Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Impossible is a true-to-life account of a family’s experiences during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and it brings the natural disaster to the big screen with an astonishing visual acumen.

One of the biggest challenges facing director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) in making a screen version of Jack Kerouac’s landmark 1957 novel, On the Road, was to give the film a cinematic voice.

Michael Haneke’s Amour—“Love” in English—rewinds an unspecified amount of time from its unshakable opening. The plot is sparse, lingering on scenes from the couple’s final months together.

A foregone conclusion has never been more mysteriously rendered than in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. Like Bigelow’s Best Picture-winning The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty similarly leaves politics aside to look at the behind-the-scenes story of one person’s mission to serve their country in a most unflinching way.

The pitch must have been simple enough: cast one of America’s greatest treasures as one of America’s greatest presidents. Bill Murray plays Franklin Delano Roosevelt in this mostly lighthearted film set just before the outbreak of World War II, when the first family played host to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at their upstate New York home.

Killing Them Softly, an undercooked adaptation of a crime novel by George V. Higgins (The Friends of Eddie Coyle), is messy through and through; with such a strong cast, it’s hard to imagine how things went so wrong.

Few films in recent memory have squandered their built-in potential as much as Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchcock.

Ambivalence is rarely a response a director would hope to elicit, but that is the sum effect of Rust and Bone, Jacques Audiard’s follow-up to the sensational A Prophet. The film follows the evolving relationship of Stephanie (Marion Cotillard), an Orca whale trainer, and Ali (Bullhead‘s Matthias Schoenaerts), a woefully down-on-his-luck deadbeat dad and struggling amateur boxer.

One of the more anticipated documentaries of this season is The Central Park Five, an investigation on the wrongful conviction of five African-American and Hispanic youths for the rape and assault on a Caucasian jogger in Central Park in 1989.