Revolution is all about style.

That’s one of the lessons to be gleaned from The Baader Meinhof Complex, an excellent new film by German director Uli Edel playing this week at Cornell Cinema. In a humane and haunting manner, the movie traces the rise and fall of the Red Army Faction, which for much of the late ’60s and ’70s sought to violently enact a Marxist awakening in West Germany. Against a finely orchestrated shower of bullets and bombs, the urgency, hope and hypocrisy of those years is played out.

Law Abiding Citizen is a whirlwind of premeditated madness. Saw, Fracture and Seven seemingly team up for a mind-blowing (literally) series of sadistic murders coordinated flawlessly by the brilliantly conniving Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler).

We all grow tired of our realities — the weight of peoples’ expectations, the feeling of needing to provoke others into reciprocating our love. Amidst all of this, who wouldn’t want to, say, sail off to run through the woods in their PJs and sleep in a gigantic pile of down-covered limbs and furry backsides?

Spike Jonze (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) once again does just what he wants in his film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, one of the most beloved bedside stories of all time; he executes a minimum of editing in his fantastical vision and preserves his stylistic edge. Meanwhile, he reminds us how the playgrounds of our creativity can help us to recognize flaws in the ways we treat other people as well as remind us that, at the end of the day, we’re all only human. Whether it is between king and subject, monster and kin or mother and child, love is beautifully imperfect.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs was pretty much everyone’s childhood dreams come true. Why have a snow day when you can have a “snowflakes made of ice cream falling and making huge mountain scoops of frozen sugary milky goodness” day? There is still a decent sized part of me who dreams of that every night. When the trailers for this movie first came out, I expected the dreamy whimsical bedtime story of the town of Chewandswallow (I wish I was clever enough to come up with something inappropriate to say here) where food falls from the sky. In the book, no one questions why — in fact, there are no real characters to do the questioning — and the weather’s always sunny-side up until the food starts to destroy the town with monstrously large hot dogs and killer pancakes.

This summer marked the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, considered a pinnacle event in American popular culture and the latter half of the 20th century. The festival was billed as three days of peace and music, and featured numerous musical groups from Jefferson Airplane and The Who to Jimi Hendrix, CCR and Sly and the Family Stone, all of whom — amidst rain and upstate New York’s humid summer weather — played to 500,000 people on a 600 acre field. No concert like it had ever been attempted, and the name Woodstock to this day is synonymous with the 1960s, hippies and the Flower Generation, as well as a lofty bar for live music events and culture-changing phenomena involving massive numbers of young people.

At an hour and forty-five minutes, this documentary might not be long enough to do justice to Patti Smith, this poet and musician whose career has spanned 40 years. But Patti Smith: Dream of Life, the culmination of 10 years of filming and shown last week at Cornell Cinema, provides a captivating look at the life and work of this artist of the spoken word. We accompany her as she tours to Japan, India and Israel, performing her poetry with a rock band. But we’re also there for her quieter moments, when she’s riding in a car, visiting her parents, or sitting in a corner amidst a pile of her belongings. Her voice is strong, sharp and deep. Her poetry is raw and un-frilled. And physically, Patti Smith presents herself in the same “what you see is what you get” manner.