Well, the Academy has announced its nominations and we’ve all had a nice long think about what constitutes great cinema. Time for the studios to remind us that it’s mid-January, and crap is king. But wait! The smaller distributors still have some decent titles in their quivers …

A Ballerina’s Tale: Hey, remember when Nelson George did my podcast? He was in town to launch this documentary, which follows the ballerina Misty Copeland as she rebounds — fairly heroically — from a devastating injury.

Band of Robbers: Aaron and Adam Nee bring Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn into the present day — and manage to make a movie that’s oddly simpatico with Mark Twain’s books while still being very much its own thing. Plus, Stephen Lang is genuinely terrifying as Injun Joe.

Mustang: Susan really loved this upstart Turkish film, which arrives in theatres just a day after landing a well-deserved Oscar nomination for Best Foreign-Language Film. (France submitted it. These things can be complicated.)

Norm of the North: Rob Schneider plays a talking polar bear who travels from the Arctic to New York with three indestructible lemmings to save his homeland from a greedy developer and oh god this was so awful I wanted to punch myself in the face let me die let me die.

Palio: The annual Palio di Siena is a high-speed, high-stakes race where anything goes. It’s The Fast and the Furious with horses! Or at least that’s how documentarian Cosima Spender sees it.

Ride Along 2: Ice Cube and Kevin Hart, together again! And Olivia Munn in a sports bra, for some reason. Rad does a very good job of explaining why the movie fails to make use of its leads.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi: Oh, Michael Bay. Is there any military theme you cannot fetishize beyond all reason? Well, at least John Krasinski got a good workout for his trouble. (My review will also be up later today.)

And that, dear friends, is that. Oh, except that I’ll be appearing on CTV News Channel Saturday morning at around 11:15 — live from New York! — to discuss the Oscars. Because that is my life now. I’ll post the link when I can.