It’s that time again. 

Rachel Getting Married is a smallish drama about a black sheep in a fractured family of four, fresh out of rehab, who returns home to attend her sister’s wedding. Despite the ragged digital video, the film is actually a disciplined study in human brokenness, keen and discerning. Jonathan Demme, the director, is a filmmaker sensitive to fragile shifts in tempo, and he fully exploits his felicity with actors. (Notice how quickly a dishwashing competition turns sour.) Good performances are plentiful (especially by Hathaway as the returning sister and Bill Irwin as the father of the bride), though almost everyone is guilty of a little too much emoting.

City of Ember is the latest family-film from that veritable family-film factory—Walden Media. This costly adventure tale, set 200 years from now in a subterranean city lit by electricity, follows the attempts of two teenagers (Saoirse Ronan and Harry Treadaway) to find an exit to the outside world. Wrought with intelligence and feeling, and niftily designed as a network of pipes and tunnels, the film holds the attention thoroughly and honestly, without resorting to melodrama or sentimentality. Bill Murray has a funny role as a corrupt mayor, and there are a few nicely executed special effects including a beastly half-seal, half-earthworm creature destined to give kids nightmares. Gil Kenan (Monster House) directed.  

Happy-Go-Lucky, an English import from Mike Leigh (now there’s a name you can trust), revolves around a single and singular character—Poppy, a loudly dressed, optimistic, unconquerable grade school teacher (played with total conviction by Sally Hawkins). A great deal of pleasure and fascination comes from watching this oddly endearing individual rub against various characters who in turn either succumb to her contagion of cheerfulness or are forced to confront their latent unhappiness. The encounters between Poppy and her perpetually irate driving instructor (the customarily excellent Eddie Marsan) yield the heftiest dramatic payoff, although they are merely parts of what constitute a whole philosophy, a whole outlook on life. Leigh, for whom human behavior is a source of constant inspiration, sees something beautiful in this character, and asks that we kindly do the same.

Changeling is Clint Eastwood’s reenactment of an 80-year-old news item—the disappearance of a small boy, followed several months later by the appearance of similar boy claiming to be the lost child. This reunion turns out to be a source of deep distress for the mother of the missing lad (Angelina Jolie), especially since the police keep insisting that she’s off her rocker. This is an intensely involving scenario, especially in the capable hands of a director like Eastwood. But as it goes deeper into darkness, the screenplay takes so many unbelievable twists and turns (including a heavy-handed stay in a loony bin operated by merciless Nurse Ratched types) that the film emerges as something of an ordeal. This, however, doesn’t mitigate the nagging desire to know What Happens Next. L.A. buffs will take special interest in the careful reconstruction of the downtown milieu, with its City Hall and corrupt police force.

Synecdoche, New York is the directing debut of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, a christened auteur whose busy, buzzing intellect has a tendency to short circuit the emotional content of his films. With no higher power to mold and temper the free-form messiness of his ideas, the indulgences run wild. In summary, the labyrinthian narrative concerns a depressed, hypochondriac theater director who embarks on an epic autobiographical production, a decades-spanning project that includes casting actors to play himself, his wife, the box office lady, and others. Layers give way to layers. Some of the ideas stick, but Kaufman makes unreasonable demands on audience participation, and the final expected epiphany never comes.

Let the Right One In, a Swedish indie, chronicles the romance between a towheaded 12-year-old and the dark-haired object of his affection, a child vampire who just moved into the neighborhood. The fantastical premise is handled with an admirable bent toward realism by director Tomas Alfredson, at least until a CG cat attack and a gore-drenched conclusion. A subplot involving school bullies resolves messily, if not satisfyingly. Still, the snowy, woodsy settings are photographed with elegance, and the kids (one fair, one dark) are believable and affecting.

Several of France’s most respected graphic artists collaborated on Fears of the Dark, an omnibus of six black-and-white horror vignettes bound together by a common theme of fear. This particular brand of animation—stripped-down, supple—may well prove dangerous in the hands of a depraved director, and indeed a couple of them go beyond horror into sheer unpleasantness. There is nevertheless a high degree of technique on display (so much is apparent as early on as the opening credits, which owe a debt to Saul Bass), and an innate understanding of the mechanics of horror—the last and best episode deals credibly with the challenge of having to find one’s way through a pitch-dark house.