I hadn’t much idea what I was in for with 1953’s Stalag 17. I supposed I imagined something dreary and earnest — I certainly wasn’t prepared for funny. But what else could I have expected, in retrospect, from the film that had to be the inspiration for the TV series Hogan’s Heroes.

Wallace and Gromit are the creations of British animator Nick Park, who has turned his hapless claymation characters into figures of cult adoration, seemingly without much effort on his own part. Clever yet unassuming, simple enough for kids to enjoy but steeped in a deep, rich knowledge and love of classic film that tickles adults, the three films starring Wallace and Gromit are among the finest and most fun animated shorts ever made.

Deep Blue Sea is not Jurassic Park. Of course it isn’t. This one is about sharks, not dinosaurs. Any idiot could see the difference.

Shaft smells like a franchise from the moment the lights go down, with a credits sequence ready-made for recycling and a theme song you can already sing along with. Cool vibes undulate off the screen, and you think: This is it. This is the new Bond. We are going to drown in cool every other summer for the next decade. Sam Jackson rocks!

Fuckhead (Billy Crudup: Waking the Dead) more than shows he deserves this disparaging nickname in Alison Maclean’s joyless and empty Jesus’ Son. An unemployed drifter moping around Iowa City in the early 1970s, FH keeps company with friends he hates and a new girlfriend, Michelle (Samantha Morton), who gets a kick out of living in … more…

Music, sex, nature, romance! Oh, the sweet mysteries of life young Moncho (Manuel Lozano) will find himself awakening to in the summer of 1936. A sweet-faced little boy with a shy smile, so delicate and sensitive his mother calls him her “sparrow,” Moncho is taken under the wing of his gentle and wise schoolteacher, Don … more…

In the cinematic ranking of cool criminals, those who boost classic, collectible cars come in somewhere between jewel thieves and gentleman cat burglars — pretty high up, in other words. The lure of the outlaw, the glamour and sex appeal of nonviolent criminals… does GONE IN 60 SECONDS exude any of this? Nope. Not an ounce. And I thought Mission: Impossible 2 was boring.

But I should have known to trust Branagh, for whom Shakespeare’s works have always been alive and real and relevant: his recent Hamlet is the best filmed version of that oft-produced play, and I’ve rarely seen a movie of any stripe as joyous as his Much Ado About Nothing. And now, I could just kiss him for giving us the exuberant, inspired Love’s Labour’s Lost. This is a wonderful film, an absolute delight.

All politics is local, someone once said, which means that the political, essentially, is personal. Sunshine — a sweeping, semi-autobiographical film from Academy Award-winning director Istvan Szabo — strives to capture the tumultuous political upheaval of the first half of the twentieth century within the story of three generations of a single Budapest family. Does it succeed in this ambitious attempt? Yes… and no.