What hath Bad Santa wrought? Does the unexpected success of 2003’s cult comedy mean that Hollywood will be compelled to trot out a yule-deflating movie every December? Last year brought Surviving Christmas and the atrocious Christmas with the Kranks. This year brings The Ice Harvest, a noir wannabe with patches of black comedy that are initially amusing but in the long run prevent the story from gaining traction.

Bee Season stars Richard Gere as a Jewish theologian who uses his study of Kabbalah to help his 9-year-old daughter become a national spelling champion.

The new movie version of Pride & Prejudice is probably the most luxuriantly sensual of the several screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s famous 1813 novel of manners, morals, the marriage market and social status. I’m not referring to the by-now infamous last scene of love that’s been added from out-of-nowhere in the version released in the States (and not in England and Europe). I mean the richly detailed, handsomely rendered settings, both in and out of doors. Joe Wright’s movie manages to be both lush and naturalistic. The evocation of Regency England by designer Sarah Greenwood and Wright, assisted by cinematographer Roman Osins, is alluring but convincing.

“That doesn’t remind us of ‘Musetta’s Waltz,’” someone jokes during a production number in the movie adaptation of Rent, as a musician (Adam Pascal) plays a few amplified guitar chords of that melody from Puccini’s opera, “La Boheme.” It’s a mildly self-deprecating, self-consciously amusing line.

The Squid and the Whale is the kind of film that’s called “autobiographical” or “thinly fictionalized.” (One writer has dubbed it a “thinly fictionalized autobiographical film.”) Much of the interest it’s attracted has been aroused by its source material: The family history of writer-director Noah Baumbach and his depiction of a character who is an exaggerated version of his father, the novelist Jonathan Baumbach. Given the extremes to which he has gone to portray his old man unflatteringly, the most interesting aspect of this comedy’s production may be the older man’s reported approval of the results.