Crank 2: High Voltage (Lions Gate): Not much new to add to our earlier review. Let it just be said that Jason Statham is still the go-to guy for authentic badasses, and that David Carradine gave his final screen role a blast of gonzo energy. Oh, and on the sad note, that the filmmakers went on to do the inane, thrill-free Gamer.

Silent Light (Palisades Tartan): A remake of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet set in an isolated community of Mexican Mennonites? Boy, Carlos Reygadas sure doesn’t make it easy for the audiences, does he? Still, anybody with an ounce of sensitivity to beauty will drool buckets over the opening shot of a sunrise that looks anything but from this earth.

Menace II Society (New Line): I vividly remember the early 1990s, when gritty portraits of alienated black kids in harsh neighborhoods seemed to be released on a weekly basis. This one, directed in 1993 by the Hughes Brothers, is tougher and more despairing than the more famous Boyz n the Hood, and it’s worth revisiting even if many of its scenes have since become fodder for the Wayans Brothers.

That Hamilton Woman (Criterion): Winston Churchill’s favorite movie, this lavish costume drama is more fun than most of its ilk thanks to the convincing passion whipped up by Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, lovers both on and off-screen. Andrew Sarris supposedly saw this one dozens of times just for a glimpse of Leigh’s piercing eyes. Ah, cinema…

Valentino: The Last Emperor (Phase 4): A panting tribute to a stinking-rich corporate magnate? In these times? Really?

Forget Romeo and Juliet, this to my young self was the ultimate tale of star-crossed lovers. It’s set during medieval times that could have come right out of a Bergman drama, with great valleys, stony ruins near mountains and cavernous, oppressive cathedrals. Navarre (uber-awesome Rutger Hauer) and Isabeau (Michelle Pfeiffer, never more beautiful) are passionately in love with each other, yet can never be together due to a curse put on them by the Bishop (John Wood), who wanted Isabeau for himself. Now, Navarre will turn into a wolf during the night and Isabeau will be a hawk during the day, so that they’re never both human at the same time. The fairy-tale is the kind you love to hear from your grandparents, save within yourself, and then pass it along to your own children. Another thing I loved, too, was the brazenly anachronistic humor injected by Gaston (Matthew Broderick), a scampering character known as “Mouse” who tags along with the couple and talks as if he’s just time-traveled from 1980s New York. (Unfortunately, the score also sounds like it has just come from that decade, too.) This was a special movie for me, utterly romantic, tragic, thrilling and funny. Only later did I realize that the director was Richard Donner, the Lethal Weapon guy. Well, if nothing else, at least hacks were versatile back then.

I’ve had just about enough of folks waxing nostalgic about how groovy Woodstock was back in the Sixties, maaaan. Still, I rather liked Taking Woodstock, director Ang Lee’s portrayal of the legendary 1969 concert as seen through the eyes of a young man. Elliott Teichberg (Demetri Martin) is the teenage son of a Jewish-Russian couple (Imelda Staunton, Henry Goodman), and the dilapidated family hotel is in danger of being taken away due to unpaid bills. Things look bleak, until Elliott hears about hippies getting kicked out of the original site for their music concert, and, seizing the opportunity, gets the event organizers to relocate to the land around his hotel. In no time, there’s an army of far-out folks camping out all over the place, running around naked, making love in the bushes, and otherwise expanding the young protagonist’s worldview. Lee (who won an Oscar for Brokeback Mountain) is a very perceptive director of drama and character, and here he displays a sensitive, gentle touch that captures Woodstock’s transient feeling of hope. Weirdly enough, there are almost no glimpses of the festival’s musical numbers, and only one psychedelic drug trip. Instead of focusing on these clichés, Lee instead gets to the heart of Martin’s character, a still unformed gay man who over the course of the event learns more about his own identity. It’s much closer to Lee’s excellent 1997 drama The Ice Storm than to the famous 1971 documentary Woodstock, and it should be seen even if you can’t tell a Sha-Na-Na from a Grateful Dead.

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.