I’m willing to forgive you if, when you hear the title Spring Breakers, you just assume it’s the latest all-American Hangover-inspired teen sex and drugs party orgy with schlumby male leads eager to make a name for themselves as Risky Business types.  

Edward I. Koch died on Feb. 1, 2013, the day Neil Barsky’s documentary Koch premiered beyond the festival circuit. Talk about timing.  

Cincinnati is home to my body and my head. After almost 13 years, I’m grounded here thanks to a strong network of friends and family. But, my heart, well, let’s just say it’s holding out. Home, for my heart, is all about those extra-special intangibles, which in part come down to movie memories.   

ReelAbilities: Cincinnati Disabilities Film Festival (March 9-16, 2013), in its second year of programming, continues to offer alternative stories featuring performers and characters with disabilities actively and artfully engaged with mainstream society.  

Two-time Academy Award nominee Kirby Dick wages a timely battle with this War, highlighting several soldiers, mainly female, but altogether these precious few are only a handful next to the thousands of cases of rape in the military (both reported and unreported) that occur every year.  

By all accounts, authors Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl have fashioned a more literate set of romantic teen stories, beginning with Beautiful Creatures, that traffic in the tried-and-true world of forbidden love between mortals and supernatural beings.   

In The Last Stand, a few opening weekend masochists forced themselves to watch as Schwarzenegger’s small border town sheriff and a ragtag collection of kooky deputies fought against a supposedly elite extraction team seeking to transport a notorious racecar driving drug kingpin back across the border.  

Amour, the brave new film from Michael Haneke, is a story that speaks to the notion and philosophies espoused by Dr. Cornel West, in particular, his consideration of what it means to be human.  

Summing up a year’s worth of movies can be tricky. Top 10 lists often yield more questions than answers. The subjective nature of the endeavor inevitably reveals personal interests, quirks and prejudices, all of which can be either intriguing or infuriating depending on whether you agree with a given compiler’s cinematic worldview.   

Sometimes the true pleasure of a film, especially a documentary, is having the opportunity to bask in the presence of someone you wish you could invite into your home for dinner or head off on an epic road trip with.