Jack O'Connell in UnbrokenUNBROKEN, THE IMITATION GAME, and BIG EYES

Among other titles, Christmas Day brought with it the area releases of Angelina Jolie's Unbroken, Morten Tyldum's The Imitation Game, and Tim Burton's Big Eyes. Each of them opens with a title-card variant on "This is a true story." Each of them ends with a series of title cards informing us what happened to characters after the films' narratives concluded. And each of them, for occasional better and more frequent worse, feels absolutely, 100-percent Hollywood.

Pandas: The Journey HomeFriday, July 25, 12:30 p.m.-ish: I take my seat for the latest big-screen edu-tainment at the Putnam Museum, and can't imagine a better way to begin my third quadruple feature of the month. For one thing, the movie I'm at is only 40 minutes long, which will shorten my work day considerably. For another, the movie is all about pandas. Pandas! Who doesn't love pandas? I figure that, at worst, the National Geographic presentation Pandas: The Journey Home will be adorable. So I'll admit to some more-than-mild surprise when, not 10 minutes into the film, we're treated to the (tasteful) sight of a female panda being artificially inseminated, right after witnessing the (tasteful) sight of a male panda mating with her. Hmmm, I think. Didn't see that in Disney's Bears.

Allison Miller in Devil's DueJanuary 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?

Catherine Zeta-Jones and Gerard Butler in Playing for KeepsPLAYING FOR KEEPS

In director Gabriele Muccino's dramatic comedy Playing for Keeps, Gerard Butler portrays a former star athlete who hopes to reconnect with his ex-wife and son by coaching the kid's pee-wee soccer team, and who is consequently forced to (try to) resist the advances of a trio of beautiful, aggressive, lascivious soccer moms who can't keep their hands off him. This, in the language of Hollywood screenwriters, is what is known as "a problem."

BraveBRAVE

Like many of you, I'd imagine, I applaud Pixar for finally giving audiences a strong female protagonist in Brave, and would've looked forward to the movie itself more had the trailers not been so resoundingly blah. But what I'd forgotten was that several of the animation studio's best outings - Finding Nemo, WALL•E, Toy Story 3 - were also promoted with weak previews, and so it's a pleasure to say that this Scotland-based adventure is one of Pixar's most involving and interesting achievements in years, partly because those generically jokey trailers give you almost no idea of what's actually in store.

Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST

I know a bunch of you bought tickets for it this past weekend, so allow me to ask: Did anyone else find Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest a little, you know, incoherent? A degree of senselessness, of course, has to come with the territory, but while I'm positive that I didn't nod off during Gore Verbinski's opus - the booming soundtrack and relentless, CGI-enhanced action won't let you - I'm not sure I ever quite understood it. There seemed to be a whole lot of plot in Dead Man's Chest but none of it meant anything or was revealed with an urgency that might make it mean anything; at some point, I simply gave up trying to figure the damned thing out, and just waited for Davy Jones and the rest of his barnacled baddies to show up again.

In discussing this year's Oscar races in the picture, director, and the acting categories, we may as well begin with the nominee area audiences had the least chance of catching, as it was the only major contender yet to get an area release: Duncan Tucker's Transamerica.