THE VOW

Even though I'm frequently annoyed, if not downright appalled, by them, I really don't ask a lot from traditional romantic weepies. If the actors involved share more-than-sufficient chemistry, and the film provides at least a decent amount of legitimate passion and pathos - with a few good jokes thrown in to keep the proceedings human - I'll generally feel that I've gotten my money's worth. And happily, I got my money's worth at The Vow. I'd hardly argue that director Michael Sucsy's love-among-the-mental-ruins effort is a good movie, but despite never being as interesting as it keeps threatening to be, this audience-friendly drama fulfills its basic requirements with the utmost sincerity and even something approaching wit.

THE GREY

Whenever I watch a movie such as Alive or The Thing or director Joe Carnahan's The Grey - especially in January - I ask myself the same question: Is it worth it? I know about cinematic sleight-of-hand, of course, and that the performers and crew aren't enduring anywhere near the nightmarish conditions suffered by the characters on-screen. I also presume that a fat Hollywood paycheck instantly makes any location shooting, including The Grey's outdoor shoot in wintry British Columbia, a lot more bearable. But still, all that ice and wind and trudging through thigh-deep snow ... . Is any movie experience worth spending three months in fear of losing your digits to frostbite?

THE ARTIST

In the spirit of Michel Hazanavicius' extraordinary silent-film celebration The Artist, I considered offering a review that, likewise, didn't offer much in the way of verbal language - just a smiley-face emoticon in the biggest font possible. And after two viewings (so far) of this intimate yet grandly ambitious comedy, I'm still not sure that a review filled with actual words will offer a more thorough expression of the rapturous pleasure it fills me with; upon leaving Hazanavicius' exhilarating experiment in black and white, both times, I haven't felt the urge to talk about it so much as sit back and reflect on it with a huge grin plastered to my face.

THE IRON LADY

It's hardly a newsflash that over the past several years - well, forever, really - Meryl Streep has treated us to a run of extraordinary performances, and her Margaret Thatcher in the screen biography The Iron Lady is one of the most extraordinary of them all. Yet the vexing question regarding Streep's indelible work of late isn't "How does she keep doing it?" It's "How does she keep doing it with so little help from her directors?"