The first James Bond flick I ever saw was Diamonds Are Forever, which was made in 1971 but played regularly on TV throughout my childhood in the 1980s. I had no idea the movie was merely another installment in one of the world’s most lucrative franchises, or, for that matter, why 007 was supposed to be a big deal. All I knew at the time was that this was the most badass thing I had ever seen. In a way, it taught me about how to be a man. It showed a world that was utterly untrustworthy, full of traps and betrayals and people who want you dead, and for a kid who had been weaned on afternoon cartoons this was a shock. And yet there was Bond (played once more by Sean Connery, after George Lazenby failed to attract much attention in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), sidestepping every danger with suavity (even being almost burned alive, for crying out loud!), inflicting violence when needed, and delivering a killer bon mot in the face of certain death. And then there was Tiffany Case, the delicious double-dealing agent who is by Bond’s bed one moment and parading bikinis for Blofeld the next. Wherever you are, Miss Jill St. John, I thank you profoundly for making me realize for the first time that I really liked girls. I’d watch many other Bond movies afterwards, including several that are better than Diamonds Are Forever. But the first time is forever.

Duplicity (Universal): Few types of movies can be as grating as the romantic drama that’s not as clever or sophisticated as it thinks it is. Case in point is Tony Gilroy’s belly flop, which teams Julia Roberts with Clive Owen in a long, witless battle-of-the-sexes espionage yarn. The plot has something to do with rival companies battling for industrial secrets, with the two stars playing spies who hook up despite being on opposite sides of the corporate fence. As he has shown in Michael Clayton, Gilroy doesn’t exactly have a light touch, and Roberts tries to play it funny and sexy but comes off as smug. At least Owen has one charming moment when he fakes a Southern accent to get info from a secretary that’s worth, if not Cary Grant, then at least Rock Hudson. But it’s not enough to make up for the rest of this slog.

Adventureland (Miramax): A surprisingly tough and touching coming-of-age dramedy. Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart make a believable romantic couple as a pair of youngsters who meet over a summer spent working at a dinky amusement park during the 1980s. It suffered from bad marketing (since director Greg Mottola also did Superbad, they decided to play up the teen comedy angle), but it’s certainly worth a rental for its sweet and unforced view of adolescent love in bloom.

Sunshine Cleaning (Anchor Bay): I like Amy Adams. I like Emily Blunt. I like Alan Arkin, even though he now just keeps playing the grandpa from Little Miss Sunshine over and over. And I like Steve Zahn. But lord have mercy, this is the kind of straight-from-Sundance quirky flick that makes me go for my gun, Goebbels-style, whenever I hear the word “quirky.”

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Criterion): At 201 minutes, this one is almost as long as its title. It’s supposed to be Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece, with Delphine Seyrig as a Belgian housewife who, uh, peels potatoes. Okay, so I haven’t seen it yet. But as soon as I have a four-hour open window in my rigorous schedule of watching Family Guy clips on YouTube, I’m taking this baby for a spin.

Rudo y Cursi (Sony): Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna pretend to be soccer-playing yokels in Mexico. No, gracias.

I’ve been catching up with recent movies recently, and Julie & Julia was not one I was particularly looking forward to. Now hold on, don’t assume that I have chick flicks, because some of my best friends are chick flicks. But seriously, a comedy about culinary doyenne Julia Child and success-greedy blogger Julie Powell directed by the terrible Nora Ephron (I still have my welts from her remake of Bewitched)? So it was an act of bravery for me to delay my second viewing of Inglourious Basterds and march into the theater without a girlfriend by my side to provide me with an excuse. But I was pleasantly surprised. Or half-pleasantly surprised, to be exact. The parts of the movie dealing with Child in the 1950s learning about the joys of cooking, dealing with snobs and laying the ground for her famous TV show are pretty delightful. Praise goes to Meryl Streep, tons of it. I don’t worship her as the greatest actress alive like several of my colleagues do, but there’s something contagious about a consummate dramatic diva kicking up her heels and having a fun, and Streep has a blast here. Unfortunately, the modern-day sequences with Powell are flat in that unmistakably too-cute Ephron way. Amy Adams, who plays Powell with her usual charm, softens the pain, but she can’t change the fact that the character is pretty much a bitch more interested in her own rising status than in her supposed “tribute” to Julia Child. So there’s half a good movie here, and, since I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy, I say check it out.

This is it, fellas, the flick of the year. I’ve always loved Quentin Tarantino, but I wondered if he could find his way back after the debacle that was Grindhouse a couple of years ago. Well, with Inglourious Basterds not only does he come back, he roars back. Everybody by now knows the plot from TV spots and trailers: a WWII military renegade named Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) puts together a bunch of Jewish-American soldiers to terrorize Nazis by shooting them, scalping them, and, in the case of one “Bear Jew” (Eli Roth), bashing their heads in with baseball bats. What many audiences don’t know is that Raine’s “basterds” only make up a part of the movie, with the two main characters actually being Shoshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), a young Jewish Frenchwoman whose family was slaughtered in a Nazi raid, and Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), the ignoble German officer responsible for said raid. There are other characters as well, like a British movie-critic-turned-spy (Michael Fassbender) and a German starlet working with the Allies (Diane Kruger), but the different plots are neatly brought together in a fiery plan to bring down Hitler, Goebbels, and the rest of the Third Reich gang. This movie had me at “hello.” The dialogue is funny, tense and masterful (another heads up, people: about two-thirds of the movie is subtitled), excruciating suspense leads to bursts of ferocious violence, and the cast is brilliant down to the last actor. Pitt is very funny and commanding, Laurent has moments worthy of Kill Bill, and Waltz (whom I hope we will be seeing in lots of movies from now on) deserves all the kudos he’s been getting. And then there’s the music, ranging from Ennio Morricone to David Bowie, and the Rod Taylor cameo, and the tavern shootout, and the exhilarating finale, and… Seriously, the riches go on and on. I’m dying to watch it again.

1. The Dirty Dozen (1967): Directed by Robert Aldrich. With Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown, Charles Bronson, John Cassavetes, Robert Ryan, Telly Savalas, George Kennedy and Donald Sutherland

2. Bitter Victory (1957): Directed by Nicholas Ray. With Richard Burton, Curd Jurgens, Ruth Roman, Raymond Pellegrin, Anthony Bushell, Alfred Burke and Christopher Lee

3. Saving Private Ryan (1998): Directed by Steven Spielberg. With Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Tom Sizemore, Ed Burns, Adam Goldberg, Barry Pepper, Vin Diesel, Jeremy Davies and Giovanni Ribisi

4. Where Eagles Dare (1968): Directed by Brian G. Hutton. With Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood, Mary Ure, Patrick Wymark, Michael Hordern, Donald Houston and Peter Barkworth

5. The Guns of Navarone (1961): Directed by J. Lee Thompson. With Gregory Peck, David Niven, Anthony Quinn, Stanley Baker, Anthony Quayle, Richard Harris and Irene Papas

6. Objective, Burma! (1945): Directed by Raoul Walsh. With Errol Flynn, James Brown, William Prince, George Tobias, Henry Hull, Warner Anderson and John Alvin

7. Play Dirty (1968): Directed by Andre de Toth. With Michael Caine, Nigel Davenport, Nigel Green, Harry Andrews, Patrick Jordan and Daniel Pilon

8. The Secret Invasion (1964): Directed by Roger Corman. With Stewart Granger, Raf Vallone, Mickey Rooney, Edd Byrnes, William Campbell and Henry Silva

9. The Dark of the Sun (1968): Directed by Jack Cardiff. With Rod Taylor, Jim Brown, Yvette Mimieux, Peter Carsten, Kenneth More, Andre Morell, Olivier Despax and Guy Deghy

10. The Inglorious Bastards (1978): Directed by Enzo G. Castellari. With Bo Svenson, Peter Hooten, Fred Williamson, Michael Pergolani, Jackie Basehart, Michel Constantin and Debra Berger

It’s not uncommon for monsters in movies to stand in for something else. I mean, look at Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster bursting into its creator’s bedroom or George Romero’s zombies making their way through a shopping mall. The aliens in the new sci-fi thriller District 9, big brown lobsters who speak in clicking sounds, are loaded with just as much bold subtext. They’ve come to our planet, but are now undesirable outsiders being hunted down by squadrons of pitiless humans. Led by a brawny field operative named Wikus (Sharlto Copley), heavily armed soldiers storm the filthy slums in which the extraterrestrial visitors have settled, squashing nests and shooting on sight. It’s only after Wikus is sprayed with an alien substance and begins a gradual mutation that he starts to grasp the complexity of the situation, which involves oppression, connection, and betrayal between species. Director and co-writer Neill Blomkamp sets the futuristic scenario in South Africa, but otherwise keeps everything vague enough so that the aliens can become metaphors for whatever prejudice you want (I’ve read reviews that see the conflict supposedly mirroring upheavals from the Middle East to concentration camps). And I’m glad that Blomkamp didn’t go all soft on the subject once the protagonist becomes one of the hunted, the way they did it in that story about the bigot getting his desserts in The Twilight Zone: The Movie. It’s a very good movie, with sharp dashes of satire. I only wish Bloomkamp didn’t go so overboard with shaky camera movements. I know this is supposed to have the rough feel of a documentary, but he goes overboard in ways that the somewhat similar Cloverfield never had to.

The Soloist (Paramount): This one has an interesting back story, a troubled reception, and a disappointing realization. The plot is based on a real-life story, about a Los Angeles journalist named Steve Lopez (played by Robert Downey Jr., who doesn’t really strike me as a “Lopez”) who comes across a homeless man (Jamie Foxx) who babbles incoherently but plays a mean violin. An article is born, and, soon enough, a friendship. Flashbacks show the virtuoso to have been at one point a promising musician blindsided by psychological turmoil, so off the move is to get him a performance at the opera house just in time for the redemptive curtain call. Joe Wright directed it, or, with all the gratuitous camera movements and busy soundtrack, perhaps I should say overdirected it. Restrained for once, Downey Jr. is good, but Foxx is doing full-on Rain Man shtick that doesn’t connect to anybody else. It’s sentimental and pushy, but at least it isn’t boring.

Obsessed (Sony): With some movies, you gotta wonder. Did the filmmakers intent it to be slyly funny or are these bad laughs? This is one of them. It’s a mild student of the Fatal Attraction school of I’m-not-gonna-be-ignored psychos, and it follows the path from flirting to seduction to stalking to brutal harassment that develops between the handsome vice-president of a Los Angeles firm (Idris Elba) and the office temp (Ali Larter). Sure, she’s sexy, but by the time he notices that she’s quite insane, she’s already making threatening phone calls to his wife (played by Beyoncé Knowles). Oh, and “Magic” Johnson is one of the producers. What the!? The giggles are slow to come, but even before we get to the chandelier-swinging catfight between the wife and the home-invading hoochie, the joint has come close to the Wicker Man remake in the realm of unintentional hilarity. Or is it unintentional? Maybe a boiling rabbit might have helped clarify things.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (New Line): Ah, The Turtles. Not as good as the Beatles, perhaps, but to a child of the 1980s who watched the cartoon daily and counted the days until they made their live-action, big-screen debut, they were a big deal. This DVD set from New Line has all four movies, which confuses me because I thought there were only three movies. Ah, they’re including the lame, computer-animated one from a couple of years back, too. But the first one still holds some magic for me. The awesomeness of seeing four genetically mutated reptiles eating pizza and donning Renaissance artists names usually keep my young self from seeing the idiocy of, well, four genetically mutated reptiles eating pizza and donning Renaissance artists names. Will seeing it again with older and (hopefully) wiser eyes break my heart? Well, if so, there’s always the videogame.

Labor Pains (First Look): After so much tabloid crap swamping her life and career, does anyone still remember that Lindsay Lohan was once a decent actress? And not just in that Robert Altman musical thing she did a while back, but in those Disney movies she did as a kid. Check out The Parent Trap and Love Bug remakes, she’s got (or at least had) real charm. Some of that charm is visible in this quasi-Disney comedy, in which she plays a young office worker who fakes a pregnancy to keep from being fired. And, what do you know, she has to keep up with the pretense for nine months, which is enough time for the usual slapstick and romance of mild family fare. It’s no big deal, but it’s nice to see Lohan back in the game, and Cheryl Hines does an expert Eve Arden number as her best pal.

The Last Starfighter (Universal): Ah, one of my childhood faves. Better than Star Wars, I used to say back then, and I now have the prequels with Jar-Jar and the gang to support my claim. Extras galore in this 25th anniversary edition, and… Wait, what? “The 25th anniversary edition”?! Oh man, thanks for making me feel old.

Charlie Kaufman is a love-him-or-hate-him filmmaker, so it’s no surprise that his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, was 2008’s big love-it-or-hate-it movie. I wasn’t crazy about it when I first saw it (in fact, there was something deeply unpleasant about the whole thing, which was the point, I know) but I kept thinking about it. So I revisited it again recently, and thought it’s definitely one of those movies that’s gonna continue growing. A lot of stuff that went over my peeved head the first time started coming together, like the main character’s fears being visualized externally, like a fake movie poster plastered on the side of a bus stop. The main character, by the way, is a playwright played by Philip Seymour Hoffman as the sad-sack to end all sad-sacks. He’s morbid, depressed, insecure, and, as it turns out, has a bad handle on the passage of time—he blinks, and he’s already gray and his little daughter has become a tattooed lesbian living in Germany. Oscar or no Oscar, I don’t see the appeal of Hoffman, but the movie has a stellar gallery of actresses, including Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Samantha Morton, Hope Davis, Emily Watson and Dianne Wiest, all of them terrific in complex and thorny parts. (I was also happy to see big, creepy Tom Noonan in the mix.) And a lot of the whimsy that felt forced the first time around, like the house on fire that nobody comments on or the thousands of post-it notes, resonate beautifully if you step back and look at the larger psychological design. I’m still not sure about what the movie is about, though. Art and death and the whole damn thing? Maybe a third viewing will elucidate things.

Judd Apatow is worth worrying about. One of the few comic directors these days with a personal touch, he has deservedly become famous in Hollywood for such first-rate comedies as The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, so there was an understandable amount of anticipation for his new movie. Still, there’s no accounting for how dopey Funny People turned out. It actually starts out promisingly, with the contrast between the young and scrawny Adam Sandler (in what looks like home movies) and the middle-aged and bulkier Adam Sandler, who plays a very successful comedy superstar. There’s also an interesting mix of moods going on as he learns that he’s got a potentially fatal disease, a sort of combination of sadness for times gone by and raunchiness for penis jokes. Seth Rogen, looking weirdly slimmed down, stars as an aspiring standup comic who crosses path with Sandler and becomes his assistant and, after he learns of the star’s medical condition, confidante and close friend. So far, so good. But then the weepy moments start to pile up, the movie loses its verve and settles for a fuzzy and interminable (two and a half hours of weak dick jokes! Really?) comedy-drama with tons and tons of shots of Apatow’s wife (Leslie Mann) and their daughters. Funny People certainly has funny people, like Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman (as well as some not so funny people, like Eric Bana), but the material is subpar and the timing is slack. It wants to be “daring” and “heartfelt,” but the results are self-indulgent and messy. Hopefully it will be just an aberration in the Apatow filmography, and not (gulp) a new direction.