Towering beanstalks? Rampaging giants? Nicholas Hoult staring slack-jawed at the sky? We know you've probably got a ton of burning questions about Bryan Singer's fairy-tale inspired blockbuster, Jack the Giant Slayer and we're here with the answers.

Forget the Schwarzenegger dud The Last Stand; the most authentic, ridiculous and overall entertaining '80s action movie throwback in theaters right now is Parker, the Taylor Hackford-directed, Jason Statham-starring big-screen version of the crime novel anti-hero created by Richard Stark (a.k.a. Donald E. Westlake). Although the character has been brought to the screen several times before -- including the 1967 classic Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin, and the compromised 1999 Mel Gibson-led Payback -- this is the first film that has been able to legally use the Parker name. And unlike those movies, it's not an adaptation of Parker's 1962 debut The Hunter, but rather a more recent installment, 2000's Flashfire (although the plot, once again, involves the character being betrayed by his fellow crooks and then embarking on a mission of revenge). But even though it takes place in the period of iPhones and Google, Hackford is very much working in the tradition of seedy Reagan-era crime pictures like John Frankenheimer's 52 Pick-Up and William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A.. Here are five ways in which the mostly satisfying Parker clearly loves the '80s.

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.

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.

So far Alfred Hitchcock biopics are batting 0-for-2 this year, with Fox Searchlight's anemic Hitchcock opening in limited theatrical release on the heels of HBO's crummy The Girl. Thanks largely to its skilled ensemble cast -- including Anthony Hopkins as Hitch, Helen Mirren as his wife Alma and Toni Collette as his long-suffering assistant, among others -- this film isn't quite as unpleasant and misguided as its small-screen predecessor, which strained to turn the Master of Suspense into one of the obsessive creeps that populated his movies. Hitchcock, which was directed by Sacha Gervasi (the guy who made that Anvil documentary a few years back), also deserves credit for paying more attention to its subject's formidable skills as a filmmaker, whereas The Girl seemed inordinately interested in his clumsy stalking of his leading ladies. Indeed, the narrative thrust of the movie concerns Hitchcock's own fears and doubts about his career as he seeks to reinvent himself in an industry that prefers the status quo. In a way, Hitchcock aspires to be another 8½ -- a self-aware portrait of an artist at a crossroads, unsure of which road to take next.

Full disclosure: I haven't read the best-selling, Oprah-approved Yann Martel novel that serves as the basis for Ang Lee's new 3D spectacle, Life of Pi, which tells the tale of a shipwrecked boy's journey across the Pacific Ocean on a small lifeboat he shares with an honest-to-God tiger. Now, I don't say this to suggest that you need to rush out and pick up the book in advance of seeing the film. This is just to establish why I was completely unprepared for the ending of the movie, which contains a metaphor-rich twist that took what had been up to that point a visually lovely, but somewhat dramatically inert fantasy-tinged aquatic adventure and made it something far more complex and interesting. Because the final 15 minutes so completely altered my view of what had come before, I can't in good faith discuss my reaction to Life of Pi without mentioning some crucial details about the conclusion. So if you, like me, haven't read the book and want to remain in blissful ignorance, here's a Spoiler Warning.

As with any new cinematic adaptation of a frequently-filmed Great Novel, the biggest challenge facing the makers of Anna Karenina -- the umpteenth film to be derived from Leo Tolstoy's enduring 19th century romance -- is convincing moviegoers that they really need to see the same story told again. Director Joe Wright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard's method of persuasion is to inject a surfeit of audacious theatricality into a novel that modern audiences might consider stodgy and old-fashioned (wrongly, of course, but that's a separate issue). In their conceit, the woeful tale of the titular Russian socialite (played by Keira Knightley, in her third collaboration with Wright) plays out within the confines of a period-appropriate theater, which constantly morphs and changes to become its own world. The motivating idea seems to be that since Anna's tragic story unfolds on a very public stage, the other characters function as both players in -- and spectators to -- her downfall. It's an intriguing approach that's executed with impressive showmanship, but it also inadvertently misses what's at the core of the book: passion.

Eighteen years and five films into his career, writer/director David O. Russell has yet to make a bad movie, but in the first 15 minutes of his sixth completed feature Silver Linings Playbook (which is based on the book by Matthew Quick), he comes pretty damn close. The film begins with the not-so-triumphant homecoming of Pat Solatano (Bradley Cooper), a Philly-based high-school history teacher recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder. For the past eight months, Pat's been cooling his heels in an institution, where he was sentenced after beating the guy his wife was sleeping with to a pulp. Convinced that being in familiar surroundings would aid in his recovery, his mother Delores (Jacki Weaver) secures his release under the proviso that he'll move back in with her and his father Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro). It's a nice thought, but the Solatano household isn't what you'd call a stress-free atmosphere; Dad's got a gambling habit (and a touch of OCD) while Mom is mostly an enabler. Both also have a penchant for bellowing at the top of their lungs, a trait that their son shares. Indeed, the opening act of Silver Linings Playbook is filled with so much yelling and screaming and carrying-on, it's like being trapped at a particularly noxious Thanksgiving dinner... the kind that makes the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade seem like a model of peace and quiet.

Too many cinematic adaptations of popular novels make the mistake of trying to replicate the book almost word-for-word onscreen, either due to a failure of imagination on behalf of the filmmakers or out of fear that story's fans will reject even the slightest change. (A fear that's not entirely off-base, by the way; for example, a sizeable chunk of Harry Potter fans still haven't forgiven Alfonso Cuarón for the liberties he took in the film version of The Prisoner of Azkaban.) But you can't accuse the formidable filmmaking trio of Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski of playing it safe with their adaptation of David Mitchell's gem of a novel, Cloud Atlas. While the movie is recognizably the book that Mitchell wrote, the writer/directors have shaped and molded the text in a way that reflects their own specific interests and sensibilities. Both the film's greatest strength -- as well as, ultimately, one of its weaknesses -- is that it's a true act of interpretation, not simply recitation.

Nicole Kidman gets an extreme makeover in the ridiculous potboiler The Paperboy. Also, our takes on Butter, The Oranges and Wuthering Heights.