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Dragonwyck (d. Joseph L. Mankiewicz) - This is one of Vincent Price's very early Gothic thriller/melodrama roles (it's also the first film by Mankiewicz). The story is basically that a young woman (Gene Tierney) is overwhelmed by the wealth and smoothness of distant relative and wealthy landowner, Nicholas Van Ryn (Price). Then when she marries him, she finds out he's a crazy asshole. Price is wonderful, as always, and his final breakdown is terrific -- nobody did sweaty, arrogant psychic disintegration quite like Price -- but Mankiewicz seemed a bit too concerned with making his film important -- laying on the plight-of-the-worker stuff a bit too heavy -- and therefore, in his mind (I'm wildly speculating) better than your standard genre film, and the result is that the film sags. There's a terrific efficiency to the best genre films, especially from this era (the film was made in 1946), so that when a film like Dragonwyck makes a transparent attempt to rise above them, it's hard not to see why those other films are so very good..
Summer Hours (d. Olivier Assayas) - This beautiful and beautifully acted French film, about a wealthy French family, whose matriarch passes away in an early scene, struggling to deal with her estate (consisting mainly of a gorgeous country home, and a sprawling collection of artwork), is not actually about family strife so much as it is about losing your past, and how much more meaningful art can be to the individual than it ever will be as art. Charles Berling, as the eldest son Frederic, gets the top marks, but as I said, everyone is superb. And for a movie with such a small, intimate story, there's an incredible pace to it, of the kind that would utterly confuse your run-of-the-mill contemporary thriller filmmaker. Carried along, no doubt, by those performances. Top shelf.
Johnny Guitar (d. Nicholas Ray) - A quite strange Western from the 1950s, featuring Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge as the White Hat and the Black Hat, respectively. A lot has been made of this gender twist on the traditional Western, but the film itself doesn't hammer on any particular point: this is just the story, and these are just the characters. Mind you, its tone is less that of a Western than it is a melodrama, or "women's picture", of the kind that Douglas Sirk made at his most bombastic (which shouldn't be taken as a criticism of Sirk). But if it works, it works, so why complain about bombast, if that's the goal, and the goal is struck dead center? Besides which, any film that features Sterling Hayden and Ernest Borgnine can't be that bad. The fact that Hayden plays the title character who is also the Mysterious Stranger shouldn't confuse one into thinking that Joan Crawford isn't, in fact, the star (she's great, too, as is McCambridge). So what it is, in fact, is a genre mash-up; while that idea tends to yield horror-comedies, or horror-Westerns, or horror-SF, here we have Western-melodrama, which is actually a hybrid with a long history. All of which I suppose to say that I'm a bit curious why so many people think Johnny Guitar is so bizarre. .
Extract (d. Mike Judge) - Each of Mike Judge's live-action films (I'm excluding Beavis and Butthed Do America, because I remember that being a bit of a sensation at the time) has taken its own sweet time finding an audience. Office Space and Idiocracy were both dumped by their studios, and each has gained cult audiences of varying degrees of healthiness. His newest film, Extract, actually got a legitimate theatrical release, and still nobody went. Nobody who did go seemed overly taken with it, and my expectations were therefore low. But I really enjoyed it, as it turns out. It's not as near-perfect as Office Space, or as occasionally riotous as Idiocracy, but unlike that latter film it also doesn't run out of steam in the last third. It's consistently genial and entertaining, bolstered by a terrific cast of outstanding deadpan comic performers -- Jason Bateman, J. K. Simmons, Kristen Wiig, Ben Affleck, and the inhumanly attractive Mila Kunis, to name a few. Mike Judge knows ordinary people, and he knows what's so funny about them.
Dead Snow (d. Tommy Wirkola) - This movie was fun enough, I suppose, but if you're going to make a movie that spoofs other zombie movies, don't get around to the spoofing eventually. Don't play it reasonably straight for half the movie, possibly longer, and then go all zany and madcap all of a sudden. I'd prefer a movie about zombie Nazis in the snow to be played as straight as possible, myself, but if I can't have that I'd at least like a filmmaker who can commit to a tone. 
