This feeling is perfectly agreeable to film critics, who accumulate this kind of arcane trivia (Jonathan Demme; soul tracks by Bobby Womack; 34 minutes) and so think of themselves as pretty smart.  But the average moviegoer (yes, we think of you as average) just wants to be entertained.

In his first three films, Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994) and Jackie Brown (1997), everyone wins—theatrical, memorable (and excessively talkative) characters try to stay alive through increasingly hopeless scenarios while every available shot, location, throwaway line and hand prop provides inside references for aficionados of world cinema.

His next two endeavours—the double-volume pan-Asian homage Kill Bill (2003 and 2004) and the double-feature ode to 1970s American B-movies, Grindhouse (2007)—overindulged in intertextual density and underwhelmed the public.

Inglourious Basterds heralds Tarantino’s return to form.  Structured as a series of ‘chapters’ telling interconnected stories (like Pulp Fiction), the film defies easy summary.  However, here goes: during World War II in Nazi-occupied Paris, a German film premiere becomes the target of three offensives, by the French, the British and a group of American combatives known as The Basterds.

Every Tarantino picture is a post-modern pastiche, and Inglourious Basterds is no exception.  Civil-rights era American war movies like The Guns of Navarone (1961), The Great Escape (1963) and especially The Dirty Dozen (1967) featured eclectic bands of soldiers who overcome internal differences to battle a common—invariably German—enemy.

Inglourious Basterds, which takes its title from a 1978 Italian copycat of The Dirty Dozen, reproduces the dynamic with a group of mostly Jewish-American infantrymen cobbled together by a Southern lieutenant with alleged Amerindian heritage, Aldo Raine (deliciously overplayed by Brad Pitt).  Pitt’s character is brashly, brazenly all-American, in a loose inheritance of similar roles played by older hunks Gregory Peck and Steve McQueen.

As in his other work, Tarantino eschews an original score in favor of repurposed tracks from other, older films, including several musical selections by famed Italian composer Ennio Morricone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Once Upon a Time in the West).

Though epic in scale, budget and execution, Inglourious Basterds retains Tarantino’s trademark rhythm—long stretches of dialogue that explode into moments of extreme violence.  Like any good filmmaker, he keeps making the same movie over and over without repeating himself.  Signature elements clock in regularly—the inclusion of a Mexican standoff (where three or more characters point guns at each other) and the dangerous thrill of a woman’s bare feet—without threatening the integrity of the story.

Tarantino’s relationship with cinema is that of someone towards their spouse of forty years, which is about how long he’s been watching movies.  He can’t help but adore it—wholeheartedly, unrepentingly, and forever—but also knows its shortcomings and shortcuts, its successes and failures.  He knows it, as a friend and as an enemy, exploring its boundaries and possibilities.  Inglourious Basterds is another labour of love (ten years in the making) from a man who wants all of us—even the average ones—to have that feeling.

First, you will need to find, adapt or invent two people who are superficially opposites, and separated by a difficult-to-overcome barrier—attitudes (on relationships, When Harry Met Sally, 1989) or distance (a continental delta, Sleepless in Seattle, 1993) or a medium (the Internet, You’ve Got Mail, 1998) or time (fifty years in her new film, Julie & Julia).

Second, you must keep your characters apart, ensuring they meet infrequently (every five years in When Harry Met Sally), accidentally (at the Empire State Building in Sleepless in Seattle), unknowingly (on the street in You’ve Got Mail) or, in the case of Julie & Julia, never.

Third, having set the odds massively against them, you carefully blend their stories and let it sit for two hours, finding the spiritual essence that binds them together—deep affection (When Harry Met Sally), a hole in the heart (Sleepless in Seattle) or a shared passion (for reading in You’ve Got Mail; for cooking in Julie & Julia).

Voila!  Your very own romantic dramedy, just like Julie & Julia, the interwoven lives of Julia Child, real-life American diplomat’s wife who became famous for her French cookbooks, and Julie Powell, struggling New York City writer who gained a cult following by spending a year cooking her way through all 527 recipes in Child’s magnum opus, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Ephron’s movies, though insightful in a pop-psychology kind of way, are never particularly complicated.  Julie & Julia are both married to doting husbands ordinary enough to consider themselves lucky.  They are both searching for purpose in worlds which make them feel lost—post-WWII Paris for Julia, and post-9/11 New York for Julie.  Julia doesn’t understand a word anyone around her says, and an early restaurant scene with Julie’s yuppie friends tells us she doesn’t, either.

Within these similar but disparate contexts, the two women discover the joys and heartaches of cooking (while the husbands discover heartburn).  Important tip: Using better ingredients improves the recipe.  Whether an Ephron film works usually depends on its co-stars.  In the aforementioned hits, Meg Ryan was, to paraphrase Julia Child, the butter to Billy Crystal and Tom Hanks’s bread.  Bewitched (2005) failed partly because Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell lacked chemistry.

In Julie & Julia, Meryl Streep and Amy Adams are like a Cabernet Sauvignon and camembert cheese—distinct tastes that grow well together.  It’s impossible to go over-the-top playing Julia Child, so Streep’s affectations, which sometimes grate in other roles, work here.  She also has the freedom (like peers Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman) of a guaranteed audience bloc—the patrons at Palace Cineplex were middle-aged or older.

More weight rests on Amy Adams, scrabbling out of the gutter of television sitcoms and cable dramas (The Office, That 70s Show, Smallville, Charmed), aspiring to the A-list apex of crossovers Jennifer Aniston and George Clooney.  Her turn as Julie Powell is competent, but nothing to write a homepage about.  However, her listless yet histrionic blogger is the right foil for Streep’s bubbly but bourgeois housewife.

With any culinary exercise, the last step is always, of course, to consume the dish.  Julie & Julia, without being subtle or aiming for jouissance, leaves a rich, dreamy aftertaste.

The tricks of the camera and the soundstage have always fascinated us, and so the people who make movies have always strived for new ways to fascinate—remember The Matrix (1999)?  But in an age of ubiquitous special effects, where hundred-million-dollar budgets are a dime a dozen, and the Internet makes us all explorers, mere spectacle is not enough.

Thus The Time Traveler’s Wife, while indulging in one of cinema’s oldest tricks—making people vanish—recognizes it must also tell a good story.  Clare Abshire (played by Brooklyn Proulx and Rachel McAdams, bewitching as always) grew up as many little girls do, dreaming of the man—tall, strong and handsome—who would appear one day.  In Clare’s case, however, those days are many, since her husband, Henry, who can travel through time, keeps appearing and disappearing.

The film slowly opens the possibilities of its central gimmick.  Henry DeTamble (Eric Bana, the most striking librarian in the history shelves) can’t control his transcendent transportation, leading to moments opportune—escaping a car crash—and not so opportune—getting to the church in time becomes a double entendre.

The Time Traveler’s Wife raises as many questions as it settles, with Clare telling Henry about memories he has yet to experience.  It doesn’t explain why Henry, though altering timelines, never seems to change them.  And it never tells us how or why he is able to blast from the past back to the future and home again.

But the grey matter doesn’t matter, because The Time Traveler’s Wife isn’t about the time traveller—it’s about his wife, and by extension, about all American wives (and if Jamaican women can find points of connection, that’s an unintended bonus).  The film stays with Clare even when her husband does not, showing her eating alone at a table set for two, and lying alone in their king-size bed, and waiting, too often, for too long, for her husband to come home.

In this way, The Time Traveler’s Wife provides a commentary on the modern middle-class marriage, with two careers and two cars and one too many evenings spent at the office.  Even by our relatively equal standards, men usually earn more than their wives, and spend more time doing so, leaving women feeling as if their husbands are unintentional time travellers, subject to the arbitrary dictates of the company and the stock price.

Hollywood will always take us to long-gone ages and faraway places, but The Time Traveler’s Wife serves as a timely reminder that its greatest power lies in stories of the here and now.

Hyperbole is the root of all movie promotion, so you might read that line with the cynicism of someone accustomed to media that over-promises and under-delivers. Every Hollywood blockbuster, desperate to recoup its bloated budget, claims to be amazing. (G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, which could replace waterboarding in military prisons as an effective method of torture, effervesces that “saving the world has never been this much fun.”)

Even tolerable summer flicks, like Fighting, have too much Tinseltown DNA to stand out in a crowded cineplex. (G.I. Joe and Fighting, for instance, both star Channing Tatum.)  Jamaican audiences, raised from birth on American fare, no longer expect originality or variance, just the coddling familiarity of the Universal globe, MGM lion or Warner Bros. crest.

But the white TriStar horse is the first and last familiar image you’ll see in District 9. After that, you’re in the middle of Johannesburg, South Africa. And not some jungle-shack, studio-backlot, James-Bond version of Africa. The uncomfortable, sweltering cacophony of seven million people living and working together. The authentic specificity of Johannesburg—from the high-rises of the Central Business District to the squat shanties of Soweto—populated by its unique, post-apartheid ethnic spectrum—Afrikaner, bruinmense, immigrant. The Afrikaans-accented English. The closed-circuit cameras on the street corners. The Kwaito music.

The alien mothership hovering over the city.

That’s right. District 9 is a science fiction movie, an instant classic taking its place in the galaxy of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Wars (1977), Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982). In the process, its young, South African writer/director, Neill Blomkamp, inherits the genre from the men behind those movies—Stanley Kubrick (dead), George Lucas (might as well be) and Ridley Scott (still going strong).

The genius of District 9 lies in how Blomkamp uses his hometown to tell a familiar story about extraterrestrials, and uses extratrerrestrials to tell a familiar story about his hometown. The aliens, having arrived twenty years ago, live in a massive fenced-off slum directly beneath their defunct ship—a temporary humanitarian effort gone permanently wrong—called District Nine. Now, they are treated like animals, or else like children, or else like savage brutes.

The government, under political pressure, is relocating the aliens outside the city. The man in charge is a meek civil employee, Wikus Van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley). Wikus is about to have a very, very bad day at work, the kind of day that makes you want to blow up your headquarters.

Blomkamp busts open the barely-congealed wounds of apartheid and rubs some Soweto dirt in them for good measure. The police freely abuse the aliens, whom they call prawns. When a discerning prawn refuses to sign his eviction notice, Wikus threatens to take his child away. City signs threaten and confine them: FOR HUMAN USE ONLY.

As a result, District 9, despite truckloads of special effects and movie trickery, feels more honest, more immediate, more out-and-out real than Sarafina (no one in District 9 has time for singing or Whoopi Goldberg). Blomkamp uses security cameras and documentary crews to heighten the it’s-really-happening aesthetic (technical term: cinema verite), tucking his computer-generated creatures into the background of newsfootage and out-of-focus citizen journalism.

It all adds up to something you’ve never seen before—the world’s first alien apartheid allegory. Go see it.

First, there is the white Los Angeles Times reporter Steve Lopez (a real journalist, but here played by Robert Downey Jr), author of a human interest column called ‘Points West’. Lopez traffics in stories of seedy streets, of the disenfranchised but not dispirited denizens of the city. In the film, he lives alone but works alongside his amicable, attractive ex-wife (Catherine Keener)—in other words, he’s frustrated. And in both fiction and reality, he meets a homeless black cellist who changes his life.

The cellist is Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, portrayed without reserve (or eyebrows) by Jamie Foxx. His Ayers stumbles along both sides of the divide between genius and insanity, talking in a soft, rambling patter as his mouth tries to catch up with his mind. In both art and life, Ayers dropped out of New York’s Julliard School because of his schizophrenia. When Lopez spots him, he has a violin with two strings and a running commentary about his favourite Romantic composer.

Ludwig van Beethoven, although not seen except in marble or plastic, provides the aural topology for The Soloist. One scene revels in the concrete majesty of the city, with sky-high shots of its snaking highways and Spanish-architecture suburbs—majesty courtesy of a Beethoven symphony. There are implicit parallels drawn between Ayers and his idol—both suffering from tragic conditions (Beethoven slowly went deaf) that obstructed the pure expression of their immense talents.

Ayers is only at peace when consuming music, brilliantly conveyed halfway through The Soloist when he sits in on a rehearsal for the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra. As a hundred musicians dive into the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, the screen explodes into a synesthetic sequence of light and colour.

The uninitiated might wonder how an iTunes visualization found its way into the film, but the bravura sequence distills cinema to its essence—the spatial arrangement of light through time. Moreover, it proudly appends itself to a long history of visual sound films—from Walter Ruttmann’s Lichtspiel, Opus I (1921) and Oskar Fischinger’s Allegretto (1936) to the mid-century experimentations of Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer (1960) and John Whitney’s Catalog (1961). Like all maestros, these cine-magicians knew the exhilarating potential of their medium—its ability to stimulate the eyes and soothe the heart.

The man behind The Soloist is director Joe Wright, the most ambitious of all. Within the scripted confines of one film, he provides a loving tribute to a city, a scathing exposé of societal apathy and bourgeois pretensions, a filmic concerto for a two-hundred-year-old musician, and a bond between two men who are able to save each other from the ravages of life. Such an outsized endeavour, in any art form—be it the words of Steve Lopez, the notes of Nathaniel Ayers, or the images of Joe Wright—demands your admiration, your attention and the price of admission.