Save for the Oscar-winning “The Return of the King” and the classic “Goldfinger,” third installments typically disappoint. The detritus of these dismal offerings litters the film landscape: “The Godfather: Part III,” “Return of the Jedi,” “X-Men: The Last Stand,” “Superman III” and “Shrek the Third,” to name but a few. Much like the company's entire existence, Pixar defies traditional thought with “Toy Story 3.”

Ten years after the conclusion of “Toy Story 2,” the new film begins with the toys' beloved Andy preparing for college. Through a series of mishaps, the gang — Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), Jessie (Joan Cusack), Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head (Don Rickles, Estelle Harris), Rex (Wallace Shawn), Hamm (John Ratzenberger), Slinky Dog (Blake Clark) and Barbie (Jodi Benson), freshly exiled from little sister Molly's room — end up in a daycare center at the mercy of destructive toddlers. The intrepid crew, squabbling all the way, attempt to escape their prison and return to Andy.

Gender politics are at the heart of this script director-actress Agnés Jaoui co-wrote with her husband, Jean-Pierre Bacri.

Interested in putting together a documentary on an influential woman, Michel (Bacri) and Karim (Jamel Debbouze) approach the only influential woman they know: Agathe (Jaoui), a feminist author who is visiting her childhood home in the south of France to run for an election and help her sister sort out their mother’s affairs. Karim knows her best: His mother Mimouna (Mimouna Hadji, a nonpro on whom the character is based) has been her family’s housekeeper since she was a girl. What Agathe doesn’t know is that Michel is sleeping with her sister Florence (Pascale Arbillot), who is married with children.

Michel and Karim, it turns out, are ill equipped to mange even this modest project. Miscommunication, forgotten batteries and the titular weather all conspire to render their shoot a comedy of errors.

The script crackles with authentic dialogue between two sets of people who love one another — a man and a woman and a mother and son. Working at their own wonderful pace, writers-directors Jay and Mark Duplass continue to make quirky films, each one incrementally an improvement over the last. The latest from the brothers who brought us “The Puffy Chair” and “Baghead” is “Cyrus,” a film radiating with a joy for filmmaking. John C. Reilly plays John, a lonely man who is unable to control his inner sadness. This melancholy has already cost him a wife, Jamie (Catherine Keener). Fortunately for John, he and Jamie are still friends and Jamie invites John to a party. At the party, John displays his social ineptitude with poor pickup lines and easy inebriation. It’s a rough go until John meets a woman who would really be out of his league, Molly (Marisa Tomei).

Graphic violence in an engaging, quick-paced 149-minute film underscores the message that violence is an allure for far too many Americans. Other than Gaspar Noé’s “Enter the Void” (which had already been seen by audiences last year at Cannes), director Michael Winterbottom’s “The Killer Inside Me” has generated the most controversy at Sundance 2010. The film has left more than a few critics and viewers appalled at its graphic scenes of violence toward women. In addition to some tough questions volleyed at Winterbottom after one of the film’s screenings here, I’ve heard more than one woman accuse it of being misogynist and angrily wanting to know, “How could Sundance have let a film like that into the festival?”

However, more men than women are killed in “The Killer Inside Me,” begging the question: How is the violence toward women in the film worse than the violence toward men? In every murderous incident, the victim is unsuspecting and weaker.

Central to Davis and Heilbroner’s film are the three turbulent days of the Stonewall Riots, widely considered the launch of the gay rights movement, which was sparked by the type of police raid that gays at the time had accepted as the way of life. “We were used to it,” one survivor matter-of-factly relates. “[We felt], ‘That’s the way the world is.’”

Simply to be homosexual was illegal, and the consequence of having it known was frightening. Effectively interspersing into the Stonewall footage interviews with those who lived those times and segments of ‘50s public service announcements, Davis and Heilbroner present a reality that makes one wonder how anyone could believe so hellish a life would be a choice: Social ostracism aside, there was loss of job opportunities (homosexuals could not get a license to practice professions from law and medicine to beautician) and subjection to such medical treatments as sterilization and lobotomies. 

It’s taken 11 years for the producer and star of “I Am Love,” Tilda Swinton, to get her cinematic lovechild with Sicilian director, Luca Guadagnino, off the drawing board and onto the big screen. The question is: Has it been worth the wait?

“I Am Love” begins in a Milan cold and quiet beneath a blanket of snow. The Recchis are preparing for Grandpa Recchi’s (Gabriele Ferzetti) birthday dinner. As preparations are made, we watch the uniformed staff beetling around an imposing marble-and-mahogany landscape filled with antiques and massive doorways.

At the centre of all this Art Deco grandeur is the quiet and perfectly presented Emma (Swinton), the Russian wife of uptight Tancredi (Pippo Delbono), heir presumptive to the throne of the Recchi business empire. Retiring Grandpa Recchi, however, has other plans and upsets the apple cart by naming two successors: the father/son team of Tancredi and Edoardo (Flavio Parenti).

“My compositions are my life. I would die for them.” It’s not Gustav Mahler (Johannes Silberschneider) who says this but his future wife Alma (Barbara Romaner) in this biopic that focuses on the composer’s relationship with her rather than Sigmund Freud (Karl Markovics) as the title implies. Mahler’s desperate visit to the famed psychoanalyst instead provides a framework for revisiting his marriage to a vivacious socialite 19 years his junior.

The film begins at the end: Mahler has discovered that Alma has embarked on an affair with Walter Gropius (Friedrich Mücke), an architect who will later found the Bauhaus school of design. Devastated, Mahler seeks out Freud, who has delayed his vacation for an intense all-night session with the musician. (That Mahler reclines on a cot rather than a couch indicates how unusual their meeting is.) Mahler is wracked by guilt over Alma’s betrayal, and the two cultural icons must dig into Mahler’s past to discover why.

In an oeuvre of projects inspired by her own life, “The Kids Are All Right” is perhaps writer-director Lisa Cholodenko’s most personal. While working on the script with co-writer Stuart Blumberg, she and her partner, musician Wendy Melvoin, considered pregnancy and opted, ultimately, for anonymous sperm donation. Meanwhile, in college, Blumberg had donated sperm. “Kids” is the ultimate intellectual exercise based on those experiences: What if the child of a same-sex couple wanted to meet his or her other biological parent — and did?

The moms in this case are Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore), a tightly wound doctor and free-spirited dabbler who met in college and have been together ever since. They have built a domestic life that is in many ways traditional: Nic is the breadwinner, Jules is the stay-at-home mother, and they live in a cozy suburban Southern California home with their two kids — 18-year-old Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and 15-year-old Laser (Josh Hutcherson).

Filippos Tsitos, who co-wrote as well as directed, takes the ever-timely issue of tolerance to a deeper level in “Plato’s Academy.” What if “those” people, inferior beings who you feel do not even belong in your country, turn out to be … you?

Much of the conflict in the movie simmers as internal turmoil for Stavros (Antonis Kafetzopoulos), who is introduced in scene one as the weary but patient sole caretaker of his elderly mother. “Sometimes she doesn’t even know me,” he worries to the doctor at the overcrowded clinic. “Another stroke could kill her,” is the doctor’s only comment.

Stavros settles his mother to bed and escapes his apartment to motorcycle over to visit Demi, and reveals another level of his melancholy as he tries to convince his former girlfriend to come back into his life. Nor are his inner-city surroundings likely to raise his spirits; this is not the Greece of travel posters.

The very first images in “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” are of something you’ve never seen before and never will again: Joan Rivers without makeup. With these extreme close-ups, directors Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg make a statement: This is a documentary of the comedy icon unmasked. The pair, known for their films about genocide (“The Devil Came on Horseback”) and social injustice (“The Trials of Darryl Hunt”), followed the 75-year-old for 14 months, filming her at home and at work, and structured the resulting footage into a thesis about aging in youth-obsessed show business.

What emerges is a fairly candid portrait of a workaholic driven by insecurity, resentment and fear. Interwoven among standup performances, the development of a new play and book-signing appearances are archival footage, home movies and personal photographs that revisit her pioneering career as a taboo-busting comedienne, her legendary friendship and fallout with Johnny Carson and the suicide of her husband, Edgar.