Brian Clough is a legend among English soccer managers. He was the youngest coach in the league when, at 30, he took over Hartlepools United in 1965. In the early 1970s, he lifted a mediocre Derby County team from the Second Division to champion of the First, playing in a European Cup semifinal along the way. And in the late 1970s, he took an obscure Nottingham Forest squad all the way to back-to-back European Cup trophies, a feat considered one of the greatest in the history of the sport. His is, in short, a perfect Hollywood underdog story.

Near the end of Maurice Sendak’s classic Where the Wild Things Are, as young protagonist Max is abandoning the fantastical creatures who have crowned him their king, the Wild Things plead, “Oh please don’t go--we’ll eat you up--we love you so.” The line neatly captures one of the central insights of Sendak’s slim masterwork: the close proximity in the preadolescent mind between affection and aggression, between the loving and the eating.

The wittiest scene in Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2001 film The Man Who Wasn’t There is one in which a fast-talking defense attorney, Freddy Riedenschneider (marvelously played by Tony Shalhoub), invokes Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as grounds for a not-guilty verdict in a murder case:

We can’t know what really happened.… Because the more you look, the less you know. But the beauty of it is, we don't gotta know! We just gotta show that, goddamnit, they don't know. Reasonable doubt. Science. The atom. You explain it to me. Go ahead, try.

At the time, this routine seemed little more than an offhanded parody of the Michael Frayn play Copenhagen, in which Heisenberg and Nils Bohr discourse windily about the inscrutability of their past actions and intents. But the idea recurs more centrally in the Coen brothers’ new film, A Serious Man, when a beleaguered physics professor named Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) explains to his students that the uncertainty principle “proves that we can’t ever know what’s going on.” In this case, it is far less clear whether the assertion is intended as satire or corroboration of Frayn’s metaphor. Indeed, the movie itself is similarly difficult to pin down: part tragedy, part epistemological inquiry, part Jewish comedy of manners.

Zombieland, the second horror-comedy to be released in the last couple of weeks (in this case, horror-action-comedy is probably a more apt description),is everything Jennifer's Body was not--fast, funny, and fully aware of the obligations and opportunities inherent in the genre. The movie opens with a few ironic flashes of the zombie apocalypse that befell the United States when one man's consumption of a tainted burger led to a nationwide outbreak of "mad human" disease: A woman with a "The End is Near Sign" meets her nearer-than-anticipated end; a flesh-eating stripper in a G-string chases an unlucky john from a club; a flaming zombie tackles a firefighter.

Way back in 1980, when the Oscar-winning theme song of the movie Fame declared "I'm gonna live forever," it was easy to believe the lyric was an example of artistic license. Now, it's not so clear. With almost Biblical tenacity, the film begat a television series which begat a stage musical which begat a reality show. When that last iteration was cancelled after a single season in 2003, it was possible to imagine that the longest 15 minutes in show business history had finally ticked to a close.

"Hell is a teenage girl," Jennifer's Body announces in its opening moments. But the film's thesis is really more particular: Hell is a teenage girl who has been unsuccessfully sacrificed to Satan by an alt-rock band and, as a result, finds that she has become a flesh-eating demon. It's a difficult case to contest.

So this is what Matt Damon has been keeping bottled up during all those taciturn hours playing Jason Bourne. In Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!, Damon plays--and plays very, very well--a character in every way the opposite of his efficient, amnesiac superspy: a babbling bumbler who goes undercover for the FBI to gather information against his own employer but winds up exposing mostly himself. Forget Soderbergh's earlier Erin Brockovich; this is a portrait of the whistleblower as pipsqueak.

There is a moment in the first scene of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds that is not what it appears to be. A Nazi colonel named Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) is interviewing a French farmer (Denis Menochet) he believes to be sheltering Jews. Landa is conducting the inquiry in more than passable French (yes, with subtitles and everything), when he pauses. He's come to the limits of his francais, he claims. Does the farmer speak English and, if so, might they continue in that tongue? He does, and they do.

It's taken countless hours of TV crime-drama ("Crime Story," "Miami Vice") and nearly a dozen feature films (Heat, Collateral, Miami Vice again), but in John Dillinger, Michael Mann may finally have found an ideal vessel for his particular vision of masculine cool: stylish, charismatic, unflappable, adept at violence but not hungry for it.

The new Transformers movie is two-and-a-half hours long. I'm going to write that sentence again, if I may, because it is a reality I find only slightly less confounding than I would the arrival on this planet of actual alien robots inclined to disguise themselves as backhoes and eighteen-wheelers: The new Transformers movie is two-and-a-half hours long.

How do you make a sequel to a blockbuster when the star of your film declines to return for a second go-round? I refer, of course, to Tom Hanks’s hairdo in The Da Vinci Code.

I am not a Trekkie. It’s important that this be clearly established before we move on. Yes, as a boy I was a fan of the original “Star Trek,” to the point where I could distinguish a Saladin-class Destroyer from a Ptolemy-class tug--an admission I’d be loath to make if my wife weren’t already bound to me by marital vows, two children, and a large puppy. But I never cottoned to the subsequent Trek series and bailed out on the movie adaptations shortly after the Enterprise started rescuing whales in the mid-80s.

What do you do when your superhero franchise has no future? You reverse time’s arrow and plunder the past. After two strong, Bryan-Singer-directed outings, the original X-Men trilogy wheezed to a grim, dispirited conclusion in 2006 with the Brett-Ratner-helmed X-Men: The Last Stand--a lurching wreck of a movie that should have added $5 million to Singer’s subsequent asking price.

My problems with The Haunting in Connecticut began with the title. With the first word of the title, actually. The haunting in Connecticut? There's something unduly proprietary, even presumptuous, about that definite article. I mean, there must've been hundreds, thousands, of reports of paranormal activity in the Constitution State over the years. I grew up there, and think I may have seen an odd thing or two myself. Do the film’s producers really want to argue, even implicitly, that none of those hauntings were real?

What is the clue that enables Inspector Jacques Clouseau (Steve Martin) to uncover the identity of the Tornado, a notorious international thief, at the conclusion of The Pink Panther 2? Well, I’ll tell you. (Is this a spoiler? In the technical sense, yes, though anyone who imagines that this “mystery” is in any way mysterious is already displaying more imagination than the screenwriters. Still, those wishing to retain their innocence might want to skip the next paragraph.)

Near the midpoint of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, the titular demon is asked by his all-too-human girlfriend, “Do you need everyone to love you?