This week’s movie releases

The Ides of March, George Clooney’s fourth outing as a director, is a political drama set behind the scenes during a tight Democratic primary race in Ohio. As charismatic candidate Mike Morris, Clooney performs the neat trick of slipping into a supporting role while remaining center of attention. The lead here goes to Ryan Gosling as his smart, ambitious and idealistic junior campaign manager, Stephen Meyers.

He has gulped down the Morris Kool-Aid and is utterly committed to getting him into the White House, until a secret meeting, an unwanted pregnancy and even darker discoveries start to complicate his devotion. Uncharted territory this definitely isn’t, though the spectacle of the top-drawer cast — Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Evan Rachel Wood and Marisa Tomei — tearing into each and every showdown certainly helps overcome the feeling that you’re watching a sluggish West Wing episode.

What it lacks is a more overarching vision driving it forward. The upping of the dramatic ante comes as a jolt and doesn’t quite feel as diabolical as the filmmakers would like. 

Martian chronicle 

John Carter is Disney’s big-budget adaptation of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs’ sci-fi series, now 100 years old, about an American Civil War veteran inexplicably catapulted to the warring planet of Barsoom — or, plain-old Mars to us earthlings. Directed by Wall-E’s Andrew Stanton, it stars Taylor Kitsch as the old-fashioned hero and Willem Dafoe, Lynn Collins, Samantha Morton and Mark Strong as assorted Martians.

In McG’s romantic comedy This Means War, Chris Pine and Tom Hardy play best friends competing for the hand of Reese Witherspoon, with the twist that both are also CIA agents, using every tool of their trade to get the edge.

Everyone has heard about The Artist by now, but the other big French success of the year is Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano’s Intouchables. Inspired by a true story, this feel-good film about a wheelchair-bound millionaire and the Senegalese ex-young offender he hires as his caregiver has broken box-office records and has become a cultural phenomenon in its home country.

From Spain, Paula Ortiz’s De tu ventana a la mía interweaves three different love stories about three different women — Leticia Dolera, Maribel Verdú and Luisa Gavasa — in three different period of Spanish history: 1923, 1941 and 1975.

Meanwhile, horror thriller Dictado stars Juan Diego Botto and Bárbara Lennie as a couple who take in the daughter of a childhood friend who recently committed suicide, but soon find young Julia is awakening disturbing memories of a past Botto’s character had wanted to forget.