For all The Counselor‘s flaws, at least Ridley Scott’s latest isn’t boring.

Terence Malick’s latest asks big questions, but it drowns in the muddy waters of his own unquestioned aestheticism.

Each frame of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest, Biutiful, is a lovingly composed photograph. Every word is chosen carefully. Each performance is measured and full of resonance, particularly Javier Bardem. He effectively conveys the mood of a man carrying the weight of not one, but two worlds on his shoulders, with a gaze even deeper than his voice. On the surface, Iñárritu looks to have done everything right. The only problem: all that useless beauty and depth of emotion floats aimlessly in Iñárritu’s needlessly over-complicated, self-consciously tricky narrative.

While the week between Christmas and New Year’s is far from a dead zone for movies, most of the new fare that’s going to be brought out before year’s end has already come out, and those that the studios did save for Christmas day release look wholly uninteresting, from sequels to films that were horrible missteps to begin with, to overly earnest inspirational fare. Instead, we’ll join the living in the past bandwagon and revisit…

Mid-December has arrived, and with that comes the inevitable flood of best-of lists. The Washington Area Film Critics’ Association has, for the previous five years of its existence, been in the habit of trying to get their own list out ahead of most of the other critics’ societies. We can’t really blame them. Considering the fact that none of the critics from the city’s biggest newspaper are members, not to mention the fact that the…

DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Indie: War/Dance Sometimes you need an antidote before the poison even arrives. Next week Hollywood releases yet another of those diabetic-shock-inducing films about musically gifted youngsters and how they can be an inspiration to us all, designed to make soccer moms everywhere weep into their hankies. One week prior to that, though, comes a documentary from…

DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Major Release: No Country for Old Men We’ll be covering the latest release from the Coen Brothers in more depth tomorrow, but in the time being, we’ll tell you this: not only have the filmmakers recovered from the mediocre doldrums of their last couple of outings, but they have returned with a bloody vengeance with a…

>> The 3rd annual Can A Sista Rock A Mic? Festival kicks tonight off at the Rock and Roll Hotel. Bahamadia and Emoni Fela among others will be performing tonight, stay tuned for a full preview from us later. 9 p.m., $12. >> Like we mentioned in the jazz agenda, pianist Abdullah Ibrahim is one of the most influential jazz musicians to come out of South Africa, and tonight he’ll be at Blues Alley…