Greedy Lying Bastards is a documentary that takes on two problems — the pernicious impact of industry on the environment and the effect of those changes on communities and the even more pressing problem of the pernicious impact of a small group of corporate executives on politicians and the laws they enact and enforce.

A butler who sacrificed body and soul to service in the years leading up to World War II realizes too late how misguided his loyalty was to his lordly employer.

There have been many films about the Allied reconstruction of West Germany after World War II. There have been none about the American reconstruction of Japan after the Japanese surrender in 1945.

Steven Woloshen is a pioneer of camera-less animation, which includes painting, scratching and drawing directly on film. Based in Montreal, he has been making films since the 1970s, specializing in 16mm film production while studying at Concordia University.

There are those who will dismiss Les Misérables as too sentimental, populist and melodramatic to qualify as true art. I reply with a hearty yes!, it is certainly all of those things — in the best possible ways.

Take a good look at the scene in Zero Dark Thirty where Jessica Chastain’s Maya stands watching the all-male Navy SEALS fly off to take down Osama bin Laden.

François Mauriac’s legendary 1927 novel of French provincial life has been gloriously brought to the screen by the inestimable Claude Miller, who passed away shortly after completing the film. Sumptously photographed to capture the full beauty of the pine-forested Landes area in southwest France, Thérèse Desqueyroux is a beautifully conceived costume melodrama of exquisite taste.

Rambling, episodic, aimless, vague. You can throw all of these words at Walter Salles’s On The Road. They might sound like criticisms, but they are the point. The movie can’t help but ramble if it wants to honour the whole ethos of Jack Kerouac’s 1957 Beatnik travelogue, but it isn’t shy about weighing up his achievement, either.

All In Good Time follows the tradition of plain, old-fashioned, knowingly warm-hearted British films that appeal to our sense of community and stir our feelings for little people. The Full Monty, East Is East, Calendar Girls and Made In Dagenham all achieved their success through juxtapositions: of comedy and drama, tears and laughter, setbacks and eventual triumph.

By Peter Travers December 13, 2012