Directed by Steven Spielberg, a longtime fan of the source material, The Adventures of Tintin begins with a gorgeous animated credit sequence, deftly incorporating bits of the narrative about to unfold. It’s as nifty as the overture in Spielberg’s earlier Catch Me If You Can, both scored, with a glancing touch, by his longtime mood generator, composer John Williams. It’s always gratifying to hear what Williams can do when he’s not in attack mode.

Actors so rarely get paid to sit still. This week at the movies, as Tom Cruise is on Imax screens playing a frantic, hamster-like intelligence gatherer in the new Mission: Impossible movie, we have also a superb adaptation of the John le Carre spy novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

With Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol, director Brad Bird makes his live-action feature debut, having made a name for himself and a few hundred million for Disney/Pixar with The Incredibles and one of the freshest comedies of the last few years, Ratatouille. It’s obvious but probably needs restating: Live action is a different beast from animation.

In a world where the Adam Sandler fiasco Jack and Jill makes $68 million at the box office, it’s easy to forget that movies are pretty much magic. But that’s the dominant theme of a new documentary coming to Boedecker Theater Dec. 26 to Dec. 31: the magical sense of childlike wonder that cinema can evoke.

It´s not easy being mean, as Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody’s latest project, Young Adult — directed by her Juno collaborator, Jason Reitman — goes about illustrating with an intriguing, unsettled blend of pity and pitilessness.

Mildly funny adventures in extreme baby-sitting, director David Gordon Green’s The Sitter finds its emblematic moment in the scene of Sam Rockwell, playing a Brooklyn drug dealer, joking around and then suddenly blasting one of his minions in the foot in a realistically painful way. That’s Green for you. He’s the man behind Pineapple Express. Hahahahaha and suddenly there’s blood on the floor.

In 1956, not long after she married Death of a Salesman playwright Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe made a movie with director and star Laurence Olivier at England’s Pinewood Studios. The film, The Prince and the Showgirl, came from Terence Rattigan’s drawing-room comedy The Sleeping Prince, which Olivier had performed on the London stage opposite his wife, Vivien Leigh.

Five years ago, the Bristol, England-based Aardman animation folks — who created the stop-motion legends Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep and therefore are eligible for sainthood — made the digitally animated British/American co-production Flushed Away. Jam-packed with peril, if not with charm, the film had both eyes on a crossover American audience that never materialized.

A frisky new film showcasing some old pals made out of felt, charm and some kind of genius, the Disney release The Muppets overcomes a jaded streak reflecting its makers’ nervousness about selling Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear and the gang to an audience unfamiliar with Sesame Street (a Muppets chapter conspicuously left out of Disney’s production notes) or The Muppet Show or the best of the earlier featurelength films, The Great Muppet Caper being my favorite. Hence, The Muppets deploys a bit of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and a string of ’80s jokes about Molly Ringwald and Benson.

Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is a scruffy orphan who lives in forgotten spaces hidden in the walls of Gare Montparnasse, a bustling train station located in the center of Paris. It’s 1931 and memories of The Great War are fresh, even as everyone tries to resume their normal lives.