12 YEARS A SLAVE

It's impossible to imagine any viewer of director Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave not haunted for hours, if not days or weeks, by its potent, frequently horrific imagery. Be it the protracted sight of protagonist Solomon Northrup hanging from a tree, his wiggling toes barely touching the dirt, or the early shot of Northrup caged in a Washington, D.C., prison with the camera slowly tilting upward to implicate Capitol Hill in his (and all slaves') ordeal, McQueen continually delivers wrenching visual representations to match this already-wrenching tale. Yet if pressed for the one image that I find lingering above all others in this magnificent, devastating film, it would simply be the face of Chiwetel Ejiofor, who, in one unbroken take near the finale, almost seems to encapsulate hundreds of years of injustice in one anguished stare.

THOR: THE DARK WORLD

As the comic-book demigod Loki, the nefarious thorn-in-the-side to the Avengers and adopted brother to Thor, Tom Hiddleston, in the Marvel Studios movies, exudes a teasing, seductive malevolence. With his sharp, angular features and chilling gaze that suggests he might prefer eating you to killing you, he's a wonderfully unstable and hypnotic screen creation. Yet the brilliance in Hiddleston's interpretation is that his Loki is also so damned charming. The character may forever be planning destruction or plotting revenge - specifically against the golden-haired preferred son with the red cape and hammer - but Hiddleston's bearing is so smooth and relaxed, and his wide grin so infectious, that you almost can't help rooting for him, especially because he also, generally, gets his movies' best jokes.

Would you like to see a photo of perhaps the happiest child in the world?

If so, I'll direct you to the Web site of Grammy-winning zydeco musician Terrance Simien, the latest artist-in-residence for the Mississippi Valley Blues Society's Blues in the Schools program. Land on the home page at TerranceSimien.com, click on the "Creole for Kidz" tab, and check out the picture of the little boy - he looks about three or four - photographed at one of Simien's concerts. You'll have no trouble knowing which kid I'm referring to: He's wearing a red Spider-Man T-shirt, holding a gold-bead necklace, and boasting what might be the most infectiously joyful smile you've ever seen.

"That's the zydeco smile, man!" says Simien, with a laugh, when I reference the child's photo during our recent phone interview. "You get that, man! You get that when you hear the music. You just start smiling, and people start dancing ... . That's what that music does to you!"

JACKASS PRESENTS: BAD GRANDPA

This might surprise a grand total of none of you, but Bad Grandpa - which also goes by the more telling title Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa - isn't much of a movie. The first Jackass release to feature an actual narrative, and actual characters, in place of the usual parades of comically vile, violent challenges and stunts (though there are a few of those, too), director Jeff Tremaine's road-trip slapstick is mostly shapeless and certainly obvious, and nowhere near as hilarious as you want it to be.

Yet it's also a continually interesting and, in the end, rather sweet sociological experiment reminiscent of Borat, but a Borat without the mean-spiritedness. If Sacha Baron Cohen's outing, with its Candid Camera-style employment of "real people" clearly not in on the joke, reveled in displaying how crass and ignorant Americans could be, Tremaine's suggests just how tolerant and polite we can be - and given the circumstances presented here, that's apparently mighty tolerant and polite indeed.