The easiest way to ease into a discussion of Gangster Squad, the fedora-era set, City of Angels-based cops vs. crooks action movie from Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer, is to describe what the movie is not. For starters, it's not a serious take on old-school film noir in the tradition of Chinatown and L.A. Confidential. Neither is it a twisty detective story like The Big Sleep or square-jawed, no-nonsense crime picture like The Public Enemy. It's also not a richly stylized comic book take on the period like Dick Tracy. And it's definitely not a successful piece of pop art mythmaking like the film it most clearly aspires to be, Brian De Palma's The Untouchables. Above all, in case you couldn't tell already, it's also not a good movie.

Glee's resident nice kid gets darker in the indie comedy Struck By Lightning. Also, our takes on Quartet, Fairhaven and The Baytown Outlaws.

Matt Damon gets a crash course in the dangers of fracking in Promised Land. Also, read our reviews of Amour and West of Memphis.

I'm finding lately that I enjoy hearing Quentin Tarantino talk about his movies more than I enjoy actually watching them. It wasn't always this way, of course. Like many movie geeks who came of age in the '90s, I had my fragile little mind rocked by the one-two punch of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and still consider Jackie Brown one of that decade's finest achievements and Tarantino's masterwork.

Two pop culture artifacts from the '50s and '60s serve as the jumping off point for a pair of low-budget dramas that are slipping into theaters this holiday weekend amidst more high-profile fare. On the Road is the long-in-the-works movie version of the seminal Jack Kerouac novel of the same name, the book that has launched a thousand soul-searching road trips in the five decades since its publication in 1957. Set a mere seven years after Kerouac's Beat Generation anthem hit shelves, Not Fade Away -- the feature film debut of The Sopranos mastermind David Chase and the first thing he's made since that show went off the air five years ago -- begins with the arrival of the British Invasion on these shores and the immediate impact groups like The Beatles, The Yardbirds and, particularly, The Rolling Stones has on the life of a suburban Jersey boy, modeled loosely after Chase himself. While both films do a fine job recreating their respective eras, only one really gets past the period trappings and tells a universal story that will resonate equally with viewers who were alive at the time, as well as their descendants.

For Drama Club nerds of a certain age, Les Misérables -- which premiered in London in 1985 and Broadway the year after that -- was likely a formative theatergoing experience, a mega-musical that married soaring anthems with elaborate stagecraft, giving it a grand sense of scale that blew the roof off the theater. You didn't just watch Les Miz... you became part of its world. In retrospect, it's easy to slam the musical for helping to launch the still-ongoing era of Blockbuster Theater, where budget-swollen shows frequently put more effort into the spectacle than the songs and story (looking at you, Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark). But almost three decades on, Les Misérables, adapted from Victor Hugo's sprawling 19th-century tome, remains a case where all of the elements are in harmony with each other. On their own, songs like "Who Am I?", "Stars" and "One Day More" are stirring; when paired with the revolving turntable set, the intricate lighting design and the building of the barricade, they become transcendent.

Probably the biggest question facing the new Tom Cruise action movie Jack Reacher is why Paramount decided to release it smack-dab in the middle of the busiest holiday movie season in recent memory, where it's likely to be buried underneath the avalanche caused by the quintuple threat of Les Misérables, Django Unchained, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Monsters Inc. 3D and that Twilight movie that refuses to die. Sure, the fourth Mission: Impossible installment performed above expectations when it was released last year around this time, but that was an established franchise for Cruise and further benefitted from being a light-hearted, spectacle-driven blockbuster romp. Jack Reacher represents something a little different and darker for the star, whose name above the title is no longer enough to guarantee either massive success or a quality movie. (Laugh if you must, but back in his '80s heyday, Cruise rarely bet on the wrong horse. And don't try throwing Cocktail at me. That movie is and always will be awesome.) So I don't have a good answer for why the studio decided to make this their holiday tentpole release. I can, however, respond to some of the other burning questions you probably have about Jack Reacher.

Judd Apatow's newest comedy This Is 40 is billing itself as the "sort-of sequel to Knocked Up," which is technically true in that the film does feature Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann (the real-life Mrs. Apatow) reprising their roles as married couple Pete and Debbie from Apatow's 2007 mega-hit. But in spirit, This Is 40 is actually a sort-of sequel to the second half of the writer/director's more divisive 2009 effort, Funny People. That movie marked a notable transition for Apatow, with the first hour-and-change following the same kind of high-concept comic premise that fueled his previous movies. i.e. "What if a 40 year old virgin finally found a girlfriend?" or "What if a total slob knocked up a total hottie after a one night stand?" In the case of Funny People, the initial hook was "What if a major movie star discovered he was dying?" and Apatow explored that scenario with the same raunchy, but warm-hearted (not to mention, celebrity cameo-filled) sense of humor that had propelled him to the throne as Hollywood's reigning King of Comedy.

Viewed purely as a ripped-from-the-headlines survival story, Spanish director J.A. Bayona's new film The Impossible is an often harrowing experience, depicting the devastation caused by the Indian Ocean tsunami that engulfed South Asia in December 2004 through the eyes of one family, who are left separated in its wake. On holiday in Thailand when the tidal wave sweeps through, British couple Maria (Naomi Watts) and Henry (Ewan McGregor) and their three adorable boys -- who are, in order of age, Lucas (Tom Holland), Simon (Oaklee Pendergast) and Thomas (Samuel Joslin) -- abruptly go from lounging about the pool at their high-end resort to fighting for their lives as the current rockets them along. When they're finally becalmed, Maria and Lucas are miles from the hotel, while Henry, Simon and Thomas manage to find safe harbor closer by, and each group believes that the other is likely dead. Henry refuses to abandon all hope, however, and goes hunting for his wife and eldest son at the same time that Lucas is bringing his severely wounded mom to an overcrowded hospital where she joins the ranks of the hundreds and hundreds of people in immediate need of medical attention. Will her husband find her? And, if he does, will she still be alive?

Let's make this clear right from the jump: The Guilt Trip is not a good movie, at least not in the "Oh my god, what did I just see -- I want to see it again right now" sense of the term. But it's perfectly passable in the "Hey, it's better than surgery!" spirit of holiday filmgoing. (For an example of a movie where surgery would be the preferable option, see -- or better yet, don't -- Billy Crystal in Parental Guidance.) Directed by Anne Fletcher, who specializes in entirely disposable, but not completely unenjoyable schlock like 27 Dresses and The Proposal, The Guilt Trip is a mother/son road comedy starring Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen as a matriarch and child, respectively, that meanders merrily along for 95 pain-free (and, honestly, mostly laugh-free) minutes before arriving at its entirely predictable destination. En route, however, the film makes a few detours and pit stops that actually qualify as entertainment. Here are the guiltiest pleasures of The Guilt Trip: