There’s a familiarity about Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere that’s both intoxicating and exhausting.

All of Darren Aronofsky’s films stem from singular obsessions. Be it Pi, with math as an apocryphal glimpse into transcendence; Requiem for a Dream, in its junkie’s quixotic self-delusion; or The Wrestler, with the pursuit of fleeting fame for some divine redemption, the protagonists in Aronofsky’s films sacrifice everything for the single-minded pursuit of their objectives. Black Swan is no exception

A biopic that chronicles the family life of John Lennon during his troubled teen years, Nowhere Boy arrives in the U.S. on the heels of Kick-Ass, another film starring Aaron Johnson in a lead role. If Johnson was anonymously forgettable in Kick-Ass, he is a revelation here, portraying the young Lennon as a witty-but-unsophisticated, brash-but-insecure young artist.

There’s an almost overwhelming inclination to pit one’s appreciation for this remake against the merits of the original Swedish film, Let the Right One In, but the truth is that the two films are so similar that any comparison will simply boil down to a matter of preference.

The directorial debut of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jack Goes Boating centers around the socially awkward Jack, a limo driver played by Hoffman who seems to suffer from a borderline case of Asperger syndrome, and his courtship with the equally quirky Connie, played by Amy Ryan (The Wire, The Office).

In this film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s (The Remains of the Day) celebrated novel, Carey Mulligan plays Kathy, an intuitive but inhibited English boarding school girl who has grown up alongside her two closest friends, Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley). On a fateful afternoon, the children learn the shared secret to their purpose at the school, and this complicates a love struggle among the three friends as they mature.

If you buy into directors Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost’s claim that Catfish began as a document of the Facebook friendship between New York City photographer Yaniv “Nēv” Schulman (Ariel’s brother) and Abby, an eight-year-old painter who found inspiration in Nēv’s ballet photos, then you’re in for a fascinating, wildly entertaining journey through today’s tangled web of social networking and Internet sharing.

A lot of hay is being made over whether or not Joaquin Phoenix really did have a mental breakdown, retire from acting, and attempt a new career as a rapper. On the surface, I’m Still Here(directed by Casey Affleck) attempts to chronicle Phoenix’s transition from clean-cut Hollywood pretty boy to a bearded hipster hip-hop artist.

Get Low features an unusually dramatic opening scene: As a fire in a Southern country home reaches flashpoint, a figure stumbles out of a second-story window and flees into the shroud of night, his clothes flaming like an afterburner.