Warning: Minor spoilers.

Sam Raimi's greatest contribution to the land of Oz is the very modern act of tribute through mockery. Though his prequel Oz the Great and Powerful takes place about 20 years before 1939's The Wizard of Oz, James Franco's Oscar Diggs floats in a hot air balloon from Kansas (of course) and regards the foreign soil of Oz with the amused irony of someone beamed in from 2013. He has a shit-eating grin and quip for virtually all that he encounters: a winged monkey in a bellhop uniform, a porcelain doll that can talk, hot babes, good witches, bad witches, the idiotic tinkers and munchkins of Oz.

The fish slide around the deck, mouths gaping, eyes about to pop. The POV dips from blurry water to above the surface, and every time we rise the screech of gulls hovering above the sea is more voluminous, a bigger shock. A thick, golden chain pierces the infinite darkness. Skates are elevated, their wings hacked off with a machete, their bodies discarded. Heaving nets give birth to a haul of sea life in an extended plop. Sea spray glistens against the night. A yellow light offsets the blue-black sky and highlights the chunky, red blood, and it's hard to recall a time when the primary color palette has seemed more menacing.

Somewhere in Stoker's gorgeous heap of near-absurd imagery, jaw-dropping transitions, domestic melodrama, and suggestive narrative half-threads is a metaphor for the career of its South Korean director Park Chan-wook. In staggers, loops and layers, Stoker's story follows the passage into adulthood of India Stoker (gangled by Mia Wasikowska, whose obsessive performance warrants obsession) while wondering, in an elliptical and inconclusive sort of way, if she is innately evil.

Malik Bendjelloul's Searching for Sugar Man, which won Best Documentary Feature at last night's Academy Awards, is a puff piece that exists to deify its subject, Sixto Díaz Rodríguez. It is less a documentary than a montage of fawning over this American folk musician who released two albums in the early '70s, only to be ignored and then rediscovered by South Africa. We hear that he was bigger than Elvis and the Rolling Stones there, that he moved 500,000 copies of his debut Cold Fact there, that he's "like a wise man prophet" with "a genuine quality that all poets and artists have to elevate things." Someone says, "Bob Dylan was mild [compared] to this guy."

I never realized how not pregnant Beyoncé might have been until the Saturday premiere of her HBO documentary, Life Is But a Dream. Since announcing her pregnancy at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards (in August of that year), there have been naysayers, referred to with tongue in cheek as "Beyoncé birthers." There was that footage of her apparently pregnant belly folding in on itself when she made an appearance on Australian TV in the fall of 2011. Months later, Beyoncé addressed it with a pithy explanation: "It was a fabric that folded - does fabric not fold? Oh my gosh, so stupid."

This week sees the release of three new horror movies: Warm Bodies, Girls Against Boys (both in theaters) and The ABCs of Death (on demand). But it is not enough anymore merely to be a horror movie — now horror movies, in conversation with what came before them in their respective subgenres, must add something new to the conversation, or at least purport to for the sake of "angle." All three of these attempt to do so, with various yet decided degrees of success. Let's explore.

If Michael Apted's Up series of documentaries plays like the older, more relaxed brother of reality TV, it's because that's basically what it is. Launched in 1964 as a one-off special of interviews with 7-year-olds in Seven Up by director Paul Almond, the film surveyed 14 kids of various economic backgrounds to explore England's class system (it was based on the repeatedly invoked Jesuit motto "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man"). Apted, who helped cast that film, then took over and has returned to its subjects every seven years to document their lives over time. Though the films are still inherently political, what emerged was less of an economic survey and more one of humanity. Reality TV is often referred to as a sociological experiment, but the Up series is as bona fide of a longitudinal study as pop culture has ever offered.

Here is how stupid John Luessenhop's incompetent sixth installment in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise is: An alternate sequel, the film picks up where the 1974 original left off (literally with the police responding to a call from the pickup truck driver who rescued final girl Sally) and concerns a baby who is kidnapped from the demented family of homicidal cannibals. When we meet her in the present, she is played by the 26-year-old Alexandra Daddario and surrounded by horny college-esque kids. She should be at least 38.

When we remember 2012 in a few years and then a few more, what about this year in cinema will we retain? The death of film culture and then its resurrection via discursive lighting rod that Django Unchained proved itself to be, out of the gate? (Or the divisive Beasts of the Southern Wild, for that matter?) The release of two cartoonish movies about Abraham Lincoln? (Though Vampire Hunter was worse than Spielberg's Hall of Presidents recreation, at least it telegraphed how ridiculous it was from the get go.) The death (and death and death) of Taylor Kitsch's career? The reign of Channing Tatum? All the bow-wielding women heroes? Shawarma and branzino?

The great thing about Christmas is you can do it exactly the same as you did last time, every single year. Case in point: 1992's Home Alone 2: Lost in New York is basically and openly the same movie as 1990's megahit Home Alone. The main difference is that writer John Hughes and director Chris Columbus moved the setting from a Chicago suburb to Manhattan.

The new movie version of Les Misérables is a nonsensical, emotional vampire of a movie. It sucks and sucks and never stops sucking. I knew I was supposed to feel something in this ever-welling sea of emotion, but I didn't know exactly what and I most certainly did not feel a thing. Well, that's not entirely true — I did feel isolated, like I was from a different planet than the people who were moved to repeatedly applaud for actors that couldn't hear them (at a screening full of critics, no less!), and audibly weep at turns so evidently constructed to make them do so that a giant lit up "CRY NOW" sign in the theater would have been redundant.

Judd Apatow's miserable new comedy, This Is 40, is a cautionary tale that warns against two things: getting older and being married. I don't know what messages you are to extract from this thing if not: kill yourself and get divorced now.

The more I read about what Quentin Tarantino has to say about his consistently entertaining new slave Western Django Unchained, the less I like the film. This is supremely annoying:

Horror movies make death easy. Lots of people find them hard to watch, of course, but they ultimately make the loss of life a consumable commodity – with the swipe of a machete, the slash of a knife, the plunge of a handful of razors, humans expire. A series of these makes for a fast-moving popcorn picture.

Empathy comes from the weirdest place and the least savory of intentions in the just-released documentary Addicted to Fame, B-movie director David Giancola's chronicle of his 2007 film Illegal Aliens - the movie that also has the distinction of being Anna Nicole Smith's last. She was hired specifically as a stunt, to cultivate the "oh my god they didn't" factor, as Giancola, puts it. But he never trusted her. To ensure her reliability, he got her to invest in the movie and, aware that he had a train wreck on his hands, he documented the filming process extensively.

Killing Them Softly is so heavy-handed, it features the Velvet Underground's "Heroin" during a scene in which a character shoots up heroin. But it's so cool that the instrumental section plays — you have to know the song to get it.

Ang Lee's Life of Pi, a faithful adaptation of Yann Martel's 2001 novel, respects all religions, but it worships itself. Based on a tip from a mutual friend, a writer attends the house of the titular Pi, which provides the framing device for Pi's recounted tall tale that finds him out to sea for 227 days on a small boat with a giant Bengal tiger. "He said that you have a story that would make me believe in God," says the writer excitedly.

Great bad movies are fueled by their ridiculous details. Miami Connection's are stellar to the point of bonkers. This is not just a great bad movie — it's a phenomenal one. The 1987 pulp movie played only in Orlando and then after being avoided, was forgotten. But now it's being revived by Drafthouse, showing in theaters all over the country including New York's Landmark Sunshine tonight. For sheer singularity, it merits reconsideration.

A junky argues with her landlord while the Red Hot Chili Peppers' heroin ballad "Under the Bridge" plays in the background. Then, when she shoots up, we hear a cover of the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane." An alcoholic druggie purges his stash and looks longingly at wedding pictures for a marriage that eventually failed to the strains of Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine." A drug dealer is brought in to deliver some hangover-busting cocaine and the refreshed drunk rides the elevator down from his hotel room to a muzak version of "With a Little Help from My Friends."