I know I promised you something really tasty this week. Actually, I promised it to you two weeks ago. Well, it — The Great Beauty — has been moved back again. (I had nothing to do with this.) Will it open next week? Maybe. And that’s as far as I’m committing myself at this point. In its stead, we do have four movies of the mainstream variety. There’s one pretty fair possibility and three long shots. You may want to consider movies that are still playing — or some of the awards contenders that are making encore appearances.

I promised you a better week and here it is — though it’s shy one title I was expecting. That said, we get five new movies this week, and three of them have merit. One of them has a lot of merit. The other two — well, you can’t have everything. Just remember that this pretty much washes up the 2013 holdovers (apart from the one that didn’t open). And that means it’s probably lean times ahead. Get your movies while the getting’s good.

OK, so only one of the Christmas Day openings was worth seeing. That’s still one more than this week promises. There are two bright sides to this. First of all, you can catch up with all the good movies you still haven’t seen. Second, next week, a pretty strong blast of movies you’ve been waiting to see finally make it to the provinces — including one terrific movie you don’t even know you’re waiting on.

Christmas is upon us and it comes bearing Martin Scorsese, Keanu Reeves, Robert DeNiro, Sylvester Stallone, Ben Stiller (as director) and Ben Stiller (as star). At least the first of those is a good thing. One of them is OK. The rest represent what we call an unknown quantity. It is also a quantity of which I am deeply skeptical. Since at least some of these are in my future, I put on my Christmas cheer face and hope for the best. (Yeah, I’m not fooling myself either.)