The voice of Bill Courtney — powerful and punctuated, resolute and fearless — permeates every ounce of Undefeated, a marvelously spirited high school football documentary from Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin. A businessman by day, Courtney, whose love for football flows through his veins with more vigorous density than his own blood, is the volunteer football coach at North Memphis’s Manassas High School. He took over in 2004, when the team’s hopes equaled the decrepit emptiness of the town that surrounds the high school. As the film begins, Courtney’s program is filled with promise and the potential for the program’s best season to date.

Courtney’s the main presence in the film, but there are a handful of players the filmmakers focus on as well. First is O.C. Brown, an offensive lineman with blinding power and speed and the most naturally gifted athlete on the entire roster. Thanks to a YouTube video put together by another of the team’s volunteer coaches, Brown is poised to contend for a college football scholarship. Like many of his teammates, though, academics are a tough grind, and the 16 he needs on the ACT to receive college eligibility becomes his primary obstacle.

There’s also Montrail, who we come to know and love as “Money.” Blessed with a warm heart and mental toughness, “Money” is a severely undersized lineman who gets by with unusual intelligence and passion. He’s often haunted, though, by his father’s death (which came when he was a teenager), and a later knee injury threatens his well-deserved stability even further. A third Manassas Tiger, Chavis, is another of the film’s key interests — he’s a fiercely talented player, but his long-standing anger issues are a constant hazard to the team’s well-being.

The power of Undefeated is unique, because it tracks a storyline that, in a glossily-fashioned Hollywood context, could easily come off as preachy life-affirmation. But the film is so restlessly passionate that it’s almost impossible to even fathom a sappy version of the material. The straight-arrow honesty of every beat works. Like Courtney, the filmmakers are no-nonsense contributors — wise and outspoken, but never aiming to overshadow the rich delicacy of these kids and their situations.

Indeed, the philosophy of the film correlates beautifully with Courtney’s own. Much of Undefeated consists of the coach’s dynamic with his players, whether it be heated halftime speeches or one-on-one talks about topics as intimate as anything between a father and son. One of his main creeds explains how it’s the valleys, not the peaks, that reveal true character, and what’s great about the film is that despite the team journeying through a successful season, conflict and struggle are ever-present substances. Football and life aren’t separate here — they’re always affecting each other, in moving and interesting ways.

You’ll feel better about life after seeing Undefeated. I guarantee it. And not in a “life is cherries and flowers” kind of way. The effect of the film isn’t rooted in the external events that occur, but rather in the souls of the human beings on display. Bill Courtney is as inviting a movie character as I’ve seen in a long time, and it’s not simply because he’s a good person with good intentions. It’s because, in the context of the stadium and the locker room, he opens the door to his innermost core, revealing a person of steadfast determination and endless fervor for what he does. “Football reveals character,” he says during the film’s opening, and Undefeated made me believe him. It’s got a whole lot of character, and a whole lot of heart.

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In the opening scene of McG’s This Means War, CIA agents played by Tom Hardy and Chris Pine float undercover through a high-class rooftop party. About a minute in, Til Schweiger (you’ll recognize him from Inglourious Basterds, where he was given plenty more to chew on) shows up, kills a few guys, steals a briefcase, and escapes after a rooftop chase that has all the force and peril of a Kleenex commercial. That’s our villain, folks.

Considering Schweiger’s absence from the rest of the movie — you could probably count his minutes of screen time on one hand — the bad-guy subplot could’ve easily been scrapped entirely, and that McG directs the two big action sequences with a brutal lack of creativity makes it even worse. The main interest of screenwriters Simon Kinberg and Timothy Dowling is the love triangle that develops, quite improbably, with Lauren (a painfully bland Reese Witherspoon) at the center.

Tuck (Hardy) and FDR Foster (Pine) are partners and best buds. They’re also single, despite their movie-star looks and apparently sky-high salaries. (FDR’s place literally has a pool for a ceiling.) Through an online dating service, Tuck and Lauren meet up and hit it off. On her way home, however, she runs into FDR at a video store where they discuss Alfred Hitchcock and, not so surprisingly, make for thoroughly unconvincing cinephiles. The encounter nevertheless sets in motion a series of events that eventually lead to their hitting it off as well.

Which guy will she choose? That’s what the film is about, and it’s a premise that’s more suited to the world of 30-minute sitcoms — that both screenwriters thought it worthy of feature-length treatment, especially with these characters, is mildly troubling. There’s an inconsistent entertainment value to watching a guy like Hardy muscle his way through such hopeless banter, and coming off memorable assignments in both Warrior and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, it’s easy to deduce why this is the first time I’ve ever seen him visibly bored on screen.

Pine fares decently, too — he has a unique boyish energy that makes indigestible lines somewhat edible. Witherspoon, meanwhile, is as boring as her character, though it’s hard to really blame her when she’s asked to do things like dance around her kitchen while singing along to some hip-hop tune. Dance and sing — the two things all women do when they cook, right?

When the film does, on occasion, attempt to register some emotional ticks, the results are even more painful. A scene that has Hardy and Witherspoon pausing their date to try their hand at acrobatics stands out as one of the most cringe-worthy — the sight of them bouncing on a trampoline and snuggling is about as romantic as the chaotic climax of Chronicle.

Chelsea Handler also shows up here, by the way, as Witherspoon’s go-to pal, and if people like her character actually exist in the real world, then the apocalypse probably is on its way. Allow me to explain: in an early, rather disgusting scene, she’s shown making out with a guy while snacking on Cheetos. Later, Christophe Beck’s score opts for a delicate beat as we see her cradling her child, and it’s supposed to be…moving? Frightening is more like it. (Seriously, someone recommend that kid for adoption. Now.)

And if you were hoping the less-than-chivalrous treatment of women stopped there, I regret to inform you of an ex-wife character (Abigail Spencer) that couldn’t even be considered an afterthought. It’s something lower than that. Angela Bassett’s role is the same way. These are things that just make you scratch your head.

The only thing I could really think about while watching This Means War was how truthfully pathetic it was. There are maybe one or two flashes where the trashiness of it is enjoyable, but by the end I was worn down by the insufferable phoniness. I felt sad for having sat through the movie, and it is not something I will look back on fondly.

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Chico & Rita, which is fresh off receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Film, is nothing if not a visual delight. Charting an oft-tested love story that stretches across the globe, the film renders multiple hotspots — notably, Havana, New York, and Las Vegas — as beautifully as Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist depicted Edinburgh. It’s the broad characterizations of the screenplay (co-written by Fernando Trueba and Ignacio Martínez de Pisón), however, that keep the star-crossed lovers from taking off as fully-formed individuals. Yet at the same time, the story is embedded with such heartfelt strokes that a certain level of sweetness is undeniable.

In some instances, the titular lovebirds — avid piano player Chico (Eman Xor Oña) and on-the-rise lounge singer Rita (Limara Meneses) — are treated as a mere vessel through which to explore a series of historial backdrops, and it is during these sequences that the film impresses most. Beginning in late-1940s Havana, the film introduces us to a nightlife scene that bursts with passion and energy, while subsequent journeys to a stunningly designed New York City document the rise (and fall) of jazz music and its improvisational grace.

That said, there are also a couple of episodic inserts that feel randomly motivated, most obviously a brief segment showing a drug deal gone wrong. Also troubling is the way immigration status plays a role in the film — to me, it seemed to be driven less by historical authenticity than the need for another external obstacle to keep the narrative in motion.

That same problem works its way into the narrative’s origins, as Chico and Rita are such an obviously well-teamed couple that the early hurdles keeping them apart feel wholly resultant of a lack of conflict. It’s the kind of thing where, after a perfect night together, some random hysterical woman shows up at Chico’s apartment and convinces Rita that he’s nothing but a womanizing scoundrel. It’s a hard moment to buy, which is a problem since it places a roadblock between the two main characters precisely when their relationship would’ve made the most sense.

The music of the film ought to be mentioned, as it’s as dazzling as the visual palette. Bebo Valdés is responsible for the original tunes, all of which mesh wonderfully with the fast-changing time periods, but the soundtrack is also notable for its jazz-legend throwbacks — Dizzy Gillespie and Freddy Cole are but a couple of the icons put on display.

The fact of the matter is that Chico & Rita is a nice movie, pleasant and digestible, but nevertheless lacking a certain amount of involvement. We watch Chico and Rita — their troubles and triumphs, struggles and joys — but in terms of pure interest, they pale in comparison to the film’s absorbing aesthetic backdrops. They’re basically one-note characters void of anything aside from their love of music and each other. This hindrance, again, is mostly saved by the surrounding elements, but it keeps the film from leaving a legitimate impression.

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Apple has debuted the trailer for Justin Kurzel’s The Snowtown Murders, which is every bit as promising a directorial debut as last year’s Sean Durkin-helmed Martha Marcy May Marlene. During its festival run, the film was billed simply as Snowtown — a much better title, in my opinion — but the headline has since been expanded to hint more obviously at the film’s charting of a series of grisly, fact-based killings that occurred in Australia throughout the 1990s. IFC Films has slotted the film for a March 2 release date, and I’m looking forward to writing about it at full-length in anticipation of that — it’s been a week since I’ve seen it, and it’s still at the forefront of my mind. Click through to watch the embedded trailer.

The opening event of Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse may, perhaps, set up false expectations for many a viewer — set over a pitch-black screen, a coarse-grained voice-over recounts the demise of the life of Friedrich Nietzsche, which, according to the story (as well as popular belief, in some sense), was initiated by the philosopher’s lamented reaction to a cab driver’s whipping of an unresponsive horse. The incident took place on January 3, 1889, and was followed by ten years of catatonic inactivity for Nietzsche.

The most obvious reason why this introduction might tweak viewers’ expectations in the wrong direction is the presence of words. While the curtain-raiser is sustained, without imagery, by an off-screen articulation, the rest of the film — maybe ever-so-slightly ironically — is the exact opposite. It’s image-driven, with unimaginably long takes (often exceeding five minutes) and with an almost complete aversion to dialogue. Even the one discussion-centered sequence in the film feels more like a premeditated soliloquy for actor Mihály Kormos (a recurring presence in Tarr’s canon) than an actual conversation.

Providing the roar for the rest of the film, then, generally falls on the shoulders of composer Mihály Vig, whose barbarically rough score, accentuated by an oft-repeated melody of yearning, ingrains itself so deeply that it could seem to become the film’s main character. There are, however, two principal beings that more logically fit that description — Ohlsdorfer (János Derzsi), the agressive, gruff cabby from the Nietzsche story, and his daughter (Erika Bók).

The film introduces us to the central duo — presumably in the late 19th century, shortly after the voiced-over event occurs — just as a vigorous windstorm is sweeping its way through the Italian countryside. As such, the titular beast is reluctant to take on the surrounding territory, leaving father and daughter with microscopically little to do in the meantime. (We actually only see the horse in action once, during the bravura inaugural shot.)

In turn, what Tarr’s 146-minute film gives us is a fastidiously real-time presentation of the day-to-day occurrences of these two people. They wake up. She helps him get dressed. She gets water from the nearby well. They share a meal of potatoes. (If you thought Brad Pitt was the king of on-screen snacking, wait until you see the forcefulness with which Derzsi gnaws on his food.) Round and round we go, with Vig’s commanding hymns and Fred Kelemen’s stunningly stringent black-and-white cinematography lending these mundane proceedings an aura of substance.

The prizes of The Turin Horse — most powerfully, its uncompromisingly moving meditation on the value of the fibers of human existence (yes, it’s rather lofty) — are extremely hard-earned, and require a kind of devoted patience. (If your showing doesn’t have at least one walk-out, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.) The lack of a developing storyline, in the conventional sense, is a rough obstacle at first — by the third day, you’ll surely be wondering why we need to see this guy put his boots on again — but once the reasons behind Tarr’s design are crystallized, the potential rewards are as vast and far-reaching as the film’s all-encompassing rural landscape.

Tarr, 56, has announced that this will be his final film. If that statement holds true, it’s one that feels entirely appropriate after witnessing the experience of The Turin Horse, which marks an immaculate meshing between a director’s formal techniques and his thematic excitements. (László Krasznahorkai, it should be stated, co-wrote the screenplay, which must be distortedly short for a film of this length, with Tarr.) To merely praise Tarr here for “making the film he wanted to make” would be terribly reductive — that the events and techniques are burrowed in repetition is simply the foundation for a commanding inquiry that, in its patterned way, formidably tests the borders of the types of grandiose themes cinema can explore.

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I still don’t really get why The Bourne Legacy is being made, and the film’s first trailer — released today via Apple — does little to shell that suspicion. It runs an intentionally cryptic two minutes long, and, to me, has the feeling of something that thinks it’s a lot more interesting than it actually is. But it’s hard to argue with the pedigree on display, starting with Jeremy Renner, who made something fresh out a dully-written role in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, and Edward Norton, who’s great in just about anything. I have a soft spot for Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, too, so I’d like to believe he’s got a unique spin in store here. I’m simply getting a weird vibe from this one at the moment, though. We’ll see if that changes prior to the film’s August 3 release date. Embed after the cut.

From the very moment its inciting incident played out on screen, I had concerns about where Chronicle was going to end up. That’s no reflection of the overall film, which for about the first hour holds a surprising amount of promise and involvement. It’s more of a reaction to the premise itself, which struck me as something inherently difficult to conclude on appropriate scale. And it is indeed the final fifteen-to-twenty minutes, during which Seattle’s Space Needle is treated like the padded boundaries of a bumper-car arena, that marks Chronicle‘s decline into silliness.

It’s kind of a shame, too, because much of the film is so precise in its character detailing that you start to wonder whether or not the found-footage genre has gained a new purpose — for all of its artificialities, the source of the camera here, the alienated teenager Andrew (Dane DeHaan), is more than a commercial device. The camera’s looming slowly feeds into DeHaan’s creepy characterization, which is the film’s most chilling — and lasting — aspect. But man, that climactic sequence — it takes up nearly a fourth of the running time (a slim 83 minutes) and self-destructs so quickly that it eventually reaches the thresholds of unintentional self-parody.

But enough harping — let’s talk about what’s good. Above all, the drawing-up of the three principal players. The aforementioned Andrew, whose mother is going through a cancer ordeal and whose father (Michael Kelly, weirdly cast but ultimately effective), a former firefighter surviving on the royalties of a work-related injury, splits his time between getting drunk and cursing out his isolated son.

Andrew finds some alleviation in his cousin Matt (Alex Russell, faintly resembling a younger-looking Joel Edgerton), who packs an odd mix of level-headedness and lofty thinking. (He quotes philosophers a lot.) Early in the film, Matt drags Andrew to a barn party, which probably wasn’t the best of ideas considering that Andrew’s social elusiveness increases tenfold when he’s walking around filming people doing illegal things. The device comes in handy, however, when Matt and Steve (Michael B. Jordan), the class-president hopeful, come across an underground pit containing a turquoise structure that transmits electric energy.

The result of the discovery: all three guys form a spiky type of telekinesis that allows them to manipulate objects with their minds. They easily bond over their newfound abilities, spending afternoons toying with kids in the store — a great bit has a floating teddy bear menacing over a young toddler — and shifting cars in the parking lot, leaving the owners wondering how in the devil their red sedans got moved over a row. These are just a few of the instances of effective humor here, but the presence of Andrew’s camera gives everything a ghostly quality which suggests that the playful jive could be short-lived.

Over time, the group learns that their powers operate like muscles — the more they use them, the stronger they get. Much of the invisible special-effects work could be taken for granted at first, but once the trio is hurtling through the sky and it actually looks like they’re hurtling through the sky, it’s hard to deny the quality of work on display. Even something as simple as Andrew splitting a spider is handled with wonderful dexterity.

However, like the rest of the film’s leading achievements — the believable character dynamics, the quietly ingrained sense of horror on the horizon — the VFX is at its least polished in the bizarre showdown. I like the escalation-themed idea behind screenwriter Max Landis’s madness, but it outstretches it bounds by a significantly hindering margin, and feels very much at odds with the moody realism of director Josh Trank’s approach. There’s too much good too dismiss Chronicle outright, but it’s quite frustrating how close it comes to eclipsing the genre, only to be reduced by an ill-proportioned climactic creation.

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The tough-to-decipher reaction that greeted writer-director Markus Schleinzer’s Michael at last year’s Cannes Film Festival was a curious point of intrigue for me, so I was discouraged when 2011 went by without seeing the film hit domestic shores for a theatrical run. However, Strand Releasing, the distributor behind the marvelously acted Tyrannosaur, has come to the film’s rescue, prompting it for a run beginning on February 15. Apple has gotten the ball rolling by releasing the following minute-long trailer, which I find to be full of cryptic interest. Take a look at the embed after the jump, and be sure to check back around the film’s release date for a review. I can’t imagine I’ll be passing this one up.

Apple recently debuted the trailer for Daniel Nettheim’s The Hunter, which netted a pretty well-received Toronto debut last fall. The film actually looks like it could be quite good fun, if only for Willem Dafoe and the exotic wilderness locations. Interestingly enough, the source material comes from novelist Julia Leigh, who made her directorial debut in 2011 with the controversial Sleeping Beauty, so perhaps there’s more to the material than meets the eye at first. Magnolia Pictures will release The Hunter on April 6. Click through to watch an embedded version of the trailer.

Over the past few days, the Directors Guild of America (DGA) and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) have both voiced their opinion on the year in film, yet each organization has added so little to the conversation that they hardly seem worth reporting. So I’ll keep it quick. Michael Hazanavicius took the DGA award, thereby cementing The Artist as the eventual Best Picture winner and almost assuredly cementing Hazanavicius’s own goodwill in the Best Director category. Over in the documentary field, James Marsh took home the prize, whose Project Nim was thought to be an Oscar favorite until it was snubbed on nomination morning.

And if you didn’t think that was enough love for The Artist, the SAG Awards threw another bone its way by offering their Best Actor pick to Jean Dujardin. I can’t say I’m too surprised — George Clooney’s performance in The Descendants, while well-loved, strikes me as a somewhat middle-of-the-road pick, even despite his recent success during the season. It’ll still be a category to watch on Oscar night, but at this point, I see Dujardin inching ahead of Clooney by the slimmest margin. Who wouldn’t want to see him accept his statuette with Uggie in tow?

The Help, meanwhile, took home three SAG mentions — Best Actress (Viola Davis), Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer), and Best Ensemble — which is about as boring as you can get. It’s hard for me to say that the two actress fields are bursting with competition, though, so I’m not sure any feasible contender would be more deserving than these two. But seriously, where was Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy on that Best Ensemble list?

Additionally, Christopher Plummer continued coasting on the Best Supporting Actor circuit for his lovely Beginners work. I can’t help but want a watershed upset for Nick Nolte — whose Warrior performance, for my money, is the best of his Oscar-nominated category — but Plummer is nothing if not deserving here.

I honestly have nothing else to add. And there’s still a month until the eventual ceremony? One thing I am looking forward to, however, is getting acquainted with the nominated short films. Haven’t done that before.

Click here to see the full list of SAG nominees and winners, here for the DGA.