This is one of the first years in a long time that I can remember being excited about the holiday movie offerings. Usually they are big budget or tug too broadly at the emotional heartstrings or herald huge explosions. Yawn. I can get plenty of that in my mindless summer flicks.

In the wintertime, I'm a little more available to nuanced feeling and subtle characterizations. Or just a lot of fun. This holiday season's movies seem to deliver on both fronts. Here are my top picks for this holiday movie season:

The Descendants. Released November 18. This Alexander Payne film perhaps looks less depressing than his other movies like About Schmidt and Sideways, but still has less than cheery family qualities. The story focuses on Matt King (George Clooney), a man who needs to sell off parts of his family's land in Hawaii. At the same time, King is dealing with the aftermath of his wife's boating accident and coma, and continuing to build relationships with his two young daughters, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and Scottie (Amara Miller).

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Released December 25. In one of the strangest happenings I've ever heard in a movie adapted from a book, the film version based of Jonathon Safran Foer's 2004 novel of the same name is supposed to be better than its literary namesake. Quite a feat, but Foer's cinematic novel was certainly ripe for big screen adaptation. The film stars Thomas Horn as the lead character Oskar Schell, a young boy who has lost his father in the September 11 terrorist attacks. Oskar is an inquisitive young man, and goes on a quest to find the lock to match the key his father gave him before his death. The movie is full of actors with serious acting chops including Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, Viola Davis and James Gandolfini.  

Albert Nobbs. Released December 21. Glenn Close played the title character on Broadway in 1982, and worked to get this movie made for the next fifteen years. Close felt particularly close to the sad and sweet Albert, an Irish woman who disguised herself as a man to work as a butler in a fancy Irish hotel. Albert is the epitome of a good worker, and hides his secret well, until he is discovered by a co-worker named Joe. The trailer for the movie seems to imply that Albert eventually forgets his femaleness, but also hopes to claim his independence as a shopkeeper and with a wife of his own. His love interest is the always-good Mia Wasikowska.