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.

Stories about people overcoming obstacles are uplifting and inspirational and all that. A new film on people with disabilities aims higher: It’s designed to start a movement.

The fourth film in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn: Part 1 reveals a flash or two of real filmmaking (mostly in a suggestively grotesque birthing sequence), enough to save it from pure lousiness. But a significant number of its 117 minutes do seem like hours, and whenever certain actors take the lead and set the pace of the dialogue, time itself begins to crawl backward and the breaking dawn begins to feel like yesterday’s breaking dawn, or last Tuesday’s. How did this happen?

I admired much of the original Happy Feet (2006), but five years later, I’m still considering suing its makers for emotional distress. Certainly the most sadistic aspects of its storyline make it a film one doesn’t easily revisit, either for me or my son.

Operatic characters are larger than life. Especially when projected on a 20-foot tall movie screen. And today, thanks to the development of digital sound and high-definition video, more and more people experience opera on the big screen.

Forget Jack and Jill and the fact that Adam Sandler plays them both and not particularly well in his new “twins” comedy. Al Pacino is almost reason enough to see it, all by his bigger-than-life self.

Forty-five minutes or so into Tower Heist, the question arises: Is this movie with the title of purest generica — was “Stealing Money” taken? — truly good, or simply less bad than most of what director Brett Ratner has done previously?

Here, the boy-men — now 30-ish menboys, dealing with adult concerns and relationships, in addition to their perpetual White Castle jones — hunt down a Christmas tree, mix it up with Ukrainian gangsters, briefly turn into Claymation-type animated versions of themselves, consort with virgins and meet Santa.

Johnny Depp was a pal of the late Hunter S. Thompson, and the frustrating but thickly atmospheric film version of Thompson’s early novel The Rum Diary finds Depp and writer/director Bruce Robinson paying tribute to the author, freelance gonzo journalist, career substance ingester and lifelong alcohol sponge. The undertaking was a labor of love. The results are more a labor of “like, in parts,” but they certainly don’t resemble anything else on screen at the moment.

Fishbone is one of those bands that doesn’t belong to one particular genre, prompting critics and listeners to over-hyphenate when describing the band. Ska, punk, metal, reggae and funk all found their way into the Fishbone stew, which made the group members somewhat outsiders as the band paid its dues in South Central Los Angeles as hip-hop was becoming a cultural phenomenon. "Everyday Sunshine" tells the sometimes tragic, often-funny story of Fishbone, a band from Los Angeles that influenced many, yet never found a way to mainstream success.