This week’s movie releases

Punching above its weight in the eyes of some with eight Oscar nods, romantic comedy drama Silver Linings Playbook is the new movie from the talented and temperamental David O. Russell, director of The Fighter. Bradley Cooper stars as a man with bipolar disorder who moves back in with his football-obsessed parents (Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver) to restart his life after eight months in a mental institution. The Hunger Games’ Jennifer Lawrence is the troubled young woman who promises to help him get back with his wife but ends up complicating everything.

Having spent the last decade dabbling in digital animation with the likes of The Polar Express, Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis returns to live-action filmmaking with Flight. An Oscar-nominated Denzel Washington plays an airline pilot who’s hailed a hero after he performs an emergency landing and saves his passengers. But how much were his addiction problems to blame for the incident in the first place?

With four Academy Award nominations, including one for its precocious eight-year-star Quvenzhané Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild is an offbeat fantasy from first-time director Benh Zeitlin. With echoes of the Katrina disaster, it’s set in a bayou community isolated from the mainland by a giant wall, where a girl and her dying father struggle to survive as a storm hits.

Tale of Hoffman

At a ripe-old 75, Dustin Hoffman steps behind the camera for the first time to deliver Quartet. Based on a play by The Pianist screenwriter Ronald Harwood, it stars Tom Courtenay, Pauline Collins and Billy Connolly as residents of a retirement home for opera singers who mark their beloved Verdi’s birthday each year with a concert. But the arrival of Courtenay’s ex-wife, Maggie Smith, the former fourth member of their quartet, throws everything in the air.

The brainchild of Peter Farrelly, one half of the Farrelly brothers, Movie 43 is a robust comedy in 12 parts, each directed by a different filmmaker, and featuring a rolodex of Hollywood’s biggest names: Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Gerard Butler, Naomi Watts and more...

This also seems to be clear-out week for several distributors as they put out some older titles that have been sitting on their shelves. Both produced in 2011, Coriolanus, which marks the directorial debut of Ralph Fiennes, is an update of one of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays, while documentary Project Nim tells the story of a chimpanzee raised as a human in the 1970s.

Lastly, the new film from Spain’s Fernando Colomo, La banda Picasso finds Pablo Picasso mixed up in a plot to steal the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.