The horror … the horror. Lo and behold, famed director and screenwriter Francis Ford Coppola has laid an egg: he calls it Tetro. Carrying the tagline "Every family has a secret," Tetro is Coppola’s second "amateur-again" film after Youth Without Youth. Tetro is Coppola giving himself second chance, his personal spurning of Hollywood and its fakeness, unoriginality … one could give Hollywood a bad name a thousand times over. At age 70, Coppola has left living room legends Apocalypse Now and The Godfather trilogy behind him, and has purposely regressed his budget with the intention of rediscovering what it is that made him apply to L.A. film school.

Ah, the political biopic: so much opportunity, so much risk.

On the one hand, stories about the powerful offer us a chance to glimpse into the more glorious and grotesque aspects of the human soul — the determination, the fortitude, the vanity (there’s a reason Shakespeare wrote about Hamlet and Henry IV). On the flip side, these films necessarily address matters of public interest — and public record. Tell the tale poorly, and everyone will know.

The Class, directed by Lauren Calent and nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, has been called by critics “fierce, funny and moving,” a portrait of “conflict, tragedy and triumph.” All well and good, if you go in for that sort of thing. The Class is indeed a great film, but its particular greatness is obscured by its particular subgenre. Movies about young teachers trying to unite a class of underprivileged, ethnically diverse students are a bit like Slope Day acts — a new batch comes out every once in a while, and the audience reaches for the usual epithets. But what about when we get one we actually like? What then?

Twists are cliché. So is calling them a double-edged sword, but that’s what they are. Anyone witness to recent horror flicks can attest to how a plot’s jumping the shark can drive one out of the movie theater, wishing the mind could have been wiped blank after the good stuff. But sometimes a twist is masterful, and can subvert the audience’s interpretation of everything they had seen before, changing every future re-viewing of a work while never matching that initial feeling of suspension and enthrallment. Like The Sixth Sense. Not like Hancock. Ever.

Hundreds of students flooded Uris Auditorium Wednesday night for the sneak preview of Observe and Report anticipating some of the lovable Seth Rogen unfiltered and inappropriate humor. He did not disappoint. Any hopes of vulgarity, crudeness or indecency were fulfilled; as far as substance, meaning or refinement, not so much. Although the movie isn’t entirely overboard, as many students exiting the movie indicated, it absolutely crosses the line on so many levels.

Sex, drugs and tasers — one thing is for sure about Observe and Report (the second mall cop movie of 2009) Ronnie Barhardt would kick Paul Blart’s roly-poly ass.

Water or sex: which is more important? In Veit Helmer’s Absurdistan, the women are on one side of the barbed-wire fence while the men are on the other. It doesn’t take a star-reading babushka to figure out who chooses what.

There’s a lot of talk at the end of the year about Oscar-baiting. Epic films with dark themes and scenery-chewing performances abound; it’s a time for “serious” films about fresh concepts like the mentally challenged and the Holocaust, or the odd deifying biopic about a drug-addled, recently deceased musical icon.

Well, now there’s Sundance-baiting. The “quirky” films featuring no-name actors aside Hollywood giants moonlighting in miscast sagas about oddball misfit characters engaging in topsy-turvy meditations on life, relationships and art. Shit happens, indie songwriters jangle in the background, and everything ends on a quizzically upbeat, if not offbeat note. A great example? Little Miss Sunshine.

Reasons to go see Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li:

1. Plot: The Legend of Chun-Li centers around a classically-trained, millionaire pianist who receives mysterious scrolls in another language by mail and decides to give up everything to aimlessly wander through a far-off, quite dangerous city for weeks searching for the scroll’s owner, knowing only their first (or possibly last) name.

2. Believability: The Legend of Chun-Li is the kind of movie where said classical pianist looks like Kristin Kreuk, with hair and makeup still fresh after two weeks of living on the street with almost no money and just the clothes on her back.

There is a strangely “meta-” scene in Fired Up!, which is curious, because it is highly doubtful that the scriptwriters of this latest brainless teen comedy can even spell the prefix.

Life is hard. Making money is hard. Being on your own is hard. Recently, these messages have been ingrained into our brains from every media outlet and from all our friends that suddenly decided to forgo a financial career and take a stab at the LSATs. Therefore, it is difficult to sit through another movie that reiterates how depressing life can be without monetary resources. No wonder people willingly gravitated towards the dazzling, though excessively impractical, Slumdog Millionaire this past year for a fantastical escape.