“Cloud Atlas” is a film for a particular type of moviegoer: the sort who like to carefully deconstruct a picture, laboring over the meaning of each moment. Although that may sound like work, the effort is rewarded because “Cloud Atlas” is littered with symbolism and ideas that go largely undiscovered after a single viewing. The movie not only tells six individual tales, it tells them using the same actors. 

“Jack Reacher” has a lot of things going for it, but a nuanced script and reasonable character development aren’t among them. The movie – based on the Lee Child novel “One Shot” – revolves around its title character, a former military police officer who plays by his own rules. Set in Pittsburgh, the film starts with a mass shooting where a trained sniper methodically assassinates five people, then drives away unnoticed. 

In Brooklyn, there is a large support system for independent film. Marco Ursino started the Brooklyn Film Festival (BFF) 16 years ago, and has owned and operated indieScreen in Williamsburg with his wife, Susan Mackell, since 2009. He remembers the first BFF’s slogan: ‘An Invitation to Cross the Bridge.’ “Now it’s the most normal thing,” he said. “Williamsburg has been the flag of progress. All that is alternative comes from here.”

Although Jennifer Lawrence’s best actress Oscar was the only honor  “Silver Linings Playbook” pulled down at the most recent Academy Awards celebration, its impact was greater than that single award indicates. That’s because the film went into Oscar night with eight total nominations, including one for best picture. The movie also received a best director nod for David O. Russell. 

It’s a number that has been sung by many diverse artists: Elvis and Bob Dylan, Connie Francis, Harry Belafonte, Chubby Checker, Allan Sherman, Josephine Baker, Regina Spektor, Dick Dale, Glen Campbell and countless others. Harry Belafonte glorified it. Campbell viewed it as an essential tool to earn extra money playing the wedding and bar mitzvah circuit when he first arrived in Los Angeles. Dylan’s version, scholar and music critic Josh Kun explains in the documentary, “is an embrace and a refusal. It’s the smartest song about Jewish identity I’ve ever heard and it only lasts 30 seconds.” Sherman mocked it as he celebrated it, singing “Harvey and Sheila.”

But when did filmmaking shift from point A to point B: from the spectacle of trick representation to the immersive art of narrative storytelling? The metaphor of “birth” -- the birth of cinema as a narrative art -- has often been located at a dubious conjunction with D.W. Griffith’s infamous adaptation of the The Clansman and The Leopard’s Spots (novels by Thomas Dixon), eponymously titled The Birth of a Nation (1915). 

During movie awards season, “The Impossible” received most of its accolades thanks to the remarkable lead performance of actress Naomi Watts. As good as she is, focusing on such a singular component of the film is unfair because it is great in so many respects.  The feature, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, was inspired by the real-life survival story of a family caught in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.