The controversy surrounding hunt-for-Osama bin Laden epic Zero Dark Thirty, just one of the many blockbusters that debuted over the holiday season, was almost as exciting as the film itself. Its real test will come in the future, from a generation removed from any firsthand experience of the events of 9/11.

AMOUR

An entirely unromantic look at romance, Michael Haneke’s (The White Ribbon) Amour is as devastating as a love story can be. Emmanuelle Riva (Le Skylab) gives an astounding, mostly nonverbal performance as Anne, an elderly woman whose mind and body decay after a series of strokes while her husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant, Janis and John) struggles with his inability to assuage her pain. Many of Haneke’s films feel cold in their precision, but Amour is truly moving and ultimately sincere. The loving, naturalistic relationship between Anne and Georges gives the film its emotional heft — there are few things as heartbreaking as watching terrible things happen to decent people, and Haneke never flinches in depicting the myriad humiliations of old age. The way Georges and Anne embrace, almost as if dancing, as he helps her into her wheelchair says everything about the doomed tenderness of their marriage. This is one set of star-crossed lovers whose tragedy comes not from love’s dissolution but from the powerlessness of even the strongest bonds of affection in the face of death. — Robert Gifford

DJANGO UNCHAINED

Any hope that Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds) has matured are quickly dashed by the gleefully anachronistic Django theme that blasts over the opening credits. But is that really such a bad thing? Django Unchained sees Tarantino mining slavery for his latest bloody spaghetti-western genre pastiche. Django (Jamie Foxx, Horrible Bosses) is given his freedom by eccentric German dentist-turned-bounty-hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz, Carnage), and sets out to free his enslaved wife (Kerry Washington, A Thousand Words) from slimy slaveowner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, J. Edgar). Django Unchained succeeds wildly as a revenge flick; Tarantino, after all, knows how to mine humor from affected dialogue and craft compelling characters. The film does seek to portray cruelty toward slaves with harsh and shocking verisimilitude, if only so the white slavers’ comeuppance is that much more satisfying. Whether such violence is morally acceptable, on the other hand, is of no interest to Tarantino. — Warren Zhang

GANGSTER SQUAD

The Joker … I mean, Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn, This Must Be The Place) has invaded 1940s Los Angeles, and it’s up to the eponymous Gangster Squad, a renegade brigade of cop stereotypes, to shut him down. Trouble is, no one seems to care, aside from a hammy Penn, a stoic Josh Brolin (Men in Black 3), a phlegmy Nick Nolte (The Company You Keep), Ryan Gosling (Drive) and Emma Stone (The Amazing Spider-Man). Ruben Fleischer (helmer of the much better 30 Minutes or Less) directs the film like a soulless music video — all gloss and all style, tonal consistency be damned. What emerges is a gleaming, anachronistic mess, an homage made by a man with no imagination and nothing to say that degrades the very thing it’s trying to preserve. Gangster Squad ends up feeling a lot like the adaptation of a video game version of Dick Tracy. Something vital is missing here, leaving an unpleasant, ugly mess in its stead. — W.Z.

HYDE PARK ON HUDSON

Roger Michell’s (Morning Glory) Hyde Park on Hudson is a featherweight little picture on the leisurely doings of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (Bill Murray, Moonrise Kingdom) at his New York estate in 1939. The story is narrated by his cousin and secret mistress Daisy (Laura Linney, The Details), who recounts a weekend of note when King George VI (Samuel West, Albert Schweitzer) and Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Colman, The Iron Lady) come to visit the Roosevelt family. Michell’s film daintily pokes its portly nose into a handful of harrowing topics — the Great Depression, marital dishonesty, incest — but hastily pulls away from any real thematic weight. Hyde Park on Hudson may be flawed in its blatant disregard for just how disturbing these themes can and should be, instead choosing to do its artistic bidding in a world where the question of whether eating a hot dog will ruin a monarch’s royal reputation is a fundamental plot point. But you could do much worse than spending 90 minutes in the company of such a film that starts jolly and ends jolly, stopping along the way here and there to whisper, rather aimlessly, about peril, only to snap you back into a cycle of pleasant obliviousness. — Dean Essner

LES MISéRABLES

Debating the merits of Tom Hooper’s (The King’s Speech) adaptation of Les Misérables is, at the end of the day, pointless; you’ve probably already seen it, and it’s already gotten a boatload of Oscar nods. The film converts Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s smash-hit musical into a Christmas blockbuster, telling a decades-spanning story of redemption and revolution. Hooper, fresh from his success at the Oscars, tackles the material as he’s always done: placing actors on the extreme edge of the frame in a wide-angle close-up. While this style worked in The King’s Speech, Hooper’s staging frequently gets in the way in Les Misérables, particularly in more complicated musical numbers. The film sorely lacks of a sense of visual continuity and panache, which, coupled with uneven performances and a two-and-a-half hour run time, exacerbates the inherent artificiality of the musical and diminishes epic confrontations to stagelike curiosities. I can still hear the people sing, but I can’t help but dream a dream of better musicals gone by. — W.Z.

PROMISED LAND

Promised Land is almost a good movie. Director Gus Van Sant (Restless) shoots the heck out of this middlebrow drama, deftly capturing gentle earth tones and the slowly encroaching decrepitude of America’s heartland. Matt Damon (We Bought a Zoo) stars as a natural gas representative dispatched to a rural Pennsylvanian town in order to purchase land to frack. Conflict arrives in the form of a smarmy environmental activist, played by John Krasinski (Big Miracle), who slowly but surely turns the whole town against Damon. For a long while, that’s good enough. The movie goes by at a leisurely pace, taking its time with its characters and offering up a biased but outwardly balanced debate on the merits of fracking. Unfortunately, things take a dramatic turn for the worse when a third-act plot twist comes apropos of nothing and derails the entire project. The twist is a bit of an astonishing feat, managing to insult the viewer’s intelligence and negating the impact of everything leading up to it while accelerating, but not changing, the preordained ending to the story.

—W.Z.

RUST AND BONE

Rust and Bone successfully obfuscates its real intentions with a surprising amount of a success. A stealth grow-the-bleep-up character study, Rust and Bone tells the intersecting stories of Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard, The Dark Knight Rises), a water park employee crippled by a freak Orca incident, and Alain (Matthias Schoenaerts, Bullhead), an impulsive drifter trying to support a son. Writer-director Jacques Audiard doesn’t come close to matching the heights of his previous film, A Prophet, but nonetheless imbues Rust and Bone with a surprising amount of heart and keenly observed insight. Carried by two impressive lead performances, Rust and Bone emerges as a counterargument/antidote to the cynicism and pessimism slowly encroaching modern pop culture. If nothing else, Rust and Bone will go down in history as featuring the greatest unironic use of a Katy Perry song ever. Suck on that, Glee.

—W.Z.

THIS IS 40

Most films focus on life’s more dramatic moments — marriage, death, birth. It’s trickier to capture life’s banalities in an interesting fashion, but writer-director Judd Apatow (Funny People) attempts to do just that in This Is 40, which succeeds in making topics such as aging and parenting funny without ever finding a way to shape them into a real narrative. A kind-of sequel to Knocked Up, This Is 40 focuses on the sometimes-happily married couple of Leslie Mann (The Change-Up) and Paul Rudd’s (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) middle-aged Pete and Debbie. The film’s greatest strength lies in the casting. Rudd and Mann are perfect foils for each other, and their chemistry gives life to subplots that range from silly (Pete attempting to kick his cupcake-eating habit) to serious (Would they still be together if it weren’t for an unplanned pregnancy?). The ensemble is well-rounded, too, with Maude Apatow (Funny People) reprising her role as daughter Sadie and Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids), Megan Fox (Friends with Kids) and Charlyne Yi (All About Steve) all making welcome supporting appearances. But where This Is 40 does well with relationships among characters and solid writing, it fails at giving the audience an interesting story line. To put it simply, not much happens. The few conflicts drag without reaching a satisfying resolution, and it’s difficult to sympathize with the financial problems of a family living in a giant house well outside its realistic price range. It’s easier to relate to the characters on a more basic level, such as Debbie’s refusal to accept her age and Sadie’s anger at her parents when they look through her Facebook messages. This Is 40 isn’t the most solid effort from the Apatow comedy powerhouse and isn’t as poignant as its predecessor, but it’s still an overall enjoyable film that shows both the highs and lows of getting older. Maybe growing up isn’t so bad after all.

—Emily Thompson

ZERO DARK THIRTY

The controversy surrounding director Kathryn Bigelow’s (The Hurt Locker) hunt-for-Osama bin Laden epic Zero Dark Thirty, and its depiction of torture has been almost as exciting as the film itself, resulting in a Senate investigation into the filmmaker’s real-life CIA sources. Amid all this chaos, however, it’s easy to forget how fantastic a film Zero Dark Thirty is. Jessica Chastain (Maya) gives an award-worthy performance, and the way in which Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker) compressed a decade-long narrative into a two-and-a-half hour emotional thriller is nothing short of a master class in filmmaking. The real test for Zero Dark Thirty will come in the future, a generation removed from any firsthand experience of the events of 9/11. Will the film still hit as hard with an audience not so closely attached to the tragedy? Only time will tell, but at least for today, Zero Dark Thirty is one of the best films of the year.

—Zachary Berman