There are many ways to describe Baz Lurhmann's directing style, but "restrained" sure as hell isn't one of them. From Strictly Ballroom to Australia, each of the Aussie auteur's films embrace emotional and cinematic excess in grand, borderline ridiculous ways. That makes him an unlikely, but also inspired choice to tackle an adaptation of a Great NovelTM like F. Scott's Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, a text so revered that movie versions can become ossified by their own self-importance. That's what happened to the last Gatsby flick, the 1974 Robert Redford/Mia Farrow tour-de-boredom that was so respectful of Fitzgerald's text that it transformed his vibrant novel into a pretty, but inert soap opera.

There are many different ways to approach a man who lived as monumental a life as Abraham Lincoln. You could, for instance, focus entirely on his early years as a lawyer as John Ford did in the 1939 classic, Young Mr. Lincoln. Or you could zero in on the Civil War, with Lincoln's life taking a backseat to the fighting. Or you could even turn him into a vampire hunter, using the supernatural as a metaphor for Lincoln's desire to see every individual freed from the bonds of slavery, be they property of plantation owners or bloodsuckers. In the case of Lincoln, Steven Spielberg's oh-so-prestigious entry in the awards season sweepstakes, the director telescopes his subject's life into roughly a single month: January 1865, when a newly re-elected Lincoln used his ferocious will and political capital to ensure the passage of the 13th Amendment, which officially outlawed slavery in the United States. That's right, in a way this is a live-action, feature-length version of that old Schoolhouse Rock ditty "I'm Just a Bill" (or it's even better Simpsons parody "Amendment to Be") where viewers are invited to watch the long, contentious and often ugly process of how the proverbial political sausage gets made in Washington.

At the tail end of last summer, The Weinstein Company made a bet that adult audiences weary of sequels, comic-book movies and other blockbuster fare would turn out for a straight-up, grown-up thriller distinguished by a cast of respected character actors and a historical hook. That movie was The Debt -- which told the story of a group of retired Israeli Mossad agents who flash back to an operation from the '60s that changed all of their lives -- and it wound up doing solid business, solid enough that the Weinsteins are pulling the same late-summer counterprogramming stunt today with Lawless, a Prohibition-era crime thriller about a trio of bootlegging brothers in Virginia who refuse to bend to the new law of the land or the crooked businessmen who want in on their operation. Directed by critical darling John Hillcoat (best known for the Down Under Western The Proposition) and featuring a heavy-hitting ensemble that includes Tom Hardy, Jessica Chastain (who also appeared in The Debt), Guy Pearce, Gary Oldman and... um, Shia LaBeouf, Lawless certainly has the pedigree to be this summer's token prestige picture, but is the whole as great as the sum of its parts? I'll answer that -- and more of your burning questions -- below.

A prime example of a franchise sequel that exists purely because it can, rather than because it should, Men in Black 3 arrives in theaters feeling like a relic from a distant past when Will Smith was the biggest movie star in the world. And it's possible that he still is, in which case it's the picture that's real small. Even though it affords its lead plenty of opportunities to flash that mega-watt smile and sharp comic timing and piles effects-heavy set piece on top of effects-heavy set piece, MiB3 can't mask its fundamental pointlessness. It's so instantly forgettable that even though I saw it in the theater in all its 3D-enhanced glory, I felt as though I was watching it at home during the late-night cable run it'll receive a few years hence. You know, one of those experiences where you randomly stumble upon a sequel while surfing the movie networks and go, "Oh right -- they made a third one" before changing the channel.

Legend has it that for early test screenings of the first Star Wars movie, George Lucas substituted footage of World War II aerial dogfights in place of the not-yet-completed sequences pitting the Rebel Alliance's X-Wings against the Empire's fleet of TIE fighters. Now, three decades later, Lucas has made a full-fledged World War II movie about the Tuskegee Airmen, the celebrated squadron of African-American fighter pilots who defied the prejudice of the times and flew a number of crucial missions in the European theater of the war.

The new movie starring Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon is a romantic circus epic, three words I don't often like to say together. Like Titanic under the big top, or Larger Than Life during the Great Depression, the movie manages to combine star-crossed lovers and economic disparity with comedically unruly animals, and the end result is a sappy, clichéd, albeit very pretty, film. And since it takes place during Prohibition, everyone in the movie drinks, be it whiskey, cheap moonshine or champagne, and by the end of the movie, I was kind of jealous. Why should they get to drift through two hours of melodrama in a foggy haze while I have to sit there soberly and see every twist and turn coming a mile away? (And I hadn't even read the book.) If you want to be constantly surprised by this movie, I recommend making a drinking game out of it. Here are the players, and the rules.

Did you know that John Wilkes Booth didn't act alone? That even as he shot Abraham Lincoln, he had accomplices making their own unsuccessful strikes on the Vice President and the Secretary of State? You didn't? Well, now you do. So, unless you want to learn more about what a kangaroo court looked like in 1865, or how bitter things were between Northerners and Southerners in the dwindling days of the Civil War, there's really no other reason to see The Conspirator. Unless, of course, you need yet another object lesson about how no matter the progress we make, history tends to repeat itself.

After breaking out in Rome, Ray Stevenson played thugs in a slew of bad movies, from Punisher: War Zone to Cirque du Freak to The Book of Eli. He'll elevate his tough-guy game slightly in Thor and The Three Musketeers later this year, but anyone looking to see him step outside his goon-shaped box would do well to check out Kill the Irishman. The real-life character he plays is still basically a thug, but he's an intelligent, quirky thug with a fabulous mustache, and he holds his own against a huge cast of some of our greatest crime-movie actors. The film itself isn't great art, but it's a fun way to learn about a little-known period in our history, with a lot of explosions in it.

When two films come out on the same subject at around the same time, there's usually a clear victor. And although it came out several months ago, and very few people saw it, I have to give the "Best Romans fighting Picts north of Hadrian's Wall Movie" award to Centurion. The Neil Marshall-directed movie starred Michael Fassbender and was a tense action-thriller full of scenic highland chases. Kevin MacDonald's The Eagle is also a tense action-thriller, but it stars Channing Tatum, and while he's believable as an American soldier in... well, every movie he makes, he's less believable as the commander of a Roman legion. Not even giving all the other Romans American accents can cover up the fact that the man's not a terribly dynamic actor. That said, the movie is entertaining, and even occasionally humorous (both intentionally and unintentionally), and you'll definitely never look at Billy Elliot the same way ever again.

Today is Nicolas Cage's birthday. It's also the day the first mainstream release of 2011 comes out, which just so happens to be Cage's first attempt at playing a character who didn't live during the industrial age. Fans of Cage's famous (on-screen) freak-outs will probably cackle with glee at the thought of him throwing one in a castle courtyard (think Ray Liotta as a wizard in In the Name of the King), but I'm happy to see his overly serious delivery placed in a context where it actually makes sense, something we got to see a little bit of in last year's Sorcerer's Apprentice. Granted, serious Cage isn't as fun as manic Cage, but in Season of the Witch, he gets to act noble in a time when nobility actually meant something, and it's okay for him to act holier-than-thou when he has a big fricking cross on his chest. He probably should have done one of these movies years ago, because Season is better than a significant portion of his recent output. That's not saying much, but it certainly says something.