ALL IS LOST

Continuing to earn cool points following their November booking of Enough Said - a marvelous movie that finally landed in our area several months after its initial national release - schedulers for Moline's Nova 6 Cinemas have done it again with the booking of All Is Lost, another critically acclaimed title that managed to bypass the Quad Cities' first-run cineplexes.

January 17, 10:05 a.m.-ish: If it's January, it must be time for our annual demonic-possession thriller in the guise of a "documentary," and yet it still seems strange to be watching Devil's Due. The devil may be, but a mere two weeks after the release of the latest Paranormal Activity, were we audiences really due for another of these things?

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

There are some Coen-brothers movies - Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou? and True Grit come immediately to mind - that, because they exude such palpable filmmaking energy and are so spectacularly quotable, I wanted to talk about immediately after first seeing them. Then there are the rarer Coen-brothers movies, among them The Hudsucker Proxy and Intolerable Cruelty and Burn After Reading, that I didn't feel much like talking about afterward, mostly because I didn't enjoy them much on a first go-round. (Though I've consequently become a big fan of Joel's and Ethan's Hudsucker and Burn, in the case of Intolerable Cruelty, second and third go-rounds did nothing to improve matters.)

And then there are Coen-brothers movies such as the new Inside Llewyn Davis, a work that is, I think, so good that I don't want to discuss it for fear of not coming close to doing it justice.

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

The Wolf of Wall Street is Martin Scorsese's three-hour black comedy about the grotesquely indulgent life of felonious stock trader Jordan Belfort, and Leonardo DiCaprio gives a ferociously alert performance as the title character, even when, in a scene of perfectly executed physical slapstick, a Quaalude high gone wrong leaves him nearly, and hilariously, immobile. The movie is filled with memorable set pieces and blisteringly profane dialogue, and several supporting actors - Kyle Chandler and Matthew McConaughey especially - are in utterly spectacular form. There's filmmaking energy, even bravado, on display in just about every scene. And after dozens of releases in a career spanning more than four decades, it's the first Scorsese picture that I've ever actively hated.