Freeze Frame: "One Battle After Another" (R), "Gabby's Dollhouse: The Movie" (G), "Dead of Winter" (R), "Eleanor the Great" (PG-13)

Freeze Frame

Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson once again proves to be one of the world's top filmmakers with his thinking man's action thriller, "One Battle After Another." Inspired by Thomas Pynchon's novel "Vineland," Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn star in a spellbinding, entertaining and profane tale involving wannabe revolutionaries, racism, military corruption, secret political cabals...and much more. Smart and masterfully made, "One Battle After Another” easily one of the year's best movies. Parents with preschool girls know that "Gabby's Dollhouse" is the partly live-action, partly animated Netflix series about a girl who shrinks herself to doll size for adventures with her tiny doll pals. The theatrical version "Gabby's Dollhouse: The Movie" works surprisingly well thanks to imaginative art direction and a funny performance by Kristen Wiig as a cat-obsessed villainess. While squarely aimed at the tots, it's pleasantly painless for parents. The dark action thriller "Dead of Winter" stars Emma Thompson as a woman ice fishing in remote Minnesota who stumbles upon a ramshackle cabin where a strange couple have kidnapped a young woman. It's so well acted that one can almost forgive how unrelentingly grim it is. “Dead of Winter” is suspenseful but mostly unpleasant and implausible. With her directorial debut, Scarlett Johansson shows she’s been paying attention. Ninety-five-year-old June Squibb stars in the touching story of a woman who pretends to be a Holocaust survivor, befriending a teenager enamored with her and her bogus story. Squibb and young Erin Kellyman are excellent in “Eleanor the Great,” a sweet-natured comic drama about the results of questionable choices.