PENGUINS OF MADAGASCAR

Penguins of Madagascar opens with a sweeping overhead shot of an (animated) Antarctic expanse, which eventually lands on an orderly march of flightless waterfowl. This introduction is narrated by a documentarian voiced by Werner Herzog, who informs us, in the director's unmistakable German-accented English, that we're to witness penguins in all their natural glory - right before he orders a crew member to shove a few off a cliff, just to see what will happen. Between Herzog, the environmental-doc satire, and the sheer goofiness of it all, this prelude is such a fantastically funny way to start directors Eric Darnell's and Simon J. Smith's spin-off that it immediately leaves you anticipating a movie that'll be smart and hilarious throughout. Would you settle, though, for smart and moderately amusing?

HER

Her, writer/director Spike Jonze's tale of a man who falls in love with his computerized operating system, and "she" with him, casts a weirdly hypnotic spell. Although billed as comedy (as least by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association), you don't really laugh much, and when you do, the laughter generally sticks in an odd, uncomfortable place in your throat; marveling at the unbridled sincerity of the thing, your chuckles are laced with a slight hint of mockery. Yet damned if Jonze, star Joaquin Phoenix, and the film's superb supporting cast and designers don't make this improbable project pay off in spades. Thoughtful, haunting, and perceptive, and at all times wickedly clever, Her is like a sci-fi Lost in Translation with a Scarlett Johansson you never get to see.

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.

CARRIE

(Author's note: Spoilers will abound. Given that the movie under consideration is an oftentimes word-for-word updating of a 37-year-old work, I hope I'll be forgiven for them.)

As remakes of beloved genre classics go, I suppose there's little point in being bothered by the new Carrie. Director Kimberly Peirce's outing, after all, is easy to sit through, smartly staged, generally well-acted, and, in most regards, incredibly faithful to Brian De Palma's 1976 original (which was, itself, reasonably faithful to Stephen King's debut novel of 1974). The CGI effects are pretty weak, and the movie isn't even slightly scary, and considering that nearly all sentient beings know what happens to poor Carrie White at the prom - with the movie's entire advertising campaign based on post-prom imagery - there's almost nothing in the way of storyline surprise, but whatever. It's fine.