ENOUGH SAID

It should go without saying that romantic comedies are generally more enjoyable if you enter them with already-fond feelings for their leads, which is why it was more fun to sit through, say, one of Tom Hanks' and Meg Ryan's 1990s outings than the ugly one that transpired, in 2009, between Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler. But until writer/director Nicole Holefcener's Enough Said - which finally landed locally at Moline's Nova 6 Cinemas two months after its original nationwide release - I'm not sure I'd ever seen a rom-com with quite this much built-in goodwill before. Then again, no one until Holefcener had designed a rom-com for Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the late, great James Gandolfini before, either.

ZERO DARK THIRTY

As an orchestrator of cinematic suspense, Kathryn Bigelow might currently be without peer in American movies. The sequences of Jeremy Renner dismantling explosives in the director's Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker were miniature masterpieces of sustained excitement; despite our knowing, through much of the film, that it was too early for Renner's Sergeant William James to be killed off, each masterfully shot and edited act of bomb disposal vibrated with legitimate threat. In Zero Dark Thirty - Bigelow's and screenwriter Mark Boal's fictionalized docu-drama about the decade-long search for Osama bin Laden - nearly every scene feels like a ticking time bomb. There is, of course, never any doubt about the narrative's outcome, yet Bigelow's gifts for composition and pacing ensure that you still watch the picture with rapt attention and dread. And blessedly, she's also a spectacular entertainer. The movie is tough-minded and sometimes tough to watch, but even when Bigelow is fraying your nerves, she's tickling your senses.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

Where to begin in describing all the things that could've gone wrong with director Spike Jonze's live-action take on Where the Wild Things Are? And where to begin in describing all the things that have gone magically, even miraculously, right with it?

ANGELS & DEMONS

You may not necessarily know character actor Armin Mueller-Stahl by name, but you likely know him by sight, and almost surely by voice. Familiar from such thrillers as Eastern Promises, The Game, and the recent The International - and Oscar-nominated as David Helfgott's über-strict father in Shine - the 78-year-old German, with his closely-cropped gray hair and wizened eye slits, doesn't look much different now from how he did playing Jessica Lange's is-he-a-Nazi-or-isn't-he? dad in 1989's Music Box. And he sounds exactly the same, with that heavily accented, hoarse whisper of his; by the time the performer reaches the end of a sentence, he always seems dangerously close to running out of breath.