When director Spike Lee publicly criticized Quentin Tarantino’s slavery-themed film Django Unchained last week, the real surprise for some was that anyone was actually shocked. As one prominent female African-American actress noted, Lee “always goes after Tarantino. So I expected that from him. I wasn’t surprised.”

Others, including African-American director Antoine Fuqua, were less charitable. “That’s not the way you do things,” Fuqua said of Lee’s two very public swipes at the Tarantino film. “If you disagree with the way a colleague did something, you call him up, invite him for coffee, talk about it. But don’t do it publicly.”

Lee (School Daze, Do The Right Thing) has long championed a more balanced view of African-American life on the big screen and has been an outspoken opponent of anyone he deemed unwilling to follow suit, including such industry power figures as Clint Eastwood and George Lucas. The New York filmmaker has been a particular—and frequent—critic of Tarantino’s work, repeatedly taking issue with Tarantino’s casual use of the “N” word in such films as Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown.

The author and host of the Tavis Smiley show discusses filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s treatment of black culture in the new Western Django Unchained and asks why Hollywood can’t get it right on the legacy of slavery.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts on Django Unchained. What was your initial reaction to the film?

I refuse to see it. I’m not going to pay to see it. But I’ve read the screenplay, and I have 25 family members and friends who have seen it, and have had thousands of conversations about this movie, so I can tell you frame by frame what happens. I’m troubled that Hollywood won’t get serious about making an authentic film about the holocaust of slavery but they will greenlight a spoof about slavery, and it’s as if this spoof about slavery somehow makes slavery a bit easier to swallow. The suffering of black people is not reducible to revenge and retribution. The black tradition has taught the nation what it means to love. Put it another way: black people have learned to love America in spite of, not because of, so if the justification for the film in the end is, as Jamie Foxx’s Django says, “What, kill white people and get paid for it? What’s wrong with that?”­ well again, black suffering is not reducible to revenge and retribution.

We get to watch the Rachel McAdams and Jennifer Anistons of the world get epically kissed on an annual basis. (We hear McAdams’s smooch scene in The Vow was pretty great this year.) But how often do you see an undead vampire rip an entire living room apart with his loving (à la Dark Shadows), or a prostitute fall for a dwarf (Tyrion and Shae!), or Liz Lemon get married in a Princess Leia costume? 2012 was a year filled with memorable kisses, and here we present 15 of the best, from Downton Abbey to The Hunger Games and more.

‘The Amazing Spider-Man’

Though not quite as iconic as that other Spider-Man kiss, The Amazing Spider-Man held its own in the kiss department. Peter Parker (James Garfield) reveals his superpowers to Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) by spider-web-lassoing her into his arms and then planting his lips on her utterly confused face. He then jumps off a building to go fight crime, leaving Stacy totally smitten—and more than a little apprehensive. “I’m in trouble,” she breathes.

As we approach the 34th anniversary of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the commercial success of Ben Affleck’s film Argo is a timely reminder of the great tragedy that severed relations between Iran and the United States. During most of the 20th century these two great countries enjoyed generally cordial and constructive relations.

It is baffling that after 33 years of the Islamic Republic, with its dreadful record on human rights, abuses, and excesses, the director found it necessary to open Argo with a distorted and one-dimensional picture of life in Iran before the revolution. Understandably, Argo is not a documentary. But it is a motion picture which purports to re-enact true events about recent Iranian history. Affleck told Interview magazine that he went to special lengths to achieve historical accuracy, to the point where he considered traveling to Iran (he said he was dissuaded from making the trip by his studio and by the U.S. State Department). “I wanted to go—just for research—very badly,” he said. “I really wanted to be accurate.”

Yet very little about the first few minutes of Argo can be described as accurate. Over the years, the Pahlavi era has been hailed for its successes and criticized for its failings. Some criticisms are fair, others are not, just as some are truthful and others have no bearing whatsoever on reality. This is part of the natural process of trying to understand our collective experiences. All societies examine and reexamine their histories. We also understand that life on the public stage invites scrutiny. Nonetheless, Argo pushes the boundaries of fairness and truthfulness beyond what some would regard as acceptable norms even for a Hollywood movie.

A year ago, I began hearing chatter from those in the know in the entertainment industry about the Steven Spielberg film Lincoln. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Tommy Lee Jones, the movie is based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Team of Rivals. The book masterfully follows the Lincoln presidency through the lens of his relationships with three key cabinet members who were also his opponents for election in 1860. 

Spielberg’s film is more narrowly focused on the last four months of Lincoln’s life and his efforts to get the 13th Amendment to the Constitution passed by the House of Representatives to formally end slavery in the United States. 

Though several of my friends ventured out to see Lincoln and eagerly came back with rave reviews, I had little interest in revisiting the painful past of slavery—especially through eyes of white Hollywood or a heroic biography of Lincoln. 

Actress Kerry Washington doesn’t often get the chance to play the damsel in distress in her current role on TV. As Olivia Pope on the ABC show Scandal, Washington is a no-nonsense D.C. powerhouse who’s never met a problem she couldn’t fix.

But Washington and her perfectly placed cheekbones do a complete 180-degree this week in the new Quentin Tarantino film, Django Unchained.

As Broomhilda, Washington plays a slave who’s been sold away from her husband, Django (Jamie Foxx), and the plantation where they lived together. Samuel L. Jackson and Leonardo DiCaprio also star in the film.

Revolutionary fervor in seizing the barricades for change makes for great theater and grand cinema, but seldom produces the positive results that young idealists desire. Those constructive consequences come much more reliably from middle-aged, middle-class virtues, patience, planning, deferred gratification, hard work, incremental improvement—with far less flash and glory.

That’s the problem at the very heart of the magnificent new movie version of Les Miserables, an obvious front-runner for nominations in every major category in this year’s Oscar race. In faithfully adapting the hit stage show, which in turn followed the classic outlines of the revered Victor Hugo novel of 1862, the movie hands audiences an inescapably disturbing and ultimately dishonest conclusion. It’s unsettling rather than uplifting—not at all what the heroic filmmakers (led by director Tom Hooper, who previously did brilliant work on The King’s Speech) intended.

The final segment of the sprawling story focuses on a bloody incident of French history: the failed “June Rebellion” of 1832. Following the wrenching disruption and slaughter of the original French Revolution (beginning in 1789), the constant warfare of the Napoleonic era, the emperor’s exile and brief return (1815), re-institution of the monarchy, and another violent uprising in 1830 that installed the “Citizen King” Louis-Phillipe, the short-lived revolt dramatized in the novel and movie would be largely forgotten were it not for Les Miserables. The failure of the student-led uprising, culminating in nearly 200 deaths in two days of street battles, produced only more repression, and then more grisly turmoil, until another Revolution in 1848 gave way to another Emperor (Napoleon III). That imperial episode collapsed after disastrous defeat in a major war with Prussia (1870), and the brutal failure of the world's first Communist revolution (1871), yet another forlorn and violent attempt to bring on a glorious new day.

The movie adaptation of Les Misérables finally hits theaters this week and is already garnering raves. (Oscar, are you out there?)

The film, based on the enormously successful Broadway musical, is a sprawling historical epic set against the backdrop of revolutionary France. Now, mention of the French Revolution usually conjures up images of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette recommending that hungry subjects eat cake before being led off the guillotine. But neither makes an appearance here. In fact, both those guys lost their heads by 1793, while the events of Les Miserables don’t begin until 1815. Here’s what else you might not know:

The Monarchy

The French Revolution ended the age of absolute monarchy in France, but was followed by the Reign of Terror, a violent spell in which rival factions dueled it out for power, resulting in the executions of nearly 40,000 people. What emerged from the rubble was an empire under Napoleon I. A popular general, Napoleon Bonaparte came to power after a coup d’état in 1799. He was made first consul, then consul for life in 1802, and then emperor in 1804. But Napoleon’s dynasty did not last quite as long as the monarchy that had come before it—his collapsed in 1814 after a series of military defeats, including a failed invasion of Russia. He was briefly restored the following year, after escaping from his island exile. But his restoration was brief. Following the famous defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon was exiled once more—this time to an island much further away.

When Naomi Watts is suffering, her sweet visage transmogrifies into a ghastly goulash of misery—like Picasso’s Weeping Woman or the stunned victims in her first Hollywood film, The Ring. And, whether it’s a schizo aspiring actress in Mulholland Drive or a woman who loses her entire family to a car crash in 21 Grams, no other actor can capture torment onscreen like Watts.

“I’m actually a lighter person, but things have happened in my life that have informed who I am, and there are times that it’s available to be called upon,” says Watts. “My father died when I was very young, which created some level of pain and sadness that’s been in me since an early age.”

In her latest film, The Impossible, Watts plays Maria, a woman on Christmas vacation with her husband (Ewan McGregor) and three young sons in Thailand. Their idyllic getaway comes to a screeching halt when, on the morning of December 26, 2004, a tsunami tears through the coastal region, separating the family. When the waters subside, they search for one another amid the devastation. The movie is directed by Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage) and based on the true story of Maria Belon, a Spanish doctor who, along with her family, miraculously survived the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Just in time for this holiday season, the big American media machine has a slew of products that depict Operation Neptune Spear—the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Books, video games, made-for-TV movies, and Hollywood epics: this military operation is the gift that keeps on giving. After all, catching Public Enemy No. 1 deserves only our very best holiday effort. But it’s not the end product that is driving our fascination—it’s the unique and unprecedented recipe that Hollywood itself could never cook up, even with its own army of writers.

So before you venture off into the market place for your SEAL Team Six fix, take a look at our breakdown and how each of the following works decided to interpret the story and its facts. In the mix, we have:

—Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s Zero Dark Thirty
—John Stockwell’s National Geographic Channel made-for-TV movie SEAL Team Six
—Mark Bowden’s The Finish—The Killing Of Osama Bin Laden
—Mark Owen’s (nom de plume) No Easy Day
—Medal of Honor “Warfighter”

“I think the essence of love is being there for the other person, no matter what that involves,” says Michael Haneke.

An exploration of love is one of the last things you’d expect from the oft-prickly Austrian auteur, whose sinister oeuvre, includes—but is not limited to—the sad travails of a sadomasochistic piano professor (The Piano Teacher), a dark French-Algerian race-relations allegory (Caché), and a stark portrait of the origins of fanaticism (The White Ribbon). Haneke, however, is in a decidedly genial mood on an overcast fall day in midtown Manhattan—and with good reason.

His latest film, Amour, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is the Austrian submission for the Best Foreign Film Oscar (despite being in French), and recently was named not just the best foreign film of the year but the best film of the year by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association as well as A.O Scott of The New York Times. It has a great chance to be the first foreign-language film to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar since 2006’s Letters From Iwo Jima, and the first entirely foreign production to achieve that milestone since 2000’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

In the time it takes to sit through this year’s new holiday movies, you could do a lot of other things. For example, finish all your Christmas shopping, roast a turkey, drive to the airport, and fly to Hong Kong. If you don’t believe me, just look at the numbers.

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is a laborious 150 minutes. Both Les Misérables and Zero Dark Thirty are 7 minutes longer than that. Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained trudges along at 165 minutes. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey doesn’t just have a bloated title, but 169 minutes of Middle-earth sword fighting and Gollum hissing the word “precious” over and over. At least that’s what I think happens. I may have dozed off at some point.

At 143 minutes, Sam Mendes’s Skyfall is the second-longest James Bond, just a minute shy of 2006’s Casino Royale. The terrible Cloud Atlas, released in October, clocks in at 172 minutes but feels more like 172 days. Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, a movie about something (who knows what!), keeps you hostage for 144 minutes. I kept thinking how I’d rather be watching Flight on a plane to Miami (138 minutes), even after that terrifying crash scene. In comparison, Life of Pi’s 127 minutes almost felt brisk, and it still could have been leaner. (I loved Les Miz and Zero Dark Thirty, but I would say the same about both of those.)