A period comedy about the invention of the vibrator? What will those Brits think of next?

There's a moment early on in The Raven that hints at the fun slice of historical pulp fiction that the film might have been.

After two previous Oscar nominations, former Dawson's Creek star-turned-in-demand-Hollywood-actress Michelle Williams looks set to three-peat, playing iconic screen legend Marilyn Monroe in the new film, My Week With Marilyn. Adapted from a memoir by Colin Clark, the film takes viewers behind the scenes on the ill-fated 1957 British film The Prince and the Showgirl, which co-starred Monroe and Laurence Olivier (played by Kenneth Branagh here). The two repeatedly clashed during the shoot and Monroe sought solace by briefly befriending Clark (Eddie Redmayne), then a young production assistant. My Week With Marilyn director Simon Curtis spoke with us about Williams' take on Marilyn and why The Prince and the Showgirl probably should never have been made.

The release of a Clint Eastwood-directed Oscar hopeful has come to be one of the hallmarks of the holiday season, right up there with Black Friday sales, Christmas decorations and yet another live-action Chipmunks sequel. Since 2003's Mystic River, the iconic actor/filmmaker has released at least one prestige picture (and sometimes two) almost every year at around this time looking for box-office success and awards love. Sometimes it works (Million Dollar Baby, Letters From Iwo Jima) and other times, it doesn't (Flags of our Fathers, Hereafter). Based on the underwhelming reviews and grosses of his latest film, J. Edgar, an expansive biopic of the legendary FBI director written by Oscar-winning Milk scribe Dustin Lance Black and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover, this is shaping up to be one of his off years.

On principle, when a movie ends I always stay 'til after the credits roll and the theater turns the lights back on. Honestly, I'm kind of surprised more people don't and that this is something I even need to address. More often than not, I've seen snippets of bonus features that give me some sense that I didn't totally waste my time -- the stinger at the end of Rise of the Planet of the Apes was well worth the wait.

The new political drama The Ides of March, directed, co-written and starring George Clooney, is technically based on Beau Willimon's 2008 play, Farragut North, but you'd be forgiven for thinking that it's more of a ripped-from-the-headlines roman à clef. Almost everything about this moderately involving, but ultimately underwhelming film -- from the characters to the central story arc (which follows a presidential aspirant whose campaign is almost derailed by a sex scandal) -- seems to be modeled after real-life situations and individuals. That feeling is further driven home by the occasional appearance of recognizable figures like Charlie Rose and Rachel Maddow playing themselves in small cameos.

Back in the early '00s, Will Reiser was a twentysomething associate producer on the much buzzed-about HBO series Da Ali G Show, where he met and befriended then-newcomers Seth Rogen and his writing partner, Evan Goldberg. It was the beginning of one of those classic "rise up the Hollywood food chain" stories, until Reiser's momentum was derailed by an unexpected cancer diagnosis. To complicate matters further, the affected tumor was located on his spine and the risky surgical procedure that was required to remove it would be followed by a lengthy (and painful) recovery period. Reiser went through the diagnosis, the surgery and the recovery and now he's turned his cancer story into a semi-autobiographical feature film, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing his onscreen alter ego and Rogen as a character that's a thinly-veiled version of... Seth Rogen.

Did I want to be the person who hated the movie that was based on the true story of Sam Childers, a former drug-addicted criminal who turned from bad-ass "hillbilly" (his word, not mine) to African child-saving martyr? No. Was I that jerk who left the theater groaning instead of giving a standing ovation? You betcha. I want to be clear that every awful thing I'm going to say about this movie has nothing to do with Childers as a person, because I'm certainly not writing this from my self-built orphanage in Africa. I'm not really here to criticize the man's Machiavellian philosophy about whether or not extreme violence is ever justified -- not today, anyways. So when I say Childers from now on, it will be referring to the actor who portrayed him in Machine Gun Preacher, Gerard Butler, who, given the role of playing an extremely angry man with a questionable sense of right and wrong, did a fine job. The movie's content, however, made me feel compelled to write a big WARNING label for anyone interested in this film who fits into the following categories:

One of the perils that comes with this gig is that there are times where I walk into a theater armed with too much knowledge about what went down behind-the-scenes on the movie I'm about to see. Take Moneyball, for instance. This adaptation of Michael Lewis' best-selling baseball book -- which covered a season in the life (specifically the 2002 season) of the Oakland A's and their eccentric, wily GM Billy Beane -- has been on my radar since 2008, when one of my favorite directors, Steven Soderbergh, came onboard to shepherd the project to the big screen. As is often the case with Soderbergh, he had developed a fascinating angle he intended to bring to the proceedings, embellishing the central narrative with documentary segments featuring real-life ballplayers and casting actual members of that 2002 A's squad (including David Justice and Scott Hatteberg) as themselves in the dramatic scenes. This approach excited me, but unnerved the studio, which shut down the film just as shooting was going to start in earnest. Soderbergh quickly departed the project and Capote director Bennett Miller was eventually recruited to replace him.