FrozenFROZEN

As its fans (and I'm one of them) will gladly attest, Disney's Frozen is a bit of a throwback to the studio's recent golden age of animated entertainments - that period from the late '80s to the mid-'90s that found more-or-less traditional fairy and folk tales goosed with healthy portions of Broadway razzmatazz. (Those in the press championing this new work as a welcome and rather bold return to form, however, do seem to have conveniently forgotten about 2009's excellent The Princess & the Frog and 2010's near-excellent Tangled.) But while much of the film follows the standard Disney-in-its-prime formula to the letter - big-eyed ingénue heroine, check; wacky animal sidekick, check; rafter-shaking power ballad destined to win an Oscar, check - there is one aspect to Frozen that separates it from the Little Mermaid/Beauty & the Beast/Lion King herd: The movie is kind of bonkers.

Selena Gomez, Rachel Korine, Vanessa Hudgens, and Ashley Benson in Spring BreakersSPRING BREAKERS

At the screening of Spring Breakers that I attended, I counted eight viewers who walked out of the movie, and stayed out, well before the end credits rolled. In all honesty, I'm amazed the tally wasn't higher than that. The movie being touted in print and in trailers promises a rowdy, randy romp in the sun with built-in audience-grabbers: Disney princesses acting nasty! James Franco with cornrows and grillz! But the movie that writer/director Harmony Korine has actually made - despite, indeed, its also being a rowdy, randy romp in the sun - bears so little relation to its cheeky, borderline-innocuous advertising campaign that patrons can be easily forgiven for feeling badly misled and deciding to bolt. It would be like going to see Dumbo and instead getting Gus Van Sant's Elephant.

Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger TidesPIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES

During the first hour of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the third sequel in Disney's hugely successful franchise, characters are routinely told to beware of the mermaids - half-woman/half-fish beings who use their comely looks and tranquil siren songs to drag seafaring men to their deaths. Our adventurers take note of the warnings but pay them little mind, and really, why should they? Disney, after all, is the studio that gave us the benign cutie-pies of The Little Mermaid and (through its Touchstone Pictures label) Splash. Just how nasty can these things be?

We eventually find out, and as a result, I'll likely never look at Ariel or Daryl Hannah the same way again.

Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal in Love & Other DrugsLOVE & OTHER DRUGS

In my 2009 review of the director's turgid World War II drama Defiance, I opened by asking, "Am I the only person who wishes that Edward Zwick would go back to making sharp, bitchy comedies like his 1986 Rob Lowe-Demi Moore romance About Last Night ... ?" Well, less than two years later, Zwick has returned to those romantic-comedy roots with Love & Other Drugs. Because, apparently, I needed another reminder to be careful what I wish for.

The Princess & the FrogTHE PRINCESS & THE FROG

Like many of you, I'm sure, I've grown somewhat nostalgic for the hand-drawn animated Disney musicals of a long-ago era -- by which I mean the early '90s. But I'll be honest: Almost nothing about the previews for the studio's The Princess & the Frog convinced me that the old Disney magic was, at last, about to be recaptured.

District 9DISTRICT 9

Director Neill Blomkamp's District 9 is a science-fiction/horror/action flick that finds a race of malnourished, understandably irate alien creatures being forcibly detained in a Johannesburg internment camp. It's also, if you can stomach the frequent bursts of bloodshed and gooey splatter, an almost insanely good time, an unapologetic "B" movie elevated to "A" status through wizardly filmmaking, macabre humor, thematic cleverness, and some of the most inventive CGI work in years.