Tolstoy's classic novel of love and infidelity, Anna Karenina has been brought to stage and screen many times, often with mediocre results. It's a complicated story, so pay attention: It's mid-1800's Russia and Anna (Keira Knightly) is married to Karenin (Jude Law), a dull but faithful St. Petersburg public servant. When her brother Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen) has an affair, Anna travels to Moscow to try and prevent her sister-in-law Dolly (Kelly Macdonald) from divorcing Oblonsky. Meanwhile, Dolly's lovely younger sister Kitty (Alicia Vikander) is being courted by two men, Konstantin Levin (Domnhall Gleeson), an awkward and earnest landowner, and Alexei Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a vain, handsome soldier. Kitty much prefers Vronsky, but once he catches a glimpse of Anna, he's smitten, and Anna also finds in her heart a passion for Vronsky that she's never felt with the boring Karenin.

While I quite enjoyed the 2009 Guy Ritchie reinvention of the fabled observant detective in Sherlock Holmes, applying the same formula in this newer film Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows proved more a boring, tedious exercise in special effects and self-conscious film making and less an engaging and narratively ingenious film.

Once in a while, a film comes along that defies simple explanation. The story proves complex, the characters unexpectedly nuanced, and the entire narrative experience is beyond anything you expect. Hugo is just such a movie, a story that succeeds as a children's fable in the spirit of childhood fantasies like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and City of Ember, and simultaneously offers a surprisingly deep and profound exploration of love, family and what it means to be human.

There are specific genres of films, certain themes, that I find highly appealing, and one of those is apocolyptic events. From the daft The Happening to the cheesy The Day After Tomorrow, if the world's ending, if we're all facing extinction as a species, if something really terrible is going to happen, I'm interested. I think this started with classic old sci-fi like The Day of the Triffids and The Day the Earth Caught Fire, but that's another story.

One of the most powerful - and frightening - of these film themes is global pandemics. Diseases already seem to spread without us fully understanding or being able to control them, and given that they rapidly evolve to become resistant to our defenses, it's not much of a leap to see a very bad future or to imagine that they might be bioweapons or even alien life forms. My favorite film in this genre is the original 1971 thriller The Andromeda Strain, a film that's still anxiety-provoking 40 years later.

That's why I was perfectly primed for Contagion, though was a bit disappointed how cerebral and unthrilling it was for a film marketed as a tense action thriller. Filmed in a documentary style (think District 9) and with an interesting, if occasionally complicated timeline that jumps back and forth, the film is a fascinating primer on how an illness can spread rapidly and how difficult it is to identify, contain and cure.

The film initially focuses on international traveler Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow) who returns from a trip overseas to her home in Minneapolis and then, in front of her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) collapses and soon dies. Who did she interact with? What did she touch? How is the as-yet unidentified disease transmitted?

Contagion then moves to the Centers for Disease Control, as represented by Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) and Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) and the World Health Organization and its field specialist Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard). Their job: figure out the transmission vector, slow down the spread of the disease and ultimately come up with both a cure and a vaccine. To do that, however, they need to be able to replicate the disease (shades of The Andromeda Strain), which proves very difficult to accomplish.

Meanwhile, people are dying and Alan Krumweide (Jude Law) is causing trouble and creating even more paranoia with his wild conspiracy theories about drug company schemes to make millions, even as he double-deals and insists a homeopathic treatment is the only cure for the H1N1-like disease.

It's not a thrill ride with amazing special effects, but I found Contagion to be a tense and alarming medical mystery with great verisimilitude and a style well matched for its cool presentation of the spread and consequences of a pandemic that rapidly spreads around the globe. And yes, I thoroughly washed my hands afterwards.

Let me just start my review by saying that Repo Men was awful. Graphic, bloody, and with a staggering body count, this is all that's wrong with Hollywood action films, a glossy sheen on a completely vapid, empty story that works against itself in scene after scene. Then, the worst of all is the surprise ending, a twist that's always frustrated me. I won't reveal it, but if you do suffer through this dreck, you'll know exactly why it's a formulaic ending that ruins all but a precious few films that utilize it.

If you've never seen a Terry Gilliam film before, you'll be baffled and likely frustrated by the storytelling style and visual exaggeration that are trademarks of his weird and wonderful movies.  A former member of the comedy team Monty Python, a peculiarly English sense of humor suffuses his films too, from Time Bandits to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to Brazil. In the spirit of disclosure, I am a big fan of Gilliam's work and have looked forward eagerly to the cinematic release of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and really enjoyed it.

I've been a fan of Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary detail-oriented detective Sherlock Holmes for as long as I can remember. As a young child I devoured the stories and as recently as last week was watching a classic 1944 Holmes movie, The Scarlet Claw, starring Basil Rathbone as the eponymous detective and Nigel Bruce as his bumbling medical sidekick John Watson. I also greatly enjoyed the BBC series of Holmes stories that starred Jeremy Brett as the detective and David Burke as Dr. Watson.