THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY, PART 1

Like its immediate predecessor Catching Fire, director Francis Lawrence's The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 is reasonably gripping and rarely dull, although its presentation - as was bound to happen - does make the movie feel less like a satisfying two-hour entertainment than the not-bad first half of a much better four-hour entertainment. (Or five-hour entertainment, depending on how plushly Lawrence and Lionsgate pad the goodbye in next year's Part 2.) But I was really put off by one moment in the film, which found Woody Harrelson's Haymitch complaining that the makeup worn by Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss needed to be scrubbed off, as it was making the young warrior look 35. The line was amusing and Haymitch wasn't wrong, but why wasn't anyone bothered that the rest of Mockingjay 1 was making her look 13?

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.

THE CAMPAIGN

As the movie's trailers have been running since what feels like the last presidential campaign, it's understandable if viewers enter the Will Ferrell/Zach Galifianakis political spoof The Campaign worried that all of the hilarious bits have already been spoiled for them. The wonderful surprise of director Jay Roach's comedy, however, is that they haven't - not unless viewers have somehow been privy to a trailer that lasts 85 minutes.

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?"