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Tim Briody: If The Muppets doesn't move you, you have absolutely no soul. It's not perfect filmmaking by any means (the very end is botched, in my opinion), but the throwaway jokes and fourth wall breaking all worked for me. I had a smile on my face for virtually the entire film.

Matthew Huntley: I saw The Descendants, The Muppets and Hugo. All three are recommendable, with The Descendants and Hugo being about equal and The Muppets coming in a relatively close second. The Descendants is the kind of film you'll think is very good when you see it but it end up growing on you the more you think about it. It's heartrending and intelligently written. Hugo is exciting, imaginative and incredibly moving in the end. I rarely cry at the movies, but this one had me on the verge of tears. The Muppets keeps the spirit of the original show and earlier films intact and is just plain jolly all around. It could be called a one-joke wonder at times, but it has some inspired moments scattered throughout.

Samuel Hoelker: My heart may be hardening in my old age, but I couldn't quite get myself as swept away with Hugo and The Muppets as everyone else. I can understand my less-than-thrilled reaction to the Muppets, not growing up with them (but hey, the movie's still fun), but considering my one tattoo is from Trip to the Moon, I expected more from Hugo. The sentimental side of me loved it, but the side of me that still holds it to the same standards as every movie found many faults with it.

I also saw the NC-17 Shame yesterday. While the acting is excellent, it seems disinterested with the characters and fails to really make them interesting outside of their faults. Michael Fassbender and (especially) Carey Mulligan do what they can, but it's not quite enough. Also (although this may be the ultra-liberal side of me speaking) it should not have been NC-17. A 16-year-old has seen much more explicit exploits.

Wow, this makes me seem grumpy. I love lots of movies, I swear!

Max Braden: Dan Krovich and I did a double header of Shame and Martha Marcy May Marlene this weekend. Parking difficulties made me late to Shame, and when I finally took my seat, Dan whispered, "You missed all the penis!" which he said just amounted to someone walking around in the nude at home. There was penis at the end of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and my assumption is that it was the lengthy hip-on-hip thrusting that gave this the NC-17 rating. But it's barely more than is in Basic Instinct, and Shame is hardly gratuitous; the vigorous sex does actually depict the desperate loneliness of Fassbender's character. I wasn't really clicking with Fassbender during the movie because he sounds like he's struggling to hide his accent (a lot like Christian Bale) and in both this and X-Men seems uncomfortable in his own skin. But his last sequence in the movie really makes it work, and I will still automatically seek out any movie he's cast in.

I liked Martha Marcy May Marlene more than Shame, because Elizabeth Olsen is excellent (and beautiful. But no, really: excellent actress). She does a great job of depicting PTSD and paranoia after separating herself from a cult, and the ending is vague enough that you could interpret what she's seeing as either imagined or real. Olsen too gets a season pass on my movie watch list. I'd say it was my second favorite performance by an actress this year, after Elle Fanning in Super 8.

The movie I most want to see next is The Artist because I really enjoyed Dujardin in the OSS 117 movies.

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