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Moneyball has a slick, entertaining script by two pros, Aaron Sorkin and Steve Zaillian, and it's briskly directed by Bennett Miller.

Depending on your tolerance or affection for epic morality plays, Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret
may either feel too long and subplot-laden, with one too many plot
twists, or a bit thin and sketchy (despite a running time of two and a
half hours).

Sarah's Key is culled from a popular novel (by Tatiana de Rosnay)
set during the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation of France. The main
character, an Amer­i­can magazine writer (Kristin Scott Thomas) living
in Paris, discovers that her husband's family acquired their home after
the Jews who once lived there were sent to an abandoned stadium, where
they endured three hellish days before the Nazis transported them to the
camps.

In The Help, set during the civil rights era, an aspiring
journalist decides to write a book about the African-American domestics
in the small Missis­sippi town where she grew up. The movie, adapted by
Tate Taylor from Kathryn Stockett's best seller, is a glossy Hollywood
potboiler that uses a serious theme and historical context as cover.

When I walked into a
screening of The Way, which opens today, I knew very little about the film; only that it
stars Martin Sheen and is directed by his son, Emilio Estevez, and that it
involves pilgrims hiking El Camino de Santiago, a
450-mile historical pilgrimage route across northern Spain.

This year's Sundance festival featured several films offering unflattering portrayals of evangelical Christianity. Alison Willmore raises a good question about independent cinema.