A year ago I watched Affleck's "The Town" and found it to be a conceited townie fairy tale. Now, having gone back to watch "Gone Baby Gone," his directorial debut, it becomes obvious to me that the budding director is working on a townie trilogy, and not just a three-part celebration of working class Boston, but an oeuvre of far-fetchedness. "Gone Baby Gone" is so patently absurd in its supermarket novella drama, its unlikely couples' detective agency, its morally suspicious-but-above reproach police, and its groaningly moralistic protect-the-innocents plot that it amounts to a train wreck of self-importance. Just terrible.

Starts with a riveting, verité-style interview with a preternaturally composed Diane Lane, playing a meagerly talented teen orphan about to embark on a career as a punk musician. In these first few moments, the bar is set so high that the rest of the movie can hardly hope to live up to expectations, but a ham-fisted, didactic script doesn't help in the least. Much less interesting as a watchable movie than as a time capsule from an era when the potential of punk rock still seemed vast enough to win hearts and minds even in the American Midwest. Which, in retrospect, seems hilarious.

Has there ever been a movie about an adolescent teenage girl assassin written or even directed by a woman? Probably not, as the form is inherently exploitive in a way that interests only male filmmakers, no matter how much artistry they may try to bring to the affair. This is the trap that befalls director Joe Wright, who tries to stylize his way out of the exploitation gutter, to no avail. His stylization is unremarkable, but Wright's cause is not helped by misfiring performances by Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett, both of whom should have known better. The only thing Wright does right is understand that a camera can linger on Saoirse Ronan without complaint. But it's just that subdued prurience of an adult male filmmaker poring over Ronan's exquisite, underaged face, or sitting back wistfully to watch as she brings violence to males around her, that makes "Hanna" so lamentably creepy.

A somewhat hokey face-off between Burt Lancaster, just released after fourteen years in jail, and Kirk Douglas, his former partner who spent the intervening years building a reputable and successful night club. Lancaster comes looking for his promised share of the wealth, but of course Douglas double-crosses him, setting up a collision between old ways and new ways. The script dodgily implies a equivalency between old school gangsterism and the moral high ground, but it also winds more interestingly than is to be expected. Lancaster's ability to communicate magnetism through bodily hurt, and Douglas' unabashed charm and cunning almost fully redeem weak performances from the rest of the cast.

Director Hubert Cornfield's tale of a train robbery and the laborious and ill-fated getaway that follows is full of working class gloom, even if the backgrounds of its characters are little discussed. Like doomed protagonists in many films noir, the thieves at the heart of this movie are just desperate for a break, but Cornfield is refreshingly unsentimental about them, making their plight all the more real. He lets the oppressive score do a tremendous amount of the storytelling, and keeps the dialogue spare, almost minimal. Surprisingly effective.

Zoe Saldana is the latest in Luc Besson's long string of pixie-sized lethal females. In the past, when these creations have been interesting, it has only been through the fortune of having just enough inventiveness -- whether in the script, performance or direction -- to nudge them past tiresome. No such cleverness is on display here, as the entire production is hackneyed and unmoving. Terrible.

In many overt ways, a valentine to the era of silent film. Director Michel Hazanavicius wisely trades on leading man Jean Dujardin's considerable facility for conveying narrative through expression, though both let the performance veer too close to simple mugging. What grates the most about the movie though isn't its cloying adorability so much as its unfaithfulness to the tropes of silent films. The camera shots are agile in a way that true silent movies were not, and the overall effect feels quite false, more like a movie without a vocal track than a true silent film.

A gorgeously packaged, delicately acted ball of fluff. Actress Tilda Swinton acts her heart out in trying to elevate a plot that amounts to little more than a Harlequin romance novel, and director Luca Guadagnino employs his considerable directorial talents to add a level of surprise and invention to the tactical construction of many scenes. But the foundation is so weak that the result is meaningless.

A breathless puzzle of a movie in which the intricate plot adamantly refuses to hold the user's hand. The narrative strokes are almost gestural in their minimalism, yet what they sketch out is rich. The experience that approximates the fictitious mole hunt at the center of the movie -- as the characters try to figure things out, so does the audience. Wonderful filmmaking.

Sofia Coppola has been wandering through various milieux to isolate and romanticize the impassive comfort of detachment for some time, but she finally comes home to its root in this movie of a celebrity adrift amidst the material excess and emotional paucity of his own life. The result is draining and often tiresome, but she does manage to find a quiet lyricism in it by the end, rendering it not complete unworthwhile. This ability to pull out some value at the end of a shakily rendered non-story is also highly typical of her work to date: she tells microscopic tales of limited ambition, but she tells them well.