If your goal is to make a contemporary version of Roman Polanski's Chinatown, complete with an anti-heroic private eye and a shady land-grab deal overseen by corrupt politicians and businessmen, you'd best bring your A-game. It's too bad then, that the creative forces behind Broken City -- including director Allen Hughes, screenwriter Brian Tucker and star Mark Wahlberg -- only came to play with their B-game. But hey, even second-string teams can eke out a victory now and then and Broken City turns out to be a solid, if unexceptional, urban crime yarn that updates the Chinatown template from 1930s Los Angeles for 2010s New York, although the movie's version of the Big Apple feels a heck of a lot closer to the '90s than today.

With Mama, horror movie maestro Guillermo del Toro continues to give back to his favorite genre, using his significant influence within the film industry to give new directors the opportunity to freak audiences out. Mama, the feature filmmaking debut of Spanish director Andrés Muschietti, is the third scary movie to be released under the "Guillermo del Toro Presents" banner after 2007's The Orphanage and 2010's Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. It's also the first horror movie for dramatic heavyweight (and current Best Actress Oscar nominee) Jessica Chastain, who gets a Goth makeover to play the edgy rocker chick-turned-reluctant guardian of two little girls recently returned to civilization after five years spent living like animals in a cabin in the woods, with only the ghost of a long-dead mental patient for company. Even if del Toro's name by itself is enough to lure you into the theater, here are five additional things you should know about Mama:

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.