This film from the Hughes Brothers (“Dead Presidents”) simply is better, and better-acted, than the average end-of-the-world fairy tale.

‘Crazy Heart’
Rated R
★★★★
There’s a powerful symmetry at work in “Crazy Heart.” It’s a parallel between protagonist Bad Blake, a country singer at a nadir of disintegration, and star Jeff Bridges, whose exceptional film choices have put him at the height of his powers in time to make Blake the capstone of his career. It’s a mark of how fine a performance Bridges gives that it succeeds beautifully even though the besotted, bedeviled country singer has been an overly familiar popular-culture staple for forever.

‘Dear John’
Rated PG-13
★★
Like “The Blind Side,” ‘’Dear John” offers audiences a meat-and-potatoes story of love, loyalty, heartfelt generosity and other matters seldom brought to the screen with any skill at all. I truly wish this adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel were a better, less shamelessly manipulative movie, but a couple of the actors got me through it alive. Amanda Seyfried, who plays a driven-snow saint without making you gag, falls for a Green Beret (Channing Tatum, not so good) with an autistic father (Richard Jenkins, another asset). Tears ensue.

‘District 9’
Rated R
★★★
The premise: An enormous UFO descended from the sky 20 years ago, hovered over Johannesburg and stayed there. Then humans got curious and opened it up, and out spilled a million-plus alien creatures, leading to an immigration crisis. This film, shot like a documentary from the future, packs such a terrific central idea that even its flaws can’t stop the train. In its first hour it barrels along with the velocity of a new classic; as it settles for being a good addition to the venerable aliens-come-calling genre, you feel a slight letdown. But that first half? Nice.

‘Edge of Darkness’
Rated R
★★★
In his first starring role since 2002’s “Signs,” Mel Gibson plays a detective bent on revenge after his nuclear-researcher daughter is murdered. This entertaining thriller, a compressed two-hour version of a six-hour 1985 British TV miniseries, also features Ray Winstone as an assassin/fixer/philosopher who quietly becomes the most intriguing character. Director Martin Campbell’s film offers not surprises, exactly, but craftsmanship and low, brute, cunning satisfactions.

‘An Education’
Rated PG-13
★★★ 1⁄2 stars
Novelist Nick Hornby’s screenplay for British journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir sands a few edges off the corners of its heroine’s story, yet the film is awfully charming. It bops along with so much esprit and lively acting, and such an observant sense of the period (the early ‘60s), you’re seduced by the results in the same way charming, slightly oily David (Peter Sarsgaard), entices young Jenny (Carey Mulligan) into his glamorous orbit. The film belongs to Mulligan, who showcases her comic range and natural authority.

‘From Paris With Love’
Rated R
★★★
“From Paris With Love” doesn’t do much for Paris or love, or your brain cells, but it flies like a crazed eagle on uppers. Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays a low-level spy and Paris embassy functionary who longs for more exciting work. Fortune smiles, and he teams up for an anti-terrorist assignment with a visiting American intelligence ace (John Travolta). Half of Paris is dead or dying 40 minutes into this 92-minute bleed-for-all, which efficiently blends all the mayhem with a droll air of camp.

‘The Hurt Locker’
Rated R
★★★ 1⁄2
Vivid, assured and extremely suspenseful, director Kathryn Bigelow’s latest (and strongest) film takes moviegoers by the collar and throws them headlong into one horrifying life-and-death situation after another. Jeremy Renner plays a soldier in Iraq running toward the explosives while everyone else is ducking and covering. He’s a bomb tech whose job entails disarming one Improvised Explosive Device (IED) after another, day after day. Time will tell if this politically neutral war movie is a classic, but it’s certainly a formidable experience.

‘Inglourious Basterds’
Rated R
★★1⁄2 stars
A queasy historical do-over, Quentin Tarantino’s new film has been described as a grindhouse version of “Valkyrie”; a rhapsody dedicated to the cinema’s powers of persuasion; and a showcase for Austrian-born character actor Christoph Waltz, who waltzes off with the performance honors as a suavely vicious Nazi colonel. All true. Tarantino’s revenge fantasy recasts the iconography and mythic cruelties of Sergio Leone’s Westerns as the stuff of World War II history ­— not the history we know, but an alternate-reality version.

‘It’s Complicated’
Rated R
★★★
“It’s Complicated” isn’t: It’s pretty simple. It’s simply a good time, a relatively adult and easygoing conveyance for three ace performers of a certain age. The movie has three huge ringers: Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. The push-pull dynamic is between a woman who should know better and her wolfish but charming pursuer. Ten years after their divorce, Jane (Streep) and remarried Jake (Baldwin) strike up an affair. Is it love? Lust? Lustlove? Meantime, the nice fellow overseeing Jane’s elaborate house remodel (Martin) has hopes for romance.

‘The Last Station’
Rated R
★★★1⁄2
The final years of Leo Tolstoy’s life were all war and no peace. The savage rivalry for his attention and legacy between his redoubtable wife and his craftiest disciple has now been turned into a showcase for tasty acting by performers who really know how to sink their teeth into roles. Under the accomplished direction of Michael Hoffman, who also wrote the script, “The Last Station” is well-acted across the board, but the film’s centerpiece is the spectacular back and forth between Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as Sofya, his wife of 48 years.

‘The Lovely Bones’
Rated PG-13
★★
Peter Jackson, best known for his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, draws a fine performance from Saoirse Ronan as the murdered girl at the center of this story. But the adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel leaves out anything that isn’t completely “on point,” and that does not favor the thriller and suspense aspects of the plot. The specificity of the characters, and what they do to cope with their rage and loss, has been blanched out, and the film feels like a feat of engineering, not sympathetic imagination.

‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief’
Rated PG
★★
The first installment in Rick Riordan’s five-book series suggests that this could be the start of something adequate. Its limitations are less a matter of scale than of imagination. It may be director Chris Columbus’ fate to initiate a fantasy franchise destined to be improved by his successors, as with the “Harry Potter” juggernaut. Now, Columbus has taken on this fantasy construct in which Greek gods threaten war in modern-day America over Zeus’ missing lightning bolt.

‘A Serious Man’
Rated R
★★★★
Set in 1967 in the Minneapolis suburbs, “A Serious Man” is a tart, brilliantly acted fable of life’s little cosmic difficulties, a Coen brothers comedy with a darker philosophical outlook than “No Country for Old Men” but with a script rich in verbal wit. Physics professor Larry Gopnik, (Michael Stuhlbarg) is God’s chosen sufferer, coping with a failing marriage, his son’s imminent bar mitzvah, a South Korean student bribing him for a better grade, and a brother (Richard Kind) plagued by a literal pain in the neck.

‘Sherlock Holmes’
Rated PG-13
★ 1⁄2
Guy Ritchie can make all the greasy crime movies he wants, but now he gives us “Sherlock Holmes,” and I’m sorry, but I like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters. It’s a drag to see how Ritchie has turned Holmes and Dr. Watson into thugs. The casting seems so right: Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes, Jude Law as Watson, Rachel McAdams as an old flame of Holmes. Ritchie’s film operates on almost pure thuggery. It’s dependent on zero-attention-span cutting and erratically shifting film speeds.

‘A Single Man’
Rated R
★★★★
Some films aren’t revelations, exactly, but they burrow so deeply into old truths about love and loss and the mess and thrill of life, they seem new anyway. This is one such film, one of the best of 2009. In adapting Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel to the screen, first-time feature filmmaker Tom Ford (better known for being a famous fashion designer) has put his admiration of the source material to excellent results. Ford also has facilitated a career best for actor Colin Firth, one of the screen’s great and subtle portraitists.

‘The Tooth Fairy’
Rated PG
★1⁄2
Dwayne Johnson stars as a minor-league hockey player known as “The Tooth Fairy” for his ability to knock his opponents’ teeth all over the rink. The real tooth fairies do not approve of him, so he’s lifted off to Fairyland, where Julie Andrews oversees his stint as a “real” tooth fairy whose wings sprout at inconvenient times. Johnson’s a game and antic presence, but saddled with this material, he comes perilously close to tiring out the audience with all his nervous activity and mugging.

‘Up’
Rated PG
★★★★
Balloon salesman Carl (voiced by Ed Asner) shared a dream with his wife to visit South America. After his wife dies, Carl’s yearning for adventure dies as well. Yet it rises again, and “Up” becomes a chronicle of an unlikely friendship between Carl and an 8-year-old (Jordan Nagai). This Disney-Pixar film feels nervy and adventurous and a little messy, the result of formidable creators working on an enormous budget, enormously well-spent. Yet the expansive emotional landscape of “Up” is something new. More power to these people. They are making the best films coming out of Hollywood.

‘Up in the Air’
Rated R
★★★
For a movie set in a sour economy, “Up in the Air” is very crafty about lobbing to the sweet spots of all concerned. It is smooth as glass, destined for a big audience and many awards. George Clooney stars as a well-tailored hatchet man for an Omaha firm specializing in delivering bad news to laid-off employees. Vera Farmiga plays the love interest he meets in a hotel bar one night, and Anna Kendrick plays the tightly wound whiz kid he’s forced to mentor. This is a well-polished star vehicle, and it’s easy to see how it could win the Oscar for Best Picture.

‘Valentine’s Day’
Rated PG-13
★★
Set in a sprawling, grime-free L.A., director Garry Marshall’s “Valentine’s Day” is “Crash” with hearts and flowers, an ensemble romantic comedy that believes in bulk. Is “Valentine’s Day” good? Not really, though plenty of the actors are. The massive cast includes Anne Hathaway, Julia Roberts, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Jessica Biel, Queen Latifah, Topher Grace and many others. In sum it plays like 12 landlocked episodes of “The Love Boat” rammed together.

‘When in Rome’
Rated PG-13
★ 1⁄2
In Rome for her sister’s wedding, a tightly wound woman (Kristen Bell) drunkenly scoops out of a magic fountain a handful of coins tossed in by lovelorn tourists who become her magic stalkers, smitten without knowing why. These suitors (Danny DeVito, Dax Shepard, Jon Heder and Will Arnett) keep turning up back home and throwing plot obstacles in the way of our heroine after she meets a charming sports columnist (Josh Duhamel). The movie lacks invention and true magic in the worst way, and certain scenes signify nothing less than the death of screen slapstick.

‘The Wolfman’
Rated R
★★★
The new edition of the old Universal horror title “The Wolfman” constitutes a pleasant surprise, if “pleasant” can be used to describe a brooding $100 million-plus diversion with this many beheadings and eviscerations. Someone or something is on the loose in late-1800s England, slaughtering Gypsies and good, upright English folk. When a famous Shakespearean actor (Benicio Del Toro) is attacked and begins showing signs of trouble, it’s his father (Anthony Hopkins) who takes care of him, though he seems strangely interested in letting “the beast” run free.

‘The Young Victoria’
Rated PG
★★★★
Starring Emily Blunt as the 18-year-old queen of England circa 1837, this delicious historical romance is a rich pastiche of first love, teen empowerment, fabulous fashion and fate. Filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallee has captured that hot blush of pure emotion that comes before kisses, sex and heartbreak. Credit also goes to Blunt and to Rupert Friend, who plays the equally young Belgian Prince Albert. They have been given a lot to work with and make the most of it.
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— Tribune Media Services