Drama

Legendary police detective Dick Tracy is the only man tough enough to take on gangster boss Big Boy Caprice and his band of menacing mobsters. Dedicated to his work but at the same time devoted to his loyal girlfriend, Tess Trueheart, Tracy find himself torn between love and duty. His relentless crusade against crime becomes even more difficult when he gets saddled with an engaging orphan and meets seductive and sultry Breathless Mahoney, a torch singer determined to get the best of Tracy.

Director Paul Greengrass has made a career out of not holding back, with a series of films (including United 93 and The Bourne Supremacy/Ultimatum) that forcibly propel the audience out of bystander mode and into a visceral duck-and-cover reaction. (If he were a history teacher, his students would constantly be picking old gum out of their hair.) Captain Phillips, Greengrass's collaboration with a rarely better Tom Hanks, shows the filmmaker further refining his style, telling a true-life story of heroism with an immediacy that puts most movies based on fact out to staid pasture.

There are only so many filmmakers fearless or foolhardy enough to tackle a challenging novel, like Yann Martel's Life of Pi, but adaptation specialist Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) was well positioned to take it on. As a structuring device, he uses an interview between a journalist (Rafe Spall) and Pi Patel (The Namesake's Irrfan Khan), a Montreal immigrant with an unusual back story.

As affecting as it is thought-provoking, ITV's My Boy Jack illustrates the dangers of unbridled patriotism. To grow up the child of a famous author is burden enough, but when the boy must embody the beliefs of the man, the consequences can be devastating. In the case of John "Jack" Kipling (Harry Potter's Daniel Radcliffe in his most mature role to date), 17-year-old son of Rudyard Kipling (Four Weddings and a Funeral's David Haig), his father's passion for King and Country leads to a preventable tragedy.

The dazzling Bollywood superstar Tannishtha Chatterjee shines in the British film Brick Lane, based on the best-selling novel by Monica Ali. The film is true to the delicately nuanced novel, which tells the story of a young Bangladeshi girl's being married off to a young man living in England--sight unseen. The heroine, Nazneen, as played by Chatterjee, is humble and obedient, and if mildly unhappy in her new life, she's loath to be vocal about it.

The bodice-ripper that begat all bodice-rippers, John Clelland's 18th century book, Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, has finally been given the screen adaptation it deserves. This 2007 British TV presentation is cheeky and very erotic, yet subtly emotional and painstakingly costumed and set. Fanny herself, played by young, appealing newcomer TK Night, narrates the film, which goes a long way toward defusing what is essentially a tale of a woman forced into prostitution to live.

More than 150 years after its publication, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species and its theory of natural selection remain the subject of much debate; the divide between those who accept Darwin's ideas as incontrovertible science and those who consider them blasphemous may be wider now than ever. Released in 2009, director Jon Amiel's Creation goes right to the heart of the matter--indeed, right to the heart of Darwin himself.

A fast-paced, beautifully executed film, The Rebel works hard at being an epic martial arts picture set in 1920's French-occupied Vietnam. While that may sound like a bit much, director Truc Charlie Nguyen does a formidable job creating a plausible scenario with some awesome fighting sequences. While not quite epic, the film is spot on as an action thriller.

Before she became Coco, the world-famous fashion designer, Gabrielle Chanel (Audrey Tautou in a fiercely determined performance) struggled to make ends meet. After her mother's death, her father deposited her and her sister, Adrienne (Marie Gillain), at an orphanage, where they learned to sew (and where Chanel developed a taste for monochromatic ensembles). They went on to become cabaret singers, but when Adrienne runs off with a wealthy suitor, the newly christened Coco must go it alone until she meets gentleman farmer Étienne Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde).

Alternating between cosmic splendor and human squalor, Agora is a movie of unusual ambition. In the last days of the Roman Empire, the Egyptian city of Alexandria is torn between the aristocratic pagan society and the emerging, rough-and-tumble Christians. As this broad cultural conflict teeters violently back and forth, the scientist-philosopher Hypatia (Rachel Weisz, The Brothers Bloom, The Fountain) struggles to resolve the motion of the planets with her belief in celestial perfection.