Carnage

Don’t come into Carnage expecting an artsy take on Hostel. Director Roman Polanski (The Ghost Writer) uses the title metaphorically, as we witness the polite exteriors of two sets of parents quickly dissolve to reveal a nightmarish portrait of repressed frustrations and childish classism. The material doesn’t really lend itself to a cinematic interpretation — all of the action takes place in a small, New York City apartment with only the opening and closing scenes taking place outside. Credit the game, mannered performances from the cast and Polanski’s relentlessly efficient direction for the film’s success. — Warren Zhang

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The film, based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, tumbles into the anxiety of post-9/11 in the eyes of Oskar Schell (newcomer Thomas Horn), a boy on a quest to find the lock to his father’s (Tom Hanks, Larry Crowne) key. For the 9-year-old, life becomes a symphony of paranoia — every footstep is a burning building, every honk of a horn is a heart attack, every screech of tires is a car crash. His fear symbolizes the city’s trepidation in a style never before achieved in the 9/11 film genre, a new examination of the story we know by heart. — Beena Raghavendran

The Flowers of War

Director Yimou Zhang’s (Under the Hawthorn Tree) The Flowers of War is a beautiful but forgettable drama, set during the tragic Rape of Nanking, when the Japanese held the city of Nanking, China captive. One of the most memorable things about The Flowers of War might be its status as the most expensive film production in Chinese history, costing over $90 million to make. The budget was put to good use, however. The film is visually stunning and the city’s smoldering, obliterated landscape is breathtaking. Like some of Zhang’s previous films (Hero, House of Flying Daggers), The Flowers of War cares less about character development and more about captivating visuals. — Reese Higgins

Haywire

Why director Steven Soderbergh (Contagion) took it upon himself to craft a star vehicle for mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano is anyone’s guess, but whatever his reasons, it’s hard to argue with his results. A lean, efficient thriller, Haywire follows a fairly standard betrayed-spy-on-the-run plot, with Carano as the globe-hopping agent in question. The narrative is run-of-the-mill, which deprives the film of some urgency, but if the setup is routine, the execution is superb. Soderbergh’s crisp, precise style lends itself well to action scenes, and he’s smart enough to stand back during the well-choreographed fights and simply let Carano kick ass, which she does exceedingly well. When you see her choke a man half to death using her legs, you’ll understand why Soderbergh wanted to build a movie around her. A tight, economical action flick, Haywire thrives thanks to the capable direction of Soderbergh and a tough performance from Gina Carano. — Robert Gifford

Red Tails

A feckless retelling of the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, a World War II unit of African-American fighter pilots, Red Tails offers little more than an assemblage of one-note stock characters (The Hotshot, The Drinker, The Cigar-Chomping Leader, etc.) and not-quite-believable CGI dogfights in service of its blandly competent history lesson. Produced by George Lucas (The Clone Wars), it has the tone-deafness of the Star Wars prequels combined with the cornball gee-whiz earnestness of a 1950s war flick, with icy-eyed Germans growling “Show them no mercy!” before launching their attacks on the square-jawed American heroes. In short, the film’s view of war is a little too glorious; even so, it never manages to make war very interesting. Relegated to a routine patrol early on, one pilot bemoans, “War is hell, but this is just boring as hell.” Truer words. Lacking in thrills or drama, Red Tails offers little beyond a primer on the Tuskegee Airmen. — RG

The Adventures of Tintin

Director Steven Spielberg (Indiana Jones 4) returned to the theaters with a vengeance in 2011. He follows up War Horse with this motion captured take on Hergé’s famous The Adventures of Tintin comic books. The eponymous Tintin (Jamie Bell, Jane Eyre) is an intrepid journalist on the hunt for long-lost treasure, with the help of the insolvent but warmhearted Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis, Rise of the Planet of the Apes). The vast majority of Tintin plays out like a good, if chaotic, retread of better Indiana Jones films. Tintin truly comes to life during a jaw-dropping single-take set piece in a fictional Middle Eastern country, easily 2011’s greatest single moment in film. — Warren Zhang

A Dangerous Method

Leave it to the infamously perverse director David Cronenberg (Eastern Promises) to turn a dull, period script into one of the more fascinating films of the past year. A Dangerous Method tells the tale of Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender, Shame) and Sigmund Freud’s (Viggo Mortensen, The Road) development and application of psychoanalysis. A fantastically sardonic turn by Mortensen and Cronenberg’s visual flourishes — a splotch of blood in the aftermath of a sex scene, tilt-shift lenses, a vaguely homoerotic subtext to the story, etc. — punch up the, at times, didactic material. — WZ

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is one of the least glamorous spy movies ever made. I mean that as a compliment. It’s a film about pudgy, balding, middle-aged men who work in ugly brown government buildings with men they openly distrust. In short, it’s probably fairly realistic. As with director Tomas Alfredson’s last film, the chilly vampire flick Let the Right One In, it’s more concerned with atmosphere and character than traditional genre thrills, which makes it smarter and ultimately more rewarding than the average spy movie, if not necessarily more entertaining. It strips a romanticized genre of its frills, revealing the drudgery and paranoia at the heart of the spy game; there’s not an Aston Martin in sight. The performances are uniformly superb — none more so than Gary Oldman’s (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2) brilliantly minimalist turn as George Smiley, the hero of a good number of John le Carré novels — and Alfredson masterfully maintains a mood of weary dread, but the film has a bit too much plot for its own good, and those without familiarity with the source material will likely need a second viewing to appreciate all the intricacies. But this is one that deserves the extra attention. Alfredson struggles some to reduce le Carré’s novel to a two-hour film, but he succeeds in translating the book’s mood and complexity, and is aided by an impeccable cast. — RG

War Horse

Steven Spielberg has always been a classical-minded director, but War Horse may be his most blatantly old-fashioned film. A heartfelt epic about a boy, his horse, their bond and their separation during World War I, it would be easy to write off as bland Oscar bait, but like most of Spielberg’s films, there’s real substance beneath the Hollywood sheen. What begins as a 1950s-style boy-and-his-pet idyll transforms into a document of the ravages of mechanized war as the golden-hour Arcadian beauty of antebellum England is replaced by the muddy hell of the Great War. Spielberg has crafted a story about industrial society’s destruction of the old pastoral way of life in largely equine terms: Cavalry charges are shot down by machine guns, deserters who flee on horseback are caught by men in automobiles, horses who once pulled plows are worked to death pulling artillery pieces. It’s an imperfect film — the dialogue is clunky, it takes the anthropomorphization too far too often, and the finale leans on the uplift a bit hard — but there are no shortage of reminders that Spielberg has the most advanced style of any major-studio filmmaker. — RG

We Bought A Zoo

We Bought A Zoo is a bad movie made well. The premise is silly. The characters are thinly drawn. It’s as overstuffed with cliché as a Hallmark store. (And then there’s that title. Ugh.) But despite all that, it maintains an unassuming adequacy that keeps it from being nearly as enervating as it should be. Director Cameron Crowe (Pearl Jam Twenty) and stars Matt Damon (Contagion) and Scarlett Johansson (Iron Man 2) are all talented enough to keep the material from slipping too far into the cutesy or wacky, and the score by Jónsi (of Sigur Rós) gives the film an appropriately luminous feel. (There’s also a scene where a grumpy preteen drop-kicks a snake, which will someday make a pretty great .gif.) It’s aimed squarely at the twelve-and-under crowd, but most parents would find it a thankfully inoffensive respite from the likes of Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. In the exciting world of animal park-ownership movies, it ranks several pegs above Zookeeper. — RG

Young Adult

Young Adult — refreshingly — lacks much of writer Diablo Cody’s (Jennifer’s Body) now trademark and cringe-worthy “hip” dialogue. Instead, we get to watch an unflinching portrayal of a nasty youth fiction writer’s (Charlize Theron, The Road) attempts to win back her high school sweetheart (Patrick Wilson, The Ledge). While Jason Reitman’s (Up in the Air) low-key direction is superb and Cody’s so-painfully-awkward-it’s-hilarious script is good, Young Adult belongs to Theron and her sublimely bitchy performance. The movie does fall apart towards the anti-climactic ending, but the journey there is definitely worth your time. — WZ

diversions@umdbk.com