Christopher Hampton's stage play The Talking Cure provides the cerebral basis for David Cronenberg to dive into the largely overlooked story of Sabina Spielrein and her influence on the fathers of modern psychoanalysis—Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Sabina (played with astonishing authority by Keira Knightley) is a Russian Jewish mental patient brought to Jung's Burgholzli Clinic in Zurich in 1904. Sabina’s "hysteria" impedes her speech as she contorts her face, neck, and head in violent spasms. Outwardly, she seems obviously quite insane. Michael Fassbender's Jung is able to calmly look beyond Sabina's off-putting physical demeanor in the interest of curing her. Jung is determined to use Sabina as a premier test patient for Freud's revolutionary and conversational therapy, which he mistakenly calls "psychanalysis."

Cronenberg’s film glides effortlessly across years as Jung meets Freud (Viggo Mortensen) to discuss psychoanalysis and enjoin in a friendship fraught with lurking tension. The filmmaker masterfully controls the soundscape to underpin shifts of physical, emotional, and intellectual import. Howard Shore's delicate music is never allowed to intrude on a scene. Ugliness becomes beautiful; beauty becomes divine.

Liam Neeson, the actor best known for playing thoughtful, sometimes heroic men, has somehow managed (in his late 50s, no less) to reinvent himself as a steely-eyed action star in the vein of Clint Eastwood or the late Charles Bronson. Watching him beat the living hell out of absolutely everyone in his path in movies like Taken and Unknown proved more fun than anyone imagined. Because of that, the marketing campaign for The Grey has almost exclusively been focusing on the novelty of Liam Neeson fist-fighting giant grey wolves. However, if the film trailer’s shot of him taping broken glass to his hands and charging a wolf is the only thing that has you excited about this movie, then you will likely walk out of the theater disappointed. Director Joe Carnahan had more on his mind than wolf punching.

I have a few problems with this movie. First off, when you call something haywire, the audience really shouldn’t wait the entire movie to find out that nobody goes haywire. I mean if a director called a movie “Boycott” or “Slaughter,” we would expect to see one of those things happen onscreen. That’s not the case with Haywire, director Steven Soderbergh’s latest foray into action/espionage.

I’m a fan of Soderbergh. I liked Ocean’s 11(12 and 13) and I like that he has the guts to make a major epic like Che, as well as low-budget art movies such as The Girlfriend Experience, Bubble and the overlooked Kafka. He always seems to challenge genre stereotypes and puts his intellectual stamp on his subjects, but not here. Sure, there’s a snazzy jazz soundtrack and exotic locales, but no real shocks. Haywire is a mediocre flick that feels contrived and cliché. The best thing about the movie is the camera work, which stuns.

Michel Hazanavicius’ effervescent The Artist seems to be staking out a curious territory during the 2011-12 film awards season. On the one hand, it feels like it was genetically engineered to grab movie critics’ attention more than that of general audiences: It’s in black and white, it’s silent, it swoons over cinema history and its creative team is made up of people whose names are hard to pronounce. Yet its multiple critics’-group wins have occasionally felt like the recognition of an acceptable compromise between the esoteric artsyness of something like The Tree of Life and serious-minded popular hits like The Help. What’s not to like about The Artist? And then again, what is there, exactly, to love about it?

Whether you have children of your own, plan to someday have kids or simply can’t stand them, it’s universally known that at some point a child will make your life a pain in the ass. Acclaimed director Roman Polanski brings us one such moment without even introducing the rascals.

After a disagreement between two boys turns violent, the parents of the children converge over the details and the proper way to handle it, only to find themselves acting like children when their differing opinions get out in the open. This oddly entertaining comedy, featuring humor that goes from dry to downright scorched, takes place entirely inside a New York apartment.