Theater-trained Julie Taymor's reach exceeds her grasp for a good half of this phantasmagoric story of young lovers caught up in the 1960s counterculture as seen through the prism of Beatles songs. When it doesn’t work, the movie sems trite and gimmicky, but when it does, it’s nothing short of breathtaking: Visually inventive — Taymor’s trademark — but also vividly attuned to the broad streak of melancholy that runs through some of the sunniest pop hits of the 1960s.

1968, Liverpool: Restless Jude (Sturgess) sits on a deserted beach, looking out to sea and plaintively singing "Is there anybody going to listen to my story?" Not unlike the four working-class boys who supplied the soundtrack, Jude is destined to one kind of life — marriage to his conventional girlfriend (Hogg), a dead-end shipyard job, weekly visits with his unmarried mum (Mounsey), who raised him alone after her wartime romance with an American soldier went bad — but dreams of another, one in which he can be an artist. So Jude abandons everyone and everything, working his way to the U.S. as a deckhand and then jumping ship in hopes of finding the father he's never met but has heard works at Princeton University. The reunion isn't all he'd hoped, starting with the fact that his dad is a janitor, but Jude falls in with free-spirited Max (Anderson), a wealthy WASP who hates his family's lock-jawed conformity and runs away to live la vie de boheme in Greenwich Village. Jude tags along, falls in love with Max's sister, Lucy (Wood), who just lost her high-school sweetheart to the Vietnam War, and bears witness to the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll revolution.

Their circle of friends and fellow travelers includes rockers Sexy Sadie (Fuchs) and JoJo (McCoy), cheerleader-turned-lesbian-hippie Prudence (Carpio), student radical Paco (Marshall-Green), merry prankster Dr. Robert (Bono), acid guru Mr. Kite (Izzard), and sundry dropouts, scene-makers and activists. Any resemblance to Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin (whom Fuchs played in the Off-Broadway musical Love, Janis), Weather Underground founder Mark Rudd and other iconic rebels, icons and legends is strictly intentional.

Beyond that, though, I'm not sure what to make of Alien Trespass, which is neither a spoof nor an homage… more like a reverential ritual designed to keep the movie memories of yesteryear alive. But since the films it evokes are still around and, if anything, more available than ever with us (you can see in its entirety It Came From Outer Space on YouTube, albeit broken into pieces: start here), the past's flame doesn't seem in desperate need of fanning.

1957: As a meteor shower lights up the sky over the Mojave desert, residents of a small desert town — including hormonal-but-decent teens Dick and Penny (Dunbar, Smyth), aspiring artist Tammy (Baird), drunken saucer-buff Wilson (McBeath), egghead Ted Lewis (McCormack) and his va-va-va-voom wife (Thompson) — see a puzzling object streak through the sky and crashes near a popular make-out spot at the edge of town. Dick and Penny, who are, naturally, in the middle of a steamy (but chaste) makeout session, hotfoot it out of there. Wilson stumbles out of his shack to great the visitors, but his close encounter scares the bejabbers out of him — maybe it was that head-to-toe silver jumpsuit. And Dr. Lewis — who, as an astronomer, owes it to science to investigate, slips out of the sleeping Lana's arms and winds up possessed by silver-suit guy, an intergalactic "Federal Marshall" named Urp, who accidentally lost a space monster — the ravenous, tentacled Ghota, which can reduce a human being to a puddle of slime without batting its gigantic single eye — and is desperate to get it back .

Lana immediately notices that her husband is acting, well, kind of crazy, speaking in the uniquely stilted cadences of '50s aliens and marvelling at stupid stuff like table salt. Urp/Dr. Lewis contrives to escape Lana's tender mercies: The Ghota is the cane toad of aliens, and must be stopped before it begins to reproduce!

Meanwhile, cops Vernon and Barnes (Patrick, Brocklebank) are besieged by reports of monsters on the loose; Dick and Penny's juvenile delinquent pal, Cody (Brooks), persuades them to revisit the crash site so he can take pictures with his dad's fancy new polaroid; and Tammy has an odd encounter with Dr. Lewis and Chief Dawson (Lauria) curses fate for visiting this nonsense on his town two days before he was due to retire.

Alien Trespass doesn't have a mean bone in its body: Fisher and X-Files veteran Goodwin are fans of vintage science fiction movies whose reach exceeds their threadbare grasp. The love is palpable. Goodwin and Fisher wrap their affectionate pastiche in a tongue-in-cheek back story told through pitch-perfect faux newsreels — scuttled by poverty-row mogul Lewis B. Goldstone after a feud with b-movie idol "M. Eric McCormack" (the grandfather of Will & Grace star Eric McCormack, wink, wink), Alien Trespass was believed lost until a print resurfaced five decades later &mdash and scrupulously reproduce the not-quite-perfect matte shots, theramin-goosed scores and endearingly unconvincing rear-projection of films like The Day the Earth Sood Still, This Island Earth and, of course, It Came From Outer Space.

Australian filmmaker David Michod’s gripping crime drama charts the slow unraveling of a family bound together by violence through the eyes of a teenage nephew unexpectedly thrust into their midst.

Seventeen-year-old Joshua “J” Cody (Frecheville) lives with his single mother, who’s estranged from her shady family and did her best to keep her son out of their reach. But when she dies of an overdose, the only person he can think of to call his grandmother, Janine (Weaver), known to everyone as “Smurf.” And she’s the answer to a suddenly unmoored boy’s prayers: Calm, comforting and decisive, she gently but firmly tells J to pack his things and come live with her in Melbourne — everything will work out, she promises.

As J quickly learns, Smurf’s blandly suburban ranch house is the only ordinary thing about her household, where life revolves around her three grown sons, J’s uncles. They’re three-quarters of an armed robbery crew so notorious that an unmarked police car has been parked across the street for weeks and her eldest, ringleader Pope (Mendelsohn), has been forced to leave the nest and hide out until the heat dies down. High-strung, heavily tattooed middle son Craig (Stapleton) deals drug on the side and is intimately familiar with his product, while Smurf’s youngest, the malleable Darren (Ford), is drifting inexorably into the family business.

The crew’s fourth member, Baz Brown (Edgerton), is the steadiest of the lot: Happily married and a father, Baz is sufficiently clear-eyed to realize that they’re all getting older, the cops are becoming more ruthless and this might be a good time to think seriously about easing out of the thug life.

So naturally it’s Baz who’s murdered by overzealous police officers as he sits in his car in a supermarket parking lot. J’s efforts to keep clear of the ensuing firestorm are futile: At an age when most boys are worrying about juggling girlfriends, schoolwork and a bit of fun with the lads, he’s trapped between persistent police detective Nathan Leckie (Pearce), who hopes J will turn state’s evidence, and the volatile, ruthless relatives he comes to realize would happily sacrifice him to save their own skins.

Set in the 1980s, screenwriter Michod’s directing debut is stunning — it’s as though he managed to shrink The Godfather to nuclear-family dimensions without losing any of its epic intensity. The casting is flawless, from first-timer Frecheville to experienced character actor Mendelsohn, but the film’s dark, discomfiting heart is Weaver’s grandma Smurf, whose impeccable make-up, sequined, sorbet-colored tops and warm embrace belie a predatory resolve so steely that sharks could take lessons. Her performance alone would make Animal Kingdom worth seeing, and the fact that it’s set in a film that never makes a false step is nothing short of astonishing.

This review originally appeared in slightly different form in Film Journal

Baz Luhrmann's epic tale of Northern Australia between 1939 and 1941, when it was a wild frontier not unlike the American West, recalls the old-fashioned, golden-age Hollywood movie-movies that wrapped forbidden desire, aching heartbreak, personal tragedy, war, adventure and breathtaking thrills in a glittering overlay of movie-star glamor. It's far from perfect, erring as it does on the side of sweeping visuals, broad characterization and shameless sentiment. But Gone With the Wind wasn't a subtle dissection of Southern history and mores either. Luhrmann, whose rural family briefly ran a movie theater, set out to make a rousing, romantic, all-encompassing spectacle, and that's exactly what he delivered.

If you're looking for brutal, feel-bad films about how the outback was won, have a look at Nick Cave and John Hillicoate's The Proposition (2005), Rolf de Heer's The Tracker (2003) or Gregor Jordan's Ned Kelly (2002), starring Heath Ledger as Australia's Billy the Kid. But if you're up for a rousing romp with just enough ideas in its glossy head that you don't have to feel thoroughly stupid for surrendering to its charms, Australia is the way to go.

Largely shot on location in the awesomely photogenic Outback, Australia opens in 1939 and is narrated by mixed-race child Nullah (Walters), born on the cattle ranch Faraway Downs to a devoted Aboriginal mother and a white overseer, Neil Fletcher (Wenham), to whom a bastard colored child is of no more use or consequence than a mongrel dog. Faraway Downs is owned by Englishman Maitland Ashley, whose prim and proper wife, Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman), is convinced that her husband is carrying on some kind of torrid affair in the land down under. She pays a surprise visit in hopes of catching him in flagrante, only to find him dead and the ranch on the brink of failure, thanks to the dastardly machinations of cattle baron King Carney (fellow Australian crossover star Brown), who with the help of opportunistic weasel Fletcher hopes to corner the market in beef for the British army. Lady Ashley may be a long-stemmed English rose, but she's not about to be pushed around by a pack of common hooligans descended from transported criminals.

In short order, she has allied herself with the sexy Drover (Jackman), a rugged cowboy who won't be fenced in by love or barbed wire; bonded with the charming, resourceful and newly motherless Nullah; and assembled a ragtag crew of women, children and the inevitable gentleman drunk (veteran Aussie actor Thompson) to thwart Carney by driving 1,500 head of Faraway Downs cattle to Darwin in time to stop upright Captain Emmett Dunham (Ben Mendelsohn) awarding Carney a monopoly. And that's only the beginning of Lady Ashley's journey, which culminates in the 1942 air raid on Darwin by Japanese kamikaze bombers.

French animator Michel Ocelot's jewel-like fable unfolds in a once-upon-a-time version of medieval North Africa alive with vibrant colors and dazzling patterns, both natural and manmade. It's an astonishing feat of visual imagination, every bit as beautiful as Ocelet's feature debut, the West African-folktale inspired Kirikou and the Sorceress (1998).

It opens in a stern castle in medieval France, where North African nanny Jenane is raising two small boys: Her own son, Asmar, and Azur, the blue-eyed child of her employer. Brought up as brothers, squabbling and scrapping, Azur and Asmar are enchanted by the stories Jenane learned as a girl, including the tale of the captive Djinn Fairy, more beautiful than any diamond and imprisoned somewhere deep underground.

As the boys grow older, Azur's father realizes that by abdicating his parental duties to a Saracen, he's saddled himself with a bilingual son indifferent to class and race and ignorant of the arts of a gentleman. He tries to rectify the situation by banishing Jenane and Asmar, but the damage is done: Azur grows up to be a headstrong dreamer whose only ambition is to liberate the Djinn fairy.

Spectacularly unprepared for the rigors of his journey, Azur is nearly lost at sea but washes up in North Africa, where he's shunned for his limpid blue eyes -- considered an ill omen -- and takes refuge in feigning blindness, is taken advantage of by a wily beggar and eventually reunited with Jenane, now a fabulously wealthy merchant who welcomes him as a long-lost son. Asmar, about to undertake his own quest for the Djinn fairy, is somewhat less thrilled, especially when Jenane insists the boys start their adventure together.

How things will wind up is a foregone conclusion — that's how fairy tales are — but the film's visual splendors are sensuously enthralling. This is Ocelot's first foray into CGI, which he uses with considerable subtlety: Faces and hands are modeled, while the lavishly ornamented clothing is rendered in a flatter, more decorative style; the elaborate backgrounds, rooted in non-figurative Arabic art, are simply dazzling, rivaled only by maverick animator Richard Williams' sadly compromised Arabian Knight/The Thief and the Cobbler (this article details its tumultuous history).

The story itself is as didactic as the average Disney moral tale, encouraging religious and racial harmony, fairness, equality for women, honesty and good manners. But it's both less formulaic in structure and considerably less saccharine, even as the cast of characters expands to include a comic sidekick (the aforementioned wily beggar), a wise old man and a precocious child princess.

Made for French television, Bertrand Normand's portrait of five Russian ballerinas at various stages of their careers peeks behind the velvet wall that separates dance lovers from the rigorously disciplined, unglamorous lives of dancers. It's a shame that the film itself is so simplistic, but the ballerinas provide the panache and mercurial complexity it lacks.

Normand's subjects range from Alina Somova, whom we first see as a 17-year-old star at St. Petersburg's world famous Vaganova Academy and follow as she starts over in the Kirov's corps de ballet, to Ulyana Lopatkina, 32, a Kirov Ballet prima ballerina hoping to make a comeback after a two-year absence from the stage. Having undergone surgery in the US to repair her damaged ankle, gotten married and had a daughter, Lopatkina is beginning the arduous road back from injury, hoping to regain the strength and artistry she once had. Diana Vishneva, another Kirov star, is in her late 20s and internationally acclaimed for her extraordinary stage presence and acting skills, which more than compensate for her less-than-textbook technique. Vishneva revels in the fact that since Perestroika, Russian dancers have been freer to perform with companies around the world, allowing them to grow as artists by experiencing other styles of choreography and performance.

Ukrainian-born Svetlana Zakharova, 24, was accepted into the Kirov when she was 17 and made a soloist the following year; she eventually leaves the Kirov for the Moscow-based Bolshoi Ballet. Fresh-faced Evgenia Obratsova, who graduated from Vaganova a year before Somova and combines meltingly soft technique with fierce dedication, rises to new heights in Romeo and Juliet but still goes out of her way to maintain a personal connection with the fans — mostly women — who gather outside the stage door of the Mariinsky theater.

You don't have to know an arabesque from an alligator to enjoy Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine's loving documentary about the various incarnations of the Ballet Russe: The reminiscences of its international cast of raconteurs — razor-sharp survivors of a bygone era filled with glittering, larger-than-life personalities and outrageous twists of fate — are better than any soap opera.

Flamboyant Russian cultural impresario Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) — who inspired The Red Shoes' imperious Boris Lermontov, who tells his dancers they must choose between love and art mdash; formed the first Ballet Russe in 1909, cultivating artists, dancers, composers and choreographers; they included George Balanchine, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, Vaslav Nijinsky, Michel Fokine, Leon Bakst and Leonide Massine. The company folded after Diaghilev death, but Monte Carlo Opera Ballet director Rene Blum and Russian expatriate Colonel Vassili de Basil revived it as the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, hiring Balanchine and Massine and recycling the original company's vast stockpile of costumes and scenery.

For 30 years, egos raged behind the "everything is beautiful at the ballet" facade. Balanchine was ousted in 1933, Blum quit in 1935, and Massine and de Basil jockeyed for control until 1938, when Massine formed his own Ballet Russe and fought de Basil for the name. Massine won, forcing de Basil to rename his company the Original Ballet Russe. De Basil's company conquered Australia and South America before folding in 1948, while Massine's toured the US under the auspices of booking agent extraordinaire Sol Hurok. Balanchine, who'd spent the intervening years working on Broadway, in Hollywood and even choreographing an elephant dance for the Ringling Brothers' circus, replaced Massine and then left to form his own company, the world-famous New York City Ballet. The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo limped on until 1962, when it danced a last, threadbare performance at New York's Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Before television, video or the internet brought world-class dancers and musicians into people's homes, the various Ballets Russes brought both classic and daringly modern works to small towns and international opera houses; their dancers went to Hollywood and to Broadway, trailing an intoxicating aroma of old-world glamour. When the ball was over, they scattered to Denmark, England, Australia, Venezuela and the United States, settling in cities as diverse as New York, Dallas, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Chicago, where they taught, started companies and tended the flames of their golden youth. Geller and Goldfine have assembled a treasure trove of color and B&W performance footage, but the stars are the incredibly diverse Ballets Russes alumni, from grown-up "baby ballerinas" Irina Baronova and Tatiana Riabouchinska to Yvonne Craig, who became TV's Batgirl, to pioneering gay pornographer Wakefield Poole. All have amazing stories, and know exactly how to tell them.

Inspired by Robert Graves' deeply cynical poem, this bleak story of love and pragmatism tells the story of a woman whose future hinges on her relationships with two very different men.

Marcela Cmolikova (Geislerova) got pregnant as a teenager and left home because her mother and stepfather, Zdena (Brejchova) and Risa (Schmitzer), insisted that she have an abortion. Marcela married mechanic Jarda (Luknar), who adopted her daughter, Lucina (Mrvikova), now 15, and fathered her seven-year-old son, Kuba (Misik). Powerful sexual chemistry is the glue that holds their marriage together, but Marcela feels increasing trapped in the aftermath of a flood that damaged their uninsured home, destroyed most of their possessions and is compromising Kuba's health — mold exacerbates his asthma. Jarda is increasingly sullen, crude and dismissive of Marcela's concerns — she doesn't want her children stigmatized by having a thief for a father, while he only cares that stealing cares is more lucrative than fixing them.

Leslie Zemekis’ affectionate documentary about the rise and fall of burlesque is once-over-lightly history, arranged by theme (mobsters, onstage mishaps, regional idiosyncrasies, marriage and children) rather than chronology and only superficially interested in the shifting politics, economics and social mores that birthed the burly q and then condemned it to history’s slag heap. But what a showcase for the women who spent the best years of their lives dressing up and stripping down! Their stories are funny, naughty, heartbreaking, disingenuous, gritty and revealing, all told with wit, verve and calculated charm — they didn’t spend all those years cultivating beguiling personas for nothing.

Burlesque was cheap entertainment for poor people, offering a vaudevillian mix of comedy, singers, novelty acts — waltzing dogs, acrobats, magicians — and pretty girls. The plus was a little extra skin, but it was still family entertainment and depression-era performers could make $35.00 a week at a time when $10.00 covered seven days worth of food and lodging. Strippers and comedians, who were at the top of the salary heap, commanded even more.

The shows gradually became more risqué, and the girls took center stage and developed a reputation: Some figured they were little better than prostitutes, others imagined they were glamorous party girls who married millionaires. The reality was inevitably more complicated, but many stories started with girls born into grinding poverty and determined not to die there.

On the road with her uncle, an aging vaudevillian, Georgia Sothern was left penniless and alone when he died in a low-rent hotel full of burlesque dancers; they made her up, found her some nice clothes and got her a job stripping. Sothern was 13.

Ann Corio, one of 12 children from an old-fashioned Italian family, was a teenager when she lit out for New York in hopes of a career on stage. The Rowland sisters sought to parlay youthful looks into long term security: Dian, whose heart was damaged by a childhood bout with scarlet fever, died young; Rozelle married a baron and committed suicide rather than live her last years in a nursing home; Betty survived to tell their tales. Chorus girl Joni Taylor had three children to support by the time she was 16 and Sunny Dare was stranded in Texas when fan-dancer Sally Rand stiffed her entire touring troupe; Dare stripped her way home. Any of them could just as easily have wound up in Ruth Leitman’s 2004 documentary Lipstick and Dynamite, Piss and Vinegar: The First Ladies of Wrestling: Stripping, girl-on-girl grappling and running away with the circus (whose “cooch shows” were burlesque programs in a tent) all promised adventure, fame and fortune.

Zemeckis (wife of Robert Zemeckis) interviews the famous and the forgotten, from canny striptease stars like Blaze Starr and Tempest Storm to Kitty West, once a New Orleans sensation as “Evangeline the Oyster Girl,” the lovelorn and lightly-clad beauty at the center of a meticulously staged fairy-tale number and now living in a FEMA trailer, having lost everything to Hurricane Katrina. Most seem to have enjoyed the ups of their lives in sequins, and to have weathered downs that included shattered marriages, confused children (“why is mommy naked?”), backstage politics, exhausting schedules, police harassment and the ever-present specter of aging out of life in the spotlight. The frank, acerbic Dixie Evans, once billed as the “Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque,” just about runs away with the show, whether dishing backstage dirt — notoriously raunchy Rose La Rose walked around with her pubic hair in curlers and Storm had no sense of rhythm — or telling tales on herself. Once so afraid of giving patrons a glimpse of her “little fur cat” that she shaved it off, Evans later wowed 'em with a tiny g-string made from real fur — her employer was impressed but suggested a little personal grooming before the next show. Funny stuff.

But Evans also confides that she gave up her baby for adoption, then immediately regretted the decision and tried to reclaim her; the Nevada politician who had adopted the infant promised to have her arrested if she ever tried to contact her daughter.

The men Zemeckis interviews are strictly second bananas, but include the much-loved actor Alan Alda, whose father was both a “tit singer” — a real title, Alan insists, denoting the guy who warbled while pretty girls paraded around the stage — and comedy-skit straight man. The senior Aldo took his small son on the road, except when there wasn't room in the car for both the kid and the pig that figured into a running gag. After all, the kid could stay with relatives, but without the pig, the show didn't go on. Renald von Muchow recalls the beefcake hand-balancing act he did for 25 years with grammar-school pal Rudy, while drummer John Perilli describes his life as low man on the burlesque-club totem pole.

Many of the film’s delights are in the details: Traveling troupers ran the snack concessions and perfected elaborate spiels to move overpriced candy. Detroit was nicknamed the “The Vatican” because two bump-and-grinds in a row got a show closed down. Stripping was forbidden in Green Bay, but gradually shucking your clothes offstage wasn't, because technically that constituted a costume change. Strippers paid chorus girls to gather up and guard the clothing they tossed offstage, and one of the most in-demand costumers was a former drag-show performer who taught himself to make flimsy-looking frills that wore like iron.

Zemeckis brings on the scholarly talking heads (professor Janet M. Davis; Sarah Jacobs of the Museum of Sex; authors Rachel Shteir and Kelly DiNardo) to provide a modicum of context, and doesn’t entirely ignore the burly q’s casualties, like the world-famous Lili St. Cyr, who descended into a twilight of multiple suicide attempts, heroin addiction and reclusive near-poverty, or Sherry Britton, who so hated the business that she had a nervous breakdown and spent 30 years in a lithium fog.

But Zemeckis’ intent is to celebrate burlesque’s bawdy, gaudy splendor, not poke around its dark corners. The result is nostalgia with an overlay of history, but future researchers will thank her for tracking down so many aging witnesses to a bygone and haphazardly-documented era, several of whom are now dead. The rest of us can just sit back and enjoy their tales of good times past.

First and foremost a showcase for the latest developments in motion-capture and 3-D technology, Robert Zemeckis' take on the ancient tale in verse of men and monsters transforms real actors — including Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, Crispin Glover, John Malkovich and Robin Wright Penn — into waxy-looking, dead-eyed avatars that look as though they belong in a high-end video game.

Denmark, sixth century: Hedonistic King Hrothgar (Hopkins) has a monster problem: The powerful, misshapen Grendel (Glover) has declared war on Hrothgar's kingdom, brutally murdering and terrorizing his subjects. Enter brawny, boastful Beowulf (Winstone), who brings his loyal right-hand man Wiglaf (Gleeson) as well as a band of warriors from far across the sea. Beowulf proceeds to make good on his promise to slay the beast, but he loses most of his company to the wrath of Grendel's mother (Jolie), a gilded water demon with a long, sinuous braid of hair that seems to have a writhing, sinister life of its own — and she makes an offer no mere man can refuse.

While Beowulf and Grendel's oft-told tale would seem to define the term "spoiler-proof," it actually is possible to spoil screenwriters Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman's ingenious solution to the story's thorniest structural quirk: the rift between the first half and the second, which takes place decades later and pits the still-mighty Beowulf against a vindictive dragon. Suffice it to say that they found a structurally elegant way to pull the two halves together.

The trouble is that the film's look trumps all. Zack Snyder's adaptation of Frank Miller's 300 (2006), to which Beowulf has been compared, is a stunning fusion of live action and computer-generated images, simultaneously highly stylized and vividly rooted in flesh-and-blood physicality.

Zemeckis' film is both kitsch and creepy: Beowulf is fantasy, but Beowulf is a sheltered teen-boy fantasy, full of macho bluster, denatured violence and leaden double entendres. Limbs fly in a spatter of decorative cartoon gore, the fleshy Winstone gets a virtual trade-up to an anonymously buff Chippendale dancer's body (the better to vanquish Grendel in the nude and wow Hrothgar's comely queen) and the frontally naked "Angelina Jolie" is as smooth and desexed as "Grendel's Mother Barbie." And there's something faintly depressing about such pallidly antiseptic daydreams.

You don't have to be a wrestling fan to enjoy screenwriter Barry Blaustein's directing debut, a behind-the-scenes documentary that manages to be unabashedly sympathetic without being a puff piece.

Blaustein, who confesses up front that he's been a wrestling fan since childhood, focuses on three wrestlers at very different points in their careers. Hugely popular WWF star Mick Foley, 35, wrestles under the name Mankind, hidden behind a Dr. Lecter-like leather mask. An articulate and gentle man in real life, Foley's specialty is taking brutal beatings in the ring, and Blaustein records the horrified reactions of his wife and children as Foley gets pummeled until he bleeds. (Foley recently announced his retirement.) Middle-aged Terry Funk has been wrestling since the '70s, when his wild-man persona made him a well-loved heel; now he's an éminence grise, still loved by fans and commanding substantial fees. But the years of wrestling have taken a physical toll, and Funk's family is encouraging him to give up the game for good. Jake "The Snake" Roberts was an '80s star, but drug abuse and emotional turmoil have reduced him to wrestling in low-rent venues. Blaustein chronicles Roberts's painful attempt at reconciliation with one of his seven children, as well as the wrestler's grim stories of his own miserable childhood and self-destructive rampages. Blaustein also gives a quick history of professional wrestling and includes plenty of footage of preposterous antics.

English documentarian Nick Broomfield never met a controversy he didn't want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the ground, and the murders of rappers Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur — still unsolved seven years after Broomfield hurled himself into the fray — are nothing if not controversial.

One-time friends whose bitter, high-profile feud epitomized the East Coast-West Coast rap wars, Shakur and B.I.G. — born Christopher Wallace — died within six months of each other in 1996 and 1997, both shot in public places (Las Vegas and Los Angeles, respectively) in front of dozens of witnesses who saw nothing. Conventional wisdom — and an exhaustive September 2002 Los Angeles Times investigative report — suggests that Wallace masterminded Shakur's murder, then fell victim to ongoing rap world violence.

Broomfield favors a theory blaming Death Row Records founder Marion "Suge" Knight and the ongoing antagonism between Death Row and Bad Boy Records boss Sean "Puffy" Combs. The hit-and-run tactics Broomfield refined while making such incendiary films as Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1994), Heifi Fleiss: Hollywood Madame (1996) and Kurt and Courtney (1998) are in full flower here, and almost succeed in diverting attention from the fact that while he elicits some provocative theories about the rappers' deaths, he can't back them up. Broomfield is a filmmaker, of course, and not bound by judicial rules of evidence. But while a documentary like Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line (1988) presents a detailed and compelling alternative to the official version of a 12-year-old Texas murder case, Biggie and Tupac is just another episode of the ongoing "Nick Broomfield Show," in which everyone who tries to elude his intrusive camera looks evasive, shifty, stupid or some combination of the three.

Released on the heels of the WWII-era Defiance, which dramatizes the armed resistance spearheaded by the Bielski brothers of Belarus, this documentary (with reenactments) tells the equally inspiring story of Hannah Senesh.

For the full review, click here.

London-based playwright-turned-filmmaker Duncan Ward’s adaptation of Danny Moynihan’s satirical novel drops all the right names and takes jabs at all the usual suspects. But it’s a blinding glimpse of the obvious: No one who cares is unaware that the contemporary art world is teeming with sharks, poseurs, shooting stars and star lovers, high-stakes gamblers, social climbers and poor jerks who don’t realize they’re in over their heads until they go under for the third time in a sad froth of bursting bubbles.

The blood in the water is a rumor: The first of Piet Mondrian’s Boogie Woogie paintings may be for sale. Ailing, elderly collector Alfred Rhinegold (Lee) doesn’t want to part with it — he bought it directly from the painter himself — but his level-headed wife (Lumley) sees a solution to their dismal financial situation. Super-dealer Art Spindle (Huston) has begun making discrete advances via Alfred’s coolly calculating secretary (McBurney) while quietly cultivating a buyer: close personal friend and long-time client Bob Maclestone (Skarsgard).

Unfortunately for Spindle, his trusted assistant, Beth Freemantle (Graham), is planning a giant step up in the art-world hierarchy: Her own gallery, bankrolled by none other than secret sugar daddy, Maclestone, whom she tips off. As Maclestone plots an end run around Spindle, Beth begins surrepticiously assembling a roster of artists, many of whom she intends to poach from Spindle before tendering her resignation. She also has her eye on ruthlessly ambitious, up-and-coming video artist Elaine Barstow (Jaime Winstone, the daughter of veteran UK actor Ray), a predatory lesbian working on a massive installation composed of footage of her busy sex life recorded via That tacit agreement Elaine has with her old friend Dewey (Cumming), who’s supplied her with encouragement, emotional support and, most important, introductions to key art-world insiders? Tacit agreements don’t hold up in court and she’ll buy him off with some old piece of her work.

Meanwhile, Maclestone’s wife, silly, champagne-fogged Joan (Anderson), is cozying up to studly flavor-of-the-month Jo Richards (Jack Huston, Danny’s nephew), whose main talents are for spouting art-critic double speak and sleeping with women in a position to advance his career, which is why he’s dating Beth. And ingénue Paige Prideaux (Seyfried), the impeccably groomed and educated daughter of a ruined financier, is carefully weighing the potential of various lechers to help her get a stillettoed foot in the door.

All the stuff of vicious, world-class satire is there: The venal pomposity of the mileu, the cast of scheming backstabbers, vapid trendies and bull artists, the ridiculous objects they covet, the sniffy signifiers of insider status (what philistine doesn’t know Brancusi is pronounced bran-coosh/) and the meaningless buzz words — everything is marvelous, extraordinary, challenging, sensual or bold. But Boogie Woogie is a monumental piece of squandered potential, arch but not witty, mean without being perceptive, its most outrageous shock little more than static sparks. Worst of all, its so fundamentally broad that with a few bits of search-and-replace rejiggering it could be about Hollywood filmmaking, literary publishing, rare orchid cultivation or comic book collecting. Moynihan, who was once the roommate of enfant terrible Damian Hurst (who loaned the film his curatorial influence)’s roommate, might have done better just to gather up every dirty, dishy tale that came his way; truth isn’t always stranger than fiction, but its outrages pack a sting that can’t be beat.

To say that The Book of Eli is vastly more entertaining than The Road isn't really praise, in the same way that "apocalypse lite" isn't really an endorsement. The movie's ruined America looks grim enough, but damned if Denzel Washington doesn't have the light of the future tucked into his backpack, because... well, because he's Denzel Washington.

Some 30 years after a devastating war, America is one sorry-ass heap of rubble and despair where predatory savages lord it over less ruthless folk and much of the world is sightless, thanks to the searing light that still pours through the hole in the sky left by that last great war. Unlike the majority of people scratching out a hardscrabble existence in this nasty new world, Eli (Washington) was born "before:" Before "the flash" that stripped away the Earth's vegetation, before water became more precious than gold, before literacy crept to the top of some list of useless skills no one can read anyway..

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Directed by Antony Marselli, playwright Susan Charlotte's examination of 9/11's psychic scars comprises three loosely connected vignettes, each featuring a pair of New Yorkers whose paths intersect at an emotionally volatile moment.

In the first segment, set on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, a film professor (Light) barges into a Hell's Kitchen cobbler's shop and demands that the owner (Aiello) fix her shoe, even as he protests that he's closed. "You can't be," she says abrasively, pulling off her worn, low-heeled green pump. "My sole is broken." As they bicker and spar, their damaged hearts are bared: She saw the planes that flew into the towers, and her sense of loss and dislocation is now fused with the film she was going to show that morning, Vittorio De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970). He's an Italian Jew who lost his father and grandfather during World War II, is estranged from his only child and has a terrible feeling that the customer he affectionately calls "Teenie Louise" is never coming back for her dressy pumps.

Six weeks later, a stressed-out Realtor (Robins) badgers a paranoid cabbie (Dishy) who enunciates veeeeeeery precisely into cutting short his lunch break and taking her to an apartment showing. He's agoraphobic and she's frantic; trapped in the car, they, too, bare their inner wounds: Her grandmother, once a renowned baker, lost the will to create after spending two years in a concentration camp and she's afraid of her violent, mentally unbalanced brother, while the cabbie staves off crushing loneliness by attending the funerals of fallen firefighters.

Two months after that, struggling, middle-aged actress Nan (Colin) and dyslexic director Bob (Shea) negotiate an awkward morning after: They wound up in bed on their first date, but now she wants to get to know him better, while he seems anxious to disappear. Bob's obsession with palindromes sparks a thorny discussion that eventually leads both to reveal their insecurities and mutual desire to find human connection in a cold and uncertain world.

Joel and Ethan Coen's follow-up to the Academy Award-winning No Country for Old Men (2007) is a return to the smarty pants black comedies that put them on the hipster map. And credit where it's due: The brothers' dark, all-star farce about sex, lies and surveillance is pretty damned funny.

CIA Balkan analyst Osborne Cox (Malkovich) has just quit his job, furious that his smug superiors were about to demote him, ostensibly because he has a drinking problem but more likely because of his foul temper and evident contempt for the rest of the human race. Osbourne's wife, ice-cold pediatrician Katie (Swinton), is equally furious: Osbourne's plan to start a consulting business and write his memoirs (sorry, mem-wahs) strikes her as the height of deluded self-indulgence.

Unbeknownst to Osbourne, Katie is having an affair with serial philanderer Harry Pfarrar (Clooney) — a charming horndog who claims to have spent years bodyguarding top-level politicos without ever discharging his weapon (nudge nudge, wink wink) before taking a cushy gig at the Treasury Department — and has engaged a cutthroat divorce lawyer. Harry is married to successful children's book writer Sandy (Marvel) and has no plans to divorce her, regardless of what he tells Katie or anyone else.

Meanwhile, "Hardbodies" health-club employee Linda Litzke (McDormand, Joel Coen's wife of 25 years) is in the throes of a midlife crisis and wants to reinvent herself via plastic surgery she can't possibly afford. Then her genially brainless co-worker, Chet Feldheimer (Pitt, delivering a broadly comic turn that's oddly charming despite its aggressive lack of subtlety), gets his hands on a disc full of top-secret sh*t — Osawld's mem-wahs — that the janitor found in the ladies' locker room.

Linda sees an opportunity... an opportunity for blackmail, to be sure, but an opportunity none the less. Their inept attempts to cash in set in motion a farcical series of misunderstandings that end in mayhem, murder and massive confusion in the intelligence community.

Every Coen Brothers tic and mannerism that fans of No Country rejoiced they had abandoned is back in force in Burn Without Reading: The snarky dialogue, the briskly artificial timing, the absurd plot contrivances and the cavalier willingness to exploit brutal suffering for laughs.

But it's often funny and occasionally hilarious: Unlike many films in which the cast is clearly having a high old time, the audience isn't left out of the fun. And don't miss The Fugs' gleefully profane CIA Man (1966), which plays over the closing credits. Warning: Don't listen if you have an effing problem with effing bad laguage! Effing A, man!

Dancer/choreographer/actors Carmen de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder are so funny, talented, charismatic and attractive that many faults of Linda Atkinson and Nick Doob's documentary about the couple fade in the light of their presence. It's a shame the film isn't more polished, but an imperfect look at these accomplished, unpretentious performers is better than none at all.

Married for 47 years, Holder and de Lavellande came of age as artists at a time when opportunities for black dancers were both limited and, more often than not, limiting. None of which stopped them from seizing what opportunities there were and making their own. Born in New Orleans but raised in Los Angeles, de Lavallade was inspired to dance by her cousin, ballerina Janet Collins, the first African-American dancer to perform with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. de Lavallade studied with modern dance pioneer Lester Horton; her fellow students included Alvin Ailey, who went on to found the all-black Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater company in 1957. Holder was born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, where he was ill-served by an anglocentric school system that made no distinction between being dyslecic, as Holder was, and being stupid. It's clear the memory still makes him angry, though he chuckles that having novelist-to-be V.S. Naipaul as a classmate didn't help. Holder instead followed in the footsteps of his older brother, Boscoe, an accomplished painter and dancer who later moved to England and started his own company. By the time Holder was 23, he was in New York at the invitation of Agnes DeMille and auditioning for the Harold Arlen/Truman Capote musical House of Flowers, where he met de Lavallade. They were married in 1955 and continue to work, together and separately, even though both are well into their 70s.

Pets play spy games in this children’s movie that both spoofs high-tech espionage pictures and caters to single-digit sensibilities with gags about butt-sniffing canines.

The CGI-heavy sequel to 2001’s underwhelming Cats & Dogs gets off to a terrific start with a witty, James Bond-style credit sequence (Casino Royale in particular) scored to Shirley Bassey’s cover of “Get the Party Started.” The rest of Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore in no way lives up to its meticulous inventiveness, but contains enough clever touches to keep adults from dozing off while their kids giggle at the sight of house pets using computers, rocketing around with jet packs and kicking ass like Jackie Chan.

Lou (voice of Harris), an adorable puppy in the first movie, has grown up to head D.O.G, a top-secret organization dedicated to protecting the human race: Just think The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s Alexander Waverly played by a sweet-faced beagle. A dastardly plot to scramble doggie brains via a high-frequency signal and turn them against their masters is underway, masterminded by rogue feline Kitty Galore (voice of Midler). Once an agent of MEOWS, DOG’s feline counterpart, she took a Joker-like fall into a vat of noxious chemicals that left her a sociopathic, hairless horror. All that stands between dog lovers and the canine apocalypse is an unthinkable alliance between DOG agents Butch (voice of Nolte) and Diggs (voice of Marsden) and MEOWS’ Katherine (voice of Applegate), a sleek feline with mad ninja skills.

A special-effects artist once said that it's easy to create monsters and aliens but hard to make a cat, because everyone knows exactly what cats look like. The truth about Cats & Dogs is that despite the efforts of its A-list effects crew, every cut from a real animal to an animatronic or CG stand-in is joltingly obvious. That shouldn’t hurt the movie’s box office, because little kids won’t care and where small fry go, parents follow, sit and stay. But it’s a shame, because several of the inevitable pop-culture jokes are actually clever, and the set design is occasionally brilliant. Of course, MEOW’s underground command center would look like a deluxe cat condo with a ’60s molded-plastic and shag-carpeting vibe, accessorized with state-of-the-art computers and flat-screen TVs!

This review first appeared in slightly different form in Film Journal International.

One of the many science fiction films whose combined DNA produced the Terminator series, Colossus is the least mentioned. But its vision of a Defense Department supercomputer that achieves self awareness and immediately concludes that the puny humans who made it are too flawed to run the world.

Brainy bon-vivant Dr. Forbin (Braeden) and his team have spent years developing a state-of-the-art computer, Colossus, capable of administering complex defense monitoring and deployment systems without human intervention. Colossus goes online amid fatuous speechifying and glasses of champagne, but moments later the mood shifts dramatically: Colossus sends up a message it's detected another system like itself, a system it identifies as its Russian counterpoint, Guardian. CIA Director Grauber (Schallert) leaps to the conclusion that a spy on Forbin's team has been feeding classified information to Soviet scientists, but the problem is far greater than Cold War politics as usual.

As Colossus and Guardian get to talking, the US president (Canadian journeyman Pinsent, who suddenly shot to pop-culture prominence some 35 years later for his performance in Away from Her) and Soviet leaders temporarily set aside their differences and conclude that it might be better for both their nations to keep the artificial big brains apart. Unfortunately they take a little too long doing it; when Colossus is suddenly cut off from Guardian it flies into a rage, threatening that "action will be taken" if communication isn't restored. Being a computer, Colossus doesn't bluff, and the very safeguards Forbin and his team devised to keep terrorists from disabling Colossus come back to bite them in the ass: Colossus controls the entire US military arsenal, including nuclear weapons; has access to every form of electronic surveillance; is tucked away under a Colorado mountain and can't be shut off. In short order, Colossus puts Forbin and his team under 24/7 observation, orders up technical modifications and makes it clear that no resistance will be brooked. But Forbin and his Soviet counterpart, Dr. Kuprin (Rodine), aren't about to let their servants become their masters.

Director Joseph Sargent spent the bulk of his career making TV movies, but attention must be paid to the guy whose resume includes both Colossus and the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974). Colossus is an intensely static movie — there's an awful lot of standing around and talking. It's not bad directing — Pelham One Two Three makes it abundantly clear that when the story demanded action, Sargent delivered — but youu don't undermine a giant computer by roaring around on a motorcycle. The human resistance is driven by keyboards and phone calls and surreptitious conversations held just outside the range of Colossus' almost all-seeing eye, and Sargent responds with clean, claustrophobic interiors that look more and more like human cages. SPOILER ALERT:

The most astonishing thing about Colossus is also a major reveal, so if you don't want to know stop reading now and go add the film to your Netflix queue.

Eastwood and J. Michael Straczynski's period crime thriller has everything going for it. It's based on a bizarre true crime story, features a top notch cast and pivots on the travails of an independent woman who refuses to acknowledge the prejudices of a casually sexist era and pays for her boldness. But for all its assets — fine cast, engaging story, meticulous attention to detail and a sense of outrage at the lengths to which venal men will go to protect their own interests — it's a strangely arid piece of filmmaking, handsome, respectful, unsensational and thoroughly lifeless.

Los Angeles, 1928: Single mother Christine Collins (Jolie) has spent the last nine years quietly defying deeply ingrained social biases that paint women as weak, helpless and prone to nervous disorders. Christine has raised a polite, responsible son, Walter (Gattlin Griffith), while earning a respectable living working for the telephone company, where she excels as one of the first women trusted with a supervisory position. And then one ordinary day Christine's world is turned upside down: She returns from work to find Walter gone and the LAPD — a police department with a formidable history of corruption, favoritism and shameless showboating — treats her as a hysteric when she begs them to initiate a search. Most missing kids come home of their own accord with 24 hours, they assure her; if Walter isn't back tomorrow they'll take a report.

Walter doesn't come back, and several months later — months of emotional agony for Christine — LAPD Captain J.J. Jones (Donovan) announces that Walter has been found in Illinois and is on a train back to California.

But the child (Devon Conti) who steps off the train isn't Walter. Christine knows it the moment she sees the boy, but is persuaded to take in the changeling because this child, as young and vulnerable as her own, has nowhere to go. But Christine is determined to keep the search for Walter alive, and collects statements from her son's dentist, doctor and schoolteacher asserting that the child the LAPD insists is Walter is no such thing. The LAPD stonewalls until Christine's case is taken up by media-savvy activist preacher Gustav Briegleb (Malkovich), who uses his weekly radio broadcast to deplore institutionalized corruption within the police department. But even as Jones tries to silence Christine by shutting her up in a snake pit of a mental hospital, one of his own, a Detective Lester Ybarra (Kelly) stumbles, stumbles on evidence that may link Walter's disappearance to a horrifying crime.

Henry Selick never got the recognition he deserved for directing the sweetly macabre Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) — given that full title, small wonder — but his 3-D adaptation of Neil Gaiman's delightfully dark children's novel should make him a household name.

Eleven-year-old Coraline Jones (voiced by Fanning) doesn't see why her parents (Hatcher, Hodgman) had to pull up stakes and move from Michigan to Oregon. She hates their new home, a gloomily undistinguished house in the middle of nowhere, with a neglected garden and an incongruously precious name: "The Pink Palace." She misses her old friends, and Wybie (Bailey, Jr.), whose grandmother owns the Palace, is no substitute, though he's better than the eccentric neighbors — twittery former music-hall actresses Miss Spink and Miss Forcible (Saunders, French), with their Scotties (whose ages range from superannuated to stuffed) and bowls full of ossified toffy — and peculiar Mr. Bobinsky (McShane), a Russian acrobat claims to be training a mouse circus in the attic. Coraline wishes her parents were more, well, parental: They sit around the house all day writing about seeds — her mother doesn't even like gardening — and never make anything nice for dinner or buy her fun clothes. And everyone outside her family calls her Caroline, no matter how many times she corrects them.

And then Coraline finds the door. Her mother says it doesn't go anywhere — there's nothing behind it but a brick wall. But Coraline knows there must be, and indeed, she finds the key and opens it. And there it is: a slinky sort of tunnel, luridly lit in the style of Dario Argento's Suspiria, that leads back into her own home… her home the way it ought to be. Everything is new and bright and beautiful, including her parents: Coraline's Other Mother cooks her favorite foods, wears pretty clothes and never tells her to be quiet and stay out of the way. Her Other Father is fun and playful and takes her on a tour of the garden he's into a vividly colored botanical wonderland, full of pitcher plants and bleeding hearts and snap dragons that really snap. Even her toys caper and romp for her amusement. If only the other parents didn't have blank, black-button eyes… they're a little creepy, frankly. But aside from that, everything is perfect.

Coraline falls asleep in her marvelous other bedroom and wakes up in her shabby old one, but knows she wasn't dreaming. The other world is as real as this one, and she returns every night, even after the talking doppelganger of the scrawny feral cat (David) who haunts the grounds outside the Pink Palace warns that things are not as they seem. But how can she resist a world where Wybie doesn't chatter all the time — in fact, doesn't talk at all — and Mr. Bobinsky's jerboa mice perform marvelous tricks and routines, then twist and balance their furry little bodies into a living sculpture of her name? Where Miss Forcible and Miss Spink mount a theatrical spectacular just for her, complete with Victorian stagecraft and death-defying stunts? It's a little weird, two fat old ladies in scanty costumes cavorting on the flying trapeze, but it's a command performance for Coraline. By the time she realizes how right the cat is, her real world is in danger and she must be braver and smarter than she ever imagined if things are to be put right.

Like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride, Coraline was created using old-fashioned stop-motion animation, the painstaking frame-by-frame manipulation of puppets and props within a meticulously constructed world. Stop-motion breathed life into Willis O'Brien's soulful King Kong and the much-loved monsters of Ray Harryhausen; fans (of whom I'm one), love its unrepentant physicality. It produces a palpable sensation that you're seeing something real that neither classical cel animation nor CGI can; every time I hear someone marveling at how real computer-generated images look, I think of the many times I've been pulled out of live-action movies by a flock of CGI birds flapping across a real sky. And 3-D makes Coraline's meticulously imagined world look even more eerily inviting; Selick refrains from throwing things at the lens in favor of filling up the background with the kind of intricate, delightful details that make repeat viewings as fresh as the first.

Nominally co-directed by Burton and Mike Johnson, this macabre fairy tale about a nervous bridegroom who accidentally betroths himself to a cadaver is clearly Burton's show all the way.

omewhere in some dour, gray, 19th-century land beyond the forest, sensitive Victor Van Dort (voice of Depp), son of nouveaux riches fishmongers (Ullman, Whitehouse), is to marry into the aristocratic but broke Everglot family. Though his imperious future in-laws (Lumley, Finney) are snobs, Victor's bride-to-be, Victoria (Watson), is a lovely and artistic young woman, the soul mate Victor always hoped to find. But at their wedding rehearsal he repeatedly flubs his vows and runs off into the deep, dark wood in shame, trying to get the cursed words right until he finally recites them perfectly. He slips Victoria's ring onto what he thinks is a desiccated branch sticking out from under the snow. But it's actually the skeletal hand of Emily (Bonham Carter), a bride murdered by her duplicitous lover, and she accepts Victor's proposal and whisks him off to the Land of the Dead.

In the surprisingly happening underworld, every day is the Dia de los Muertos, and the streets are bathed in washes of colored light and abuzz with cheerful skeletons who shake, rattle and roll their single eyeballs from socket to socket while half-rotted corpses carouse all night in establishments where the headwaiter is just that — a disembodied head. Even Victor's pallid cheeks take on a rosy glow. But while touched by Emily's sad story — delivered in the form of a bravura jumpin'-jive number by a bowler-hatted bag o' bones and crew — Victor wants only to return to Victoria. She, in turn, has been promised to a mysterious stranger, Count Barkis Bittern (Richard E. Grant), by her grasping parents. From the maggot (Reitel) who roosts behind Emily's eyeball and feeds her wicked thoughts in doleful Peter Lorre tones to the scampering spiders who reweave Victor's clothes, this puppet-animated feature is cheerfully eerie and steeped in love for old horror films, unfolding in a weirdly canted mittel-Europe that's equal parts Hammer Victoriana and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919).

Yes, writer-director Roman Coppola's feature debut is a triumph of art direction over narrative, but what art direction! And unlike the equally retro designed-within-an-inch-of-their-lives Austin Powers movies, CQ is a love letter to Euro-pop exploitation movies of the 1960s, not a nudge-nudge, wink-wink spoof predicated on hipster notions of how, like, goofy all that grooviness was.

The slim story finds oh-so-serious, aspiring American filmmaker Paul Ballard (Davies) living in Paris with French cutie Marlene (Bouchez) and making a 16mm, B&W diary of his expat life, heavy on long takes of ashtrays and mopey musings about the meaning of life. Paul is paying for this exercise in autobiographical tedium by editing a sublimely silly, Italian-financed sci-fi/sexploitation picture called "Dragonfly." Director Andrzej (Depardieu) thinks he's making a trenchant political statement about radical youth culture, but it’s clear to everyone else that "Dragonfly" is nothing more than a showcase for stunning starlet Valentine (American model Lindvall), who, amid a panoply of inventively cut-rate special effects, disports herself in and out of a series of sexy costumes

. Since Andrzej's attention to the film's subtext has led him to neglect such details as finishing the script, volatile producer Enzo di Martini (Gianinni) fires him and recruits cheesy vampire movie maker Felix De Marco (Coppola’s cousin Schwartzman) to complete the project. The hard-partying De Marco promptly breaks his leg, so Di Martini turns to Paul, whose immersion in the film leads him to hallucinate that "Dragonfly's" fictional universe is invading his day-to-day reality. /p>

The ideal audience for this feature length in-joke is a small one, made up largely of movie buffs equally familiar with David Holzman’s Diary (1968), Blowup (1966), Barbarella (1968) and cult curios like Danger: Diabolik (1967), Modesty Blaise (1966) and The 10th Victim (1965) — the kind of people who recognize both director L.M. Kit Carson and actor John Phillip Law.

Ambient French trio Mellow's hazy psychedelic soundtrack is an impeccable pastiche of period pop sounds and, with the possible exception of Davies (who always plays the same irritating drip but looks great in late '60s clothes and hair), the entire cast seems to get the joke. Giannini does a subtly hilarious impersonation of Dino DeLaurentiis; Depardieu and Schwartzman evoke the opposite extremes of pretentious auteurism; Lindvall swanks around in her pearly pink-leather catsuit as though to the manner born; and Billy Zane is ripely knowing as "Dragonfly's" villain, who's training student revolutionaries on the far side of the moon but would much rather make love than war.

”I used to be somebody,” sings ruined country-western legend Bad Blake (Bridges, looking uncannily like Kris Kristofferson), “but now I'm somebody else.” Like all great C&W lyrics, those dozen words sum up a lifetime's worth of missteps, complications and rueful perspective gained just a little too late.

Blake used to be a star, a natural-born tunesmith who turned out perfectly crafted songs about heartbreak, hard times and the beckoning road, and sang them with a hit-making mix of grit, warmth and “been there, done that” weariness. Now he's a bitter, barely functioning alcoholic, reduced to living out of his car and playing murkily lit bowling alleys and hole-in-the-wall bars because no one else will have him. Having systematically torpedoed every relationship he ever had, Blake lives on bitter pride and stews in the knowledge that he could write rings around every fresh-faced Nashville star worth a good Goddamn, including his onetime protégé, crossover country-pop star Tommy Sweet (Farrell); he wouldn’t accept a helping hand if it were wrapped around a jeroboam of bourbon.

And then fate tosses him a life raft in the form of a potentially stable relationship with small-time journalist Jean Craddock (Gyllenhaal), a single mother half his age whose bright-eyed little boy is a stinging reminder that Blake abandoned his own son years ago. But he's an old dog who isn't interested in learning new tricks. He can't even be bothered to write new songs, despite a lucrative and thoroughly respectful offer from Sweet.

It’s glib, lazy, critics' shorthand to call Crazy Heart Bridges' The Wrestler. It’s not even particularly accurate: Unlike Mickey Rourke, Bridges is no human road wreck in desperate need of career rehab: He’s logged more than 40 years of steady work in a notoriously fickle business without a single detour into tabloid hell. But the comparison is irresistible, because Crazy Heart is a low-budget, end-of-year release that came out of nowhere and threw Oscar handicappers into a tizzy by introducing dark horse into the best actor race.

Like The Wrestler, Crazy Heart is a middling movie powered by a stunning performance: Bridges powers through the show-biz clichés and finds the sad, proud, cussed essence of Bad Blake — his soul, if you will. And even the tacked-on kinda/sorta happy ending can’t diminish his accomplishment; stunning though Rourke's performance as Randy "The Ram" Robinson is, Bridges' flawless evocation of the slick delusions and ragged charm of a self-destructive has-been is more impressive still. Rourke, after all, has been there. Bridges, a Hollywood kid (his father was '50s TV star Lloyd Bridges) who earned his first Oscar nomination at 22 and is, at the age of 60, doing consistently better work than Robert De Niro, Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman, is faking it with such complete conviction that if you didn’t know who he was, you’d take him for the real thing.

Which is, of course, what acting is all about… oh, and did I mention that Bridges can sing? Not like a classically trained vocalist, but like the guy who could find the everyday poetry in those pitch-perfect pastiches by Stephen Bruton, T-Bone Burnett and alt-country rocker Ryan Bingham and sell it without breaking a sweat. The scene in which Bridges and Farrell effortlessly wrap an arena full of country-pop fans around their fingers with an "impromptu" duet on the Bad Blake standard "Fallin' and Flyin'" stands on its own merits; it flawlessly captures the electric moment when an audience suddenly hears a song that was a hit before their mothers were born as though it were vividly, thrillingly new. When you know it was shot in less than 15 minutes before a pack of Toby Keith fans waiting for their idol to take the stage, well, you just about have to stand up and salute.

So, hell, put my name on the "Jeff Bridges deserves a damned Oscar" petition. Crazy Heart may not be a great movie, but without Bridges it would be a Hallmark Hall of Fame trifle.

Based on James O'Barr's bleak comic-book series, The Crow is dark valentine to adolescent agonies and dreams, especially the dream that love — true, pure, soul-mate love — can conquer all, even death.

Tough little street waif Sarah (Davis) lives without hope in an industrial Detroit slum where daylight never shines the streets are always slick with rain and littered with filth. Aspiring rock star Eric Draven (Lee) and his angelic fiancee Shelley (Shinas), walk the same mean streets but aspire to better lives; unfortunately, they run afoul of brutal crime boss/slumlord Top Dollar (Wincott). On Devil's Night — the night before Halloween, when chaos reigns and fires rage — Wincott sends street thug T-Bird (Kelly, of The Warriors) and his gang to get rid of his troublesome tenants; after amusing themselves by raping and torturing Shelley, they finally kill them both.

A year later, Eric claws his way out of the grave, driven by the need to avenge Shelley's awful death. Perched on his tombstone is a crow, Eric's liaison between the worlds of the living and dead. One by one, Eric goes after the men who took his beloved Shelley, starting with T-Bird's gang — Grange (Candyman star Todd), Funboy (Mason) and Tin-Tin (Massee) — then T-Bird and, finally, the callous mastermind behind it all.

Australian filmmaker Alex Proyas' first US feature aims higher than the average rape/revenge tale, but its aspirations were largely overshadowed by the on-set death of star Brandon Lee, during a firearms stunt involving actor Michael Massee and a gun loaded with blanks. The gun had been used earlier for a different shot and through what appears to have been a combination of a carelessness, inexperience and bad luck, Lee was hit by a dummy bullet — not a live round, but a metal projectile nonetheless — that had lodged in the barrel. He later died at a local hospital. The fact that The Crow was shot in North Carolina, a "right to work" state where filmmakers could cut costs by employing non-union labor, was widely considered a contributing factor in the mishap, but no charges were filed (for a full account, see Jeffrey Goodell's 1993 article in Premiere magazine.)

Viewers expecting a Zhang Yimou film like Red Sorghum (1987) or Raise the Red Lantern (1991) will be in for a shock: This operatic historical drama comes with a thick overlay of intrigue, incest and voluptuous violence and more closely resembles William Shakespeare's much-reviled Titus Andronicus than, say, the intimate The Story Of Qiu Ju (1992). And fans of Zhang's Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004) will miss the balletic martial-arts sequences. But this stunning family tragedy is lavishly entertaining nonetheless, a gilded horror story that revels in lurid colors and sensational emotions.

Set during the excesses of the Tang Dynasty's corrupt tail end (923-936 AD), Curse of the Golden Flower unfolds almost entirely within the walls of the imperial palace, and opens as the household rises to prepare for the arrival of the emperor (Chow) and Prince Jai (Chou), who's returning from three years of waging war along the empire's northern border on his father's behalf. The empress (Gong) waits at home with her stepson, Crown Prince Wan (Liu), and sullen Prince Yu (Qin), Jai's younger brother. Though the household functions like a piece of intricate clockwork — eunuchs and ladies' maids rise and dress in unison, servants call out the hours, kitchen hands chop and slice and simmer with the precision of finely calibrated machines — its inner workings are a seething morass of unruly impulses.

The empress is undergoing daily treatment for an unspecified ailment, expressly ordered by her husband and personally overseen by the imperial doctor (Ni) and his loyal daughter, Chan (Li), and yet she seems to be getting sicker. Is she being poisoned because she's embroiled in a long-standing affair with Prince Wan? The dissolute Wan, in turn, is secretly trysting with Chan, and plans to ask the emperor for permission to leave the palace and go to a provincial capital. The emperor intends to pass over Wan in favor of Prince Jai, a warrior after his own heart, but Jai is torn between his powerful father and his suffering mother. Simmering resentments and secret plans come to a head during the lavish Chrysanthemum Festival, and by the time it's over the golden flowers are stained a very different color.

Alexander Proyas' film noir fever dream with a sci-fi secret revolves around a man who goes looking for his identity and makes a discovery that quite literally shifts the ground beneath his feet.

John Murdoch (Sewell) wakes up in a hotel bathroom with no memory of how he got there. There's a dead girl all cut up in the other room, and he also has no idea who she is or what happened. In fact, he has no idea who he is; though he seems to have a beautiful lounge-singer wife (Connelly) and some weird bald-headed guys in Hellraiser drag on his tail for reason he couldn't begin to fathom. And that's not the half of it: Things start getting really weird at midnight, when everyone in the city mysteriously falls into some sort of dead sleep, while Murdoch remains awake to see the very buildings around him twisting and changing, like concrete seeds sprouting in some bizarre mind-bending nightmare.

Even without Heath Ledger's Academy-Award winning (posthumous) performance as the Joker, Christopher Nolan's pitch-black sequel to Batman Begins (2005) would be a tour de force. But Ledger's mesmerizingly damaged agent provocateur is the film's dark heart, a presence so malevolently unpredictable that it remains palpable even when he isn't on screen.

Millionaire Bruce Wayne (Bale) continues to live his double life as the crusading Batman, but at an ever-escalating personal cost: He's displaced and all but alone. Wayne Manor has been burned to the ground, forcing him into an anonymous high-rise apartment, and childhood sweetheart Rachel Dawes (Gyllenhaal, taking over from the conspicuously vapid Katie Holmes) has taken up with crusading district attorney Harvey Dent (Eckhart) who's conducting his war on crime by the book and in the bright light of day.

Faithful butler Alfred (Caine) and Wayne Industries' factotum Lucius Fox (Freeman) continue to support Bruce's lonely battle against criminals, but Gotham City is still overrun with warring gangs. Public opinion regarding the dark angel is polarized — is he a grassroots champion of the average citizen or a dangerous vigilante? — and the headline-grabbing exploits of a pack of untrained, hot-headed imitators who've sprung up in the Batman's shadow only muddy the waters further. Succumbing to the unrelenting pressure, Batman and longtime ally Lieutenant Gordon (Oldman) agree to work with Dent, an arrangement that brings impressive short-term results but sets the stage for an anarchic reign of terror orchestrated by the wild card in the underworld deck: the Joker (Ledger). Having made himself persona non grata among thieves by robbing the banks that launder and safeguard their ill-gotten gains, the Joker then proposes that they all work together to take back the night.

Kuenne set out to make a glorified home movie about his longtime friend, Dr. Andrew Bagby, who was shot to death in Pennsylvania in 2001. Above all, Kuenne hoped to show Bagby's son, Zachary — born after his father's death — the kind of man his father was. But Dear Zachary quickly developed into something else. At the same time that Kuenne was teasing heartwarming memories out of Bagby's friends and relatives, Bagby's ex-girlfriend, Dr. Shirley Turner — the prime (indeed only) suspect in his murder — had fled to her native Canada and was manipulating the legal system with an eye to ensuring that she was never extradited to the United States and that Bagby's parents, Kathleen and David, never gained custody of their grandson. Turner's dreadful victory supplies the film's devastating climax.

(2006)
Written and Directed by: Pat O’Neill.
With: Wendi Winburn,William Lewis, Lauren Maher, Lilia Barsegian, Kane Crawford, Lisa Moncure and Tamara Margarian.

Avant-garde filmmaker Pat O'Neill's haunting ode to pulp fantasies and LA’s Ambassador Hotel, which opened in 1921 and was demolished in 2005 to make way for a public school building, is steeped in decaying California glamor and the ghosts of noir thrillers past. Eight years in the making and a stunning synthesis of craft and ideas, it turns the crumbling, once-grand Ambassador — site of the glittering Coconut Grove restaurant, the first Academy Awards ceremonies and presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy's assassination at the hands of lone-gunman Sirhan Sirhan — into a spook house peopled by B-movie archetypes.

O’Neill’s color footage of the ruined hotel, all peeling paint, sagging ceilings, pockmarked walls and gauzy, perpetually billowing curtains, is haunted by shimmering B&W images of jaded socialites, practical maids, cops, gangsters, grifters, hopeful shopgirls, hardened barflies, flappers, desperate tarts, doomed con men and suicide blondes. They glide like ghosts through ruined rooms: Stop-motion shadows crawl across the walls; shots ring out; a woman says, "She's gone," and someone inevitably replies, "She was never there." Snatches of hard-boiled dialogue and vintage tunes accompany discomfiting stop-motion footage of the hotel, inside and out: The buildings look normal, impassive and unmoving, while the landscape around them seems weirdly agitated.

Various combinations of characters are enmeshed in fragmented story lines we see in tantalizing glimpses: A washed-up torch singer is attempting a comeback; tough guys plot a big score; a high-strung tootsie is convinced that a dead girl is communicating with her; children play in the hallways and lawmen square off against hoods. As the film progresses, surreal images that suggest nightmares or the products of a disordered mind encroach on the ghosts of good times past. At first they’re suspended in blackness, torsos gliding in and out of the spotlight; then they become monsters, naked demons, shadowy shapes, puppet people, silhouetted women with diaphanous veils, skeletons and low-rent aliens who move with the stuttering rhythms of Japanese ghosts.

O’Neill’s film hums with echoes of The Invention of Morel (1940), by Argentine novelist Adolfo Bioy Casares, a protégé of Jorge Luis Borges. Widely recognized as a major inspiration for Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, the quintessential perplexing hotel movie, Casares’ discomfiting tale hinges on an infernal machine that immortalizes the eerily lifelike images of people whose flesh it rots away in the process. The result is a hypnotic collage of allusions that evoke a fantasy world that’s never quite superimposed on a real space that will never be again; movie-made fictions refract history through the prism of pop-culture fantasies. Does that sound like intellectual heavy lifting? It’s not: O’Neill celebrates the allure of pulp fictions — the stuff of late-night movies, comic books and paperback novels — while dropping subtle hints that their romantically cynical insights are ignored at the viewer’s peril.

(2002)
Written and Directed by: Olivier Assayas.
With: Connie Nielsen, Charles Berling, Gina Gershon, Chloe Sevigny, Jean-Baptiste Malartre, Dominique Reymond, Edwin Gerard, Thomas M. Pollard, Julie Brochen and Abi Sakamoto.

Sex, money, power and corruption converge in Olivier Assayas' glossy meditation on the dangerous allure of surfaces and the ugliness that lies beneath, which starts out a straightforward tale of industrial espionage and twists itself into a knot of existential angst so tight it makes your head hurt. And that is surely precisely the point.

Diane de Monx (Nielsen), the ambitious, Paris-based executive assistant to multinational tycoon Henri-Pierre Volf (Malartre), will do anything to climb the ladder of corporate success, including drugging her colleague, Karen (Reymond), so she’ll be no trouble to the kidnappers who want some very important papers she’s carrying in her briefcase. With Karen in the hospital, Diane inherits both her prize project and her resentful secretary, Elise (Sevigny).

Volf sends Diane and fellow executive Herve Le Millinec (Berling) to Tokyo, where they’re supposed to broker the purchase of a controlling interest in TokyoAnime, which produces pornographic cartoons and is developing a new 3-D animation software that will revolutionize the genre. Volk remains in Paris to hammer out a related deal with the owners of American website demonlover, which is apparently poised to corner the smutty-anime market.

Volf doesn't know is that Diane is actually a corporate spy for demonlover's rival, Mangatronix, and will do anything — anything — to disrupt his negotiations. He is however aware that the racy but ostensibly law-abiding demonlover is associated with Hellfire Club, a sub rosa interactive site that allows users to torture real women online.

Diane quickl finds herself adrift in a sea of deceit, tormented by anonymous notes that suggest someone knows what she did to Karen; pursued by the amorous Herve, whose motives are unnervingly ambiguous; and undermined by Elise, to whom there's more — much more — than meets the eye. As Diane loses control, the story spirals into existential incomprehensibility, and there's no longer any way to tell what's really happening and what's a paranoid fantasy.

Beware angular beauties stalking the business-class sections of international flights! Assayas weaves strands of films as diverse as David Cronenberg's spookily prescient Videodrome (1983) and the sleazy Feardotcom (2002) into his high-gloss anti-technothriller, which must be the coldest film about the intersection of technology and espionage since Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974).

Imagine, if you will, Escape from New York (1981) crossed with every mismatched-buddy movie ever made, set in one of the high-tension French banlieues, built around emerging martial art form parkour and set to a crunchy techno soundtrack. Written by Luc Besson and directed by Pierre Morel (The Transporter), the combination sounds ridiculous and plays like a jolt of pure, trashy adrenaline straight to the heart.

In the not-too-distant future, the high-rise suburbs where much of France's urban immigrant population is concentrated have been walled off, and the hardworking poor left to the tender mercies of heavily armed gangs. Law-abiding do-gooder Leito (Belle), a heavily tattooed devotee of parkour who grew up in Banlieue 13 and can navigate rooftops and building facades like Spider-man, intercepts a huge heroin shipment belonging to drug lord Taha (cowriter Naceri).

Taha's thugs come to get it back, but it's already gone down the drain, so they kidnap Leito's sister, Lola (Verissimo), to force him to make good. Leito rescues her and hauls Taha to the local police station, whose spineless commander arrests Leito and returns Lola to Taha. Some months later, elite police officer Damien Tomasso (Raffaelli), a human dynamo with muscles in places other people don't have places, has just single-handedly busted up a whole gang in an illicit casino hidden beneath a drab corner deli when Defense Secretary Kruger (Chattot) gives him a special assignment: Damien must break Leito out of a prison transport and persuade him to help retrieve an experimental WMD — a "clean bomb" that kills people but spares buildings — that was hijacked and taken into Banlieue 13. The clock is ticking, and Taha has the missile pointed right at central Paris. Damien is all about orders, Leito only wants to rescue Lola, whom the increasingly cocaine-addled Taha has been keeping on a leash by his bedside. Commencez les coups de pieds au cul!

The notion of alienation takes on new dimensions in Peter Jackson-protégé Neill Blomkamp's first feature, a lean, take-no-prisoners tale of first contact and its disillusioning aftermath.

Twenty-eight years ago, the aliens came to Johannesburg, South Africa. Or more correctly, they came to the sky above Johannesburg, and hovered, doing nothing, for months as the world watched and waited with bated breath. When South African military finally board the ship, they found a hoard of giant, bug-eyed… well, not monsters exactly. More like starving, none-too-bright crustaceans groveling in their own filth. On the whole, the aliens are a big fat letdown.

But with the eyes of the world upon them, the South African government institutes humanitarian measures, temporarily settling the aliens in a refugee camp that becomes a squalid, permanent ghetto, administered by a privately held company called Multi-National United. It soon became clear that the aliens woiuld never be integrated into mainstream society, which contemptuously nicknames them "prawns." They're too buggy — who wants to live or work next to a seven-foot crawfish with icky, wiggly mouthparts? — quarrelsome, dirty and gross (they eat cat food!), though how much of this is their nature and how much is the result of living under cramped, filthy, isolated conditions would be a matter for debate if anyone cared enough to argue about it. The prawns may be the only matter on which the black and white South African man on the street has agreed: They're a drain on resources and the best thing would be for them to go back where they came from. Except, of course, that they can't.

This background, efficiently established in mockumentary interviews and archival footage, brings us up to the story's starting point: The squalor and lawlessness of District 9 — which, like all poverty zones abandoned by legitimate authorities, is being run with an iron hand by thugs, in this case Nigerian gangsters who do a thriving business in trading cat food for alien weapons and dreaming of somehow acquiring the creatures' superior physical strength — has become an embarrassment. So, the government builds a new facility, considerably farther from greater Johannesburg area, and charges M.N.U. with handling the resettlement.

The man in charge of obtaining signed consent from each and every resident of District 9 is Wikus van der Merwe (Copley), a born bureaucrat who dotes on his pretty wife, Tania (Haywood) and owes his career to his father-in-law, M.N.U. bigwig Piet Smith (Minnaar). Wikas doesn't think of himself as prejudiced — doesn't he work side-by-side with a black man (Nkosi) whom he's the first to praise as a clever fellow — but the prawns aren't human, are they? South Africa has laws and Wikas is going to follow them, but the prawns make it tough to treat them decently, what with their insistence on creating weapons tailored to their own biochemistry, living like pigs and clinging to their fetid shacks as though they were real homes when everyone knows that wherever their home is, it's not Johannesburg.

Naturally, the resettlement gets off to a rocky start and Wikas is accidentally sprayed with some alien substance while raiding the shack of one "Christopher Johnson" (Cope, whose motion-captured work provided the foundation for all the aliens), a prawn who seems to have more going on between the ears (or where any decent creature would have ears), than the average alien. The aftermath of Wikas' little accident plunges him into a world of vicious medical experiments, totalitarian cruelty and ironic desperation: As Wikas begins to undergo a grotesque metamorphosis, he's forced to take refuge in District 9 and rely on Johnson's help to avoid hit squads dispatched by his own father-in-law.

District 9's allegorical nature isn't especially subtle; what makes it so effective is its matter-of-factness, which is hard not to ascribe to the fact that Blomkamp was born and raised in the shadow of apartheid and its aftermath. District 9 unfolds in a world where aliens are just one more unwanted minority, and Blomkamp gets the details so right that they almost slip by unnoticed, like the fact that Johnson clearly understands English perfectly while Wikas and others forced to have regular contact with the aliens have picked up a smattering of their language (a series of subtitled clicks and damp whirring sounds) without bothering to learn more because, well, why would they?

Jackson's proud claims that District 9 is the summer of 2009's only original genre film are a little exaggerated, but wholly understandable: In a summer dominated by prefabricated, merchandise-driven sci-fi and action movies like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, District 9 is a bracing breath of fresh air. Sure, it owes a debt of imagination to predecessors as diverse as The Quatermass Xperiment, Aliens, Blade Runner, David Cronenberg's The Fly and the TV series Alien Nation, but it wears its influences well, integrating them into a well-thought-out drama about what it means to be human and whether or not humans have a proprietary hold on those qualities.

A drama with big guns, car chases and exploding cars, to be sure, it is at heart a drama nonetheless, because what drives District 9 is Wikas' awakening to the truth of his life. Call it his Matrix moment, his road-to-Damascus revelation or his rendezvous with naked lunch, and make what you will of the fact that one letter turns a pawn into a prawn, but Wikas' transformation from blinkered cog to reluctant rebel is genuinely moving. It's fair to point out that it verges on the inspirational-movie stereotype of ethic minorities as agents of change for white folks, in part because no matter how carefully Blomkamp draws the relationship between Johnson and his son, Little CJ, they're too, well, prawn-like for the average viewer to identify with. But at the same time, that speaks to one of District 9's most pointed underlying conceits. As to complaints about the not-so-happy happy ending, they're thoroughly misguided: Raging against the machine may be liberating, but liberty comes at a price, a price Wikas pays.

Very Bad Things meets Knife in the Water in first-time feature director Olly Blackburn's thriller about not-so-bright young things trying to cover up a nasty accident and getting themselves into ever deeper water as they do.

Three working-class galpals from dreary Leeds decide to vacation together in anything-goes Majorca, Spain, for some sun and fun, emphasis on the fun. Lisa and Kim (Breckin and Winstone, the daughter of veteran UK actor Ray) are out for a good time, consequences be damned. Sensible Tammi (Burley) is all for a good time within the parameters of common sense, which is why she drags her heels when three likely lads — confident Marcus (Taylor), baby-faced Josh (Morris) and bad-boy Bluey (Burke) — invite them to party aboard the luxury they're crewing. But Tammi is no match for peer pressure, and they all wind up aboard the deluxe Durban, heading out to sea. Tammi hits it off with Josh's older brother, Sean (Boulter), and they wind up talking the night away while Lisa, Kim and the rest of the guys go directly to serious drinking, drugging and sexing — videotape and all, naturally. The evening's highlight is meant to be shy-boy Josh experiencing rough-sex Nirvana via the urban-legend "donkey punch," which involves a sharp blow to the back of one's sex partner's neck, triggeing involuntary spasms rumored to produce mind-blowing orgasms. Unfortunately, Josh hits Lisa too hard and snaps her neck.

The horrified girls want to go to the police and explain that the whole thing was an accident, while the boys favor tossing Lisa's corpse overboard and claiming she fell into the deep blue while dead drunk. Sean is stuck in the middle: Under other circumstances he'd side with the girls, but if everything goes pear-shaped, his brother will spend the rest of his life rotting in some Spanish jail. What to do, what to do? And so the stage is set for everyone's worst instincts to surface: Friendship and loyalty take a backseat to sheer animal will to survive, and each character is tested to his or her limits before their long, dark and bloody night of the soul is over.

First-time writer-director Richard Kelly's exercise in "or is it?" paranoia gets off to a shaky start but gradually pulls together into a genuinely haunting parable of teenage alienation.

October 2, 1988: Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) is having a rough trip through adolescence. Sandwiched between two well-adjusted, outgoing sisters — Elizabeth (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who's about to start college, and little Samantha ( Chase), part of her school's "Sparkle Motion" dance squad — Donnie feels awkward, misunderstood and alienated from the rituals and routines of high-school life. He doesn't have a girlfriend, but he's got a shrink (Ross), a medicine cabinet filled with unwanted psychotropic drugs and an imaginary friend called Frank (Duval), who looks like a guy in a malevolent bunny suit.

And then fate delivers a mind-boggling kick in the teeth: A jet engine crashes through Donnie's bedroom ceiling, and the only reason he isn't squashed is that he's out sleepwalking. Already plagued by existential angst, Donnie is deeply shaken by his brush with death, made stranger by the fact that no one can figure out where the engine came from — no crippled plane turns up anywhere, and the FAA is, frankly, baffled. Donnie begins seeing Frank behind the bathroom mirror, warning that the world will end in 28 days: Frank knows, he says, because he's from the future. A string of odd coincidences suggests Frank may be telling the truth, and Donnie becomes obsessed with time travel. He also begins having visions of energy streaming from people's bodies, apparently reaching out for... something. Meanwhile, the school is vandalized — could the culprit be Donnie, sleepwalking under Frank's influence? — and the town falls under the spell of a silver-tongued motivational speaker (Swayze). The bright spot in Donnie's increasingly dark days is his budding relationship with transfer student Gretchen Ross (Malone), who's on the run from her own demons.

Kelly's observations about materialism and crackpot pop philosophizing are trite and hardly unique to the '80s, but his missteps are minor by comparison to his achievements: He slowly weaves a meticulously crafted web of peculiarity around Donnie, and by the time the movie shows its hand, every piece of the puzzle has slipped neatly — which is not to say glibly — into place.

Although Donnie Darko tanked on original theatrical release, earning less than $5,000,000, it found such a passionate following on video and DVD that it was re-released in 2004 with 20 minutes of restored footage trimmed to reduce the running time. While many director's cuts are pointless variations on mediocre material, the extended version of Donnie Darko is a dramatic improvement on the original. It's simultaneously more vivid and more elusive, a delicious fever dream whose highlights include the most unsettling jack o' lantern ever... suffice it to say that Frank the bunny looks seriously disturbing as a pumpkin.

The indignities visited by Doug Miles and Tex Hauser (Beastmaster 2) upon low-rent, 1954 sci-fi picture Killers from Space include a new soundtrack, additional footage, actors inserted into existing scenes and a new story line. The result: A dreary movie about aliens stealing American military secrets directed by Billy Wilder's less-talented brother, W. Lee Wilder is reborn as a silly comedy about aliens stealing American manhood. Think What’s Up Tiger Lily? by way of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Tired of gays in the military, Dr. Fartin (Graves, voice of Erik Frandsen) — and that’s Far-teen, thank you very much — concocts a plan to lure sissies in uniform to isolated Sodom Flats and nuke ‘em all. But Fartin's plane crashes just outside Inbred, Texas, where it just so happens that a bunch of newly arrived aliens are lurking. Fartin is revived by the pop-eyed extraterrestrials, who bombard him with gay-rays and send him back to base Fellatio Alger to steal secrets that will help them turn the whole world homosexual.

Disturbed by Fartin's new-found familiarity with show tunes, perverted dope-fiend Colonel Butz (Seay, voice of Lloyd Floyd) urges Fartin's sexy wife, Ellen (Bestar, voice of Rosa Rugosa), to keep her husband on the straight and narrow. Meanwhile, the space invaders scheme and stage hip-hop dance numbers in their disco dungeon of terror.

The new dialogue is a barrage of puns, anachronisms, political quips and gags about anal probes, drugs and all things queer. The new footage features J. Edgar Hoover (Lippe) in drag; naughty Nurse Bendover and dumbass Inbred Police Chief Mussolino (both played by Floyd), along with racy inserts involving panty flashing, blueberry pancakes eaten off a lady's derriere and the like.

Like the L.A. Connection Comedy Group, who in the 1980s worked similar transformations on Sherlock Holmes mystery Woman in Green (1945) and The Blob (1958) — turning them into Movie Mystery Madness and Blobbermouth respectively — Hauser and Miles go for broke. Lobbing your every comic idea at the screen guarantees that some will be funnier than others, and tomfoolery like this is a matter of taste. But when Don’t Ask Don’t Tell nails a gag, it’s pretty damned funny. Twitting Peter Graves' square-jawed earnestness is a sure thing (he did it himself in Airplane! and Airplane II), and those dancing aliens are hilarious.

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The totally generic name doesn't give you a clue (it was shot as "The Colony, which isn't much better), so you probably want to know what this movie's about. Well, hard to say exactly, but it has something to do with scary amusement parks, Dennis Rodman selling high-tech weapons out of a sex shop in Antwerp, plutonium, Jean-Claude Van Damme's thighs, ripping off/paying homage to The Prisoner, tigers and bald Chinese dervishes holding switchblades between their toes.

Government agent Jack Quinn (Van Damme) just wants to lie by the pool withhis pregnant girlfriend, but get's hauled out of retirement to take on one last job involving his longtime nemesis, Starvros (Rourke). The powers that be team Quinn with Antwerp-based arms deal Yaz (Rodman), but their plan to take down Stavos goes horribly wrong: Stavros' girlfriend and child are killed and Quinn wakes up in "The Colony", which appears to be a top-of-the-line tropical spa on an isolated island but turns out to be a luxury detention center, where the the world's most dangerous superspies are made permanent guests so their brains can be drained of information that will help the battle against international terrorism (and who knows what else). Wait, is that the McGoohan estate on the line? Quinn eventually escapes, of course, determined to stop Stavros once and for all.

That most frustrating thing about writer-director Michael (Michael Clayton) Gilroy's dryly jaunty, globe-trotting spy-vs.-spy romp is that it's just good enough to make you wish it were better.

It opens brilliantly. A pair of sleekly dressed executives and their entourages converge on a private airport in the shadow of their respective corporate jets. In slow motion and without sound, the rival captains of industry hard looks, warning snarls and, finally, body blows, as their stunned minions work up the courage to separate the lions of Burkett & Randle and Equikrom. Operatic, witty and brilliantly efficient, the sequence establish the no-holds-barred war of egos against which a fiendishly complicated scam will unfold.

Dubai, 2003: MI5 hound dog Ray Koval (Owen) and steely CIA cutie Claire Stenwick (Roberts) meet at a Fourth of July shindig at the US Embassy and fall into bed like the beautiful creatures they are. Sadly, cock-of-the-walk Ray fails to realize that Claire is just after some top-secret documents, and awakes 18 hours later humiliated, outraged and suffering a major Mickey Finn hangover.

Four years later, Ray and Claire have left their respective government gigs and taken up corporate espionage: He's a last-minute addition to the team of high-tech spies assembled by ferrety CEO Dick Garsik (Giamatti) to steal the formula for a revolutionary product — it's so secret he doesn't even know what it is, beyond that it must be something to do with health and/or hygiene — developed by his sworn enemy, marketplace Darwinist Howard Tully (Wilkinson). She's the mole buried deep in Tully's security department, Whoever brings the miracle invention to market first will rule the kingdom of health and beauty aids, at least until the next big things comes along. That Ray was brought in as Claire's handler is a delicious irony neither particularly appreciates. Or do they?

Gilroy's twisty tale unfolds in a series of achronological flashbacks, each of which reveals another facet of Claire and Ray's exquisitely complicated relationship — a thing of larceny, lust and the total absence of trust. Each knows the other is a reflexive liar, constantly calculating the odds of getting away with something illegal, immoral, seductively lucrative or some combination thereof. The bitter battle of wits between Equikrom and Burkett & Randle offers the opportunity to work the long con of a lifetime: While the fat cats are busy trying to screw each other, there's room for a pair of sly mice to slip in and snatch the multimillion dollar cheese out from under their noses. The trick is figuring out where the various players' loyalties lie.

All of which promises cruel, sexy, brain-teasing fun in the tradition of The Sting, Nine Queens, The Grifters or House of Games. And it delivers, at least until the story is dragged down by the weight of Ray and Claire's oddly lifeless romance, the very thing that's supposed to add sizzle to the ice-cold mechanics of the dizzyingly complicated caper.

Noisy, derivative and thoroughly preposterous even by the standards of 21st-century action movies, this sci-fi tinged thriller pits a pair of ordinary folks against a disembodied voice that orders them to do very bad things.

Tired of competing with his brilliant twin brother, Ethan, Jerry Shaw (LaBeouf) opts out of the race, dropping out of Stamford to take a series of dead-end jobs and bum around the world. He's working at a Chicago copy shop when he's abruptly called home for Ethan's funeral. After the inevitable run in with his dad, who clearly thinks the wrong son was run down by a truck, Ethan returns home to find his bank account crammed with cash, his apartment piled high with military gear and a strange woman on his cell phone, telling him to do as he's told or he'll be arrested as a terrorist. Jerry is still waffling when the FBI's counter-terrorist unit kicks in his door.

While Jerry is being sweated by Agent Thomas Morgan (Thornton), Rachel Holloman (Monaghan) is spending a night on the town with her girlfriends. A single mother, Rachel has just put her 8-year-old, Sam (Boyce), on a train to Washington DC, where his school band is going to play at the Kennedy Center, and is enjoying her first break in ages. She too gets a call from the same female stranger, telling her that if she fails to follow directions, Sam will die. The stranger engineers Jerry's escape and throws him together with Rachel, now driving a spiffy Porsche Cayenne, and the race is on. Can Rachel and Jerry figure out who's pulling their strings and what they're being manipulated into doing before Morgan catches up to them?

Kevin Lima and Billy Kelly's surprisingly sophisticated riff on animated fairy-tale movie cliches banishes a chirpy animated princess to the real world of New York City, where happily-ever-aftering is in woefully short supply.

Beautiful, kindhearted, cartoon commoner Giselle (Adams) is about to marry handsome Prince Edward (Marsden) when Edward's wicked stepmother, evil Queen Narissa (Sarandon), steps in, shoving the unsuspecting Giselle into a deep well that opens onto a busy Times Square street. Poor, trusting Giselle, with her poofy wedding dress and sunny dearth of street smarts, is quickly robbed, drenched by the inevitable sudden squall and reduced to knocking pathetically on the door of a billboard illustration of a castle, looking like a bona fide crazy lady.

Fortunately, fate delivers her into the reluctant custody of divorced divorce lawyer Robert (Patrick Dempsey), whose fantasy-deprived little daughter, Morgan (Covey), loves all things princess and persuades daddy to keep her, at least temporarily. Giselle's presence disrupts every aspect of Robert's life, starting with his plan to propose to sassy Nancy (Menzel), the thoroughly empowered girlfriend who's spent the last five years respecting Robert's "no sleepover" rule because hey, what mature modern woman would resent a devoted single father's efforts to keep home a safe harbor for his motherless child? Nancy's rection to finding a naked stranger in Robert's shower, not unsurprisingly, is white-hot fury.

Giselle also puts a serious crimp in Robert's ongoing efforts to teach Morgan that real life is not a Disney movie, and that it's better to be smart, cautious and self-reliant than to sit around humming "Someday My Prince Will Come." In fact, she soon has Robert questioning his own rueful cynicism: There must be a logical explanation for the way a simple walk in Central Park with Giselle spontaneously becomes becomes a full-scale musical production number, or Giselle's offhand ability to get that pair of cooing doves to fly over to Nancy's place bearing a heart-shaped wreath of flowers, but damned if he can figure out what it is.

Though Enchanted casts a wide net, its most obvious influence is Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), from Sarandon's busty evil queen to the poisoned apples with which her henchman (Spall) tries to poison Giselle. And rightly so: Snow White is the source from which all subsequent Disney animation springs. With the exception of a supersweet ending that ignores the hard truth at the heart of the best fairy tales — that happy endings come at a real price — Enchanted works on every level.

It's tempting to dismiss the all-or-nothing histrionics of Michael Powell's classic ballet melodrama The Red Shoes (1948) as overwrought and unrealistic, but Nils Tavernier's sober, perceptive documentary about the Paris Opera Ballet proves beyond a doubt that the stakes are every bit as high in the real world of 21st-century dancers' lives.

"The system is a machine that crushes the weak," says former ballerina Ghislaine Thesmar of the rigorous process by which adorable youngsters are molded into world-class dancers, and dancers developed into etoiles — stars. Though a relative newcomer to the world of classical dance, Tavernier's grandparents lived on the Avenue de l'Opera, near the 19th-century Palais Garnier where the Paris Opera Ballet performs, and he became fascinated by the graceful, slightly otherworldly dancers he saw walking down the street. Shot in 1999, Tavernier's film includes footage of rehearsals, company class and performances and interviews with choreographers (including a reluctant Maurice Bejart and a more forthcoming Jiri Kylian), company directors, students and dancers, from the lowest-ranked hopefuls in the corps to the most senior members of the troupe.

Unlike most American companies, the Paris Opera Ballet is insured a steady stream of dancers trained in its specific style from its own, nearly 400-year-old school, and advancement through the ranks proceeds according to a rigid schedule. Of the hundreds of aspiring dancers who apply to the school annually, 30 are accepted, a third make it through the first year and a handful graduate to dance with the company. Without slipping into point/counterpoint cliches, Tavernier elicits starkly contrasting accounts of life in the school and the company; whether because he's a particularly skilled interviewer or French dancers are especially articulate, his subjects' responses are both candid and considered.

Etoile ClaireMarie Osta, who channeled her teenage desire to be a nun into dancing, wasn't phased by the harsh mental and physical demands of the Paris Opera Ballet school, while fellow etoile Marie-Agnes Gillot concedes that she would have welcomed a little more emotional support. Other dancers speak perceptively about balancing their careers and their personal lives, the ironic and frustrating way that artistic maturity coincides with loss of physical ability, the complicated mix of camaraderie and competition that defines their relationships with other dancers, and what they get in return for all they've given up.

2001
Directed by: Calum Grant and Joshua Atesh Litle.
Written by: Calum Grant.
With: Calum Grant, Angie Thierot, Brad Olsen, Mary Rutheford, Simon Thieriot, Stewart Fallon, Dan Plumlee, George Fangides, Ed Archie Noisecat, David Driver, James Curry, Joshua Atesh Litle, Mark Routhier and Josiah Clark.

Calum Grant and Joshua Atesh Litle's post-apocalyptic tale, set 12 years after the Kotto virus wiped out most of the human race, styled itself as a documentary portrait of a handful of the 186 men and women left in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Based on Swedish writer Mikael Hafstrom's semi-autobiographical, 1981 novel, a blunt denunciation of institutionalized cruelty in general and Sweden’s collaboration with Nazi Germany in particular, Ondskan was nominated for a 2003 Academy Award in the foreign-language film category.

Set in the 1950s, it revolves around bright-but-alienated middle-class teenager Erik Ponti (Wilson), whose home life is an endless nightmare of vicious abuse by his smirking stepfather (Rabaeus) — a sadistic restaurateur who rhapsodizes over pommes duchesses while emotionally terrorizing his meek wife (Richardson). Erik takes out his pent-up frustrations on other students and blows off his schoolwork; after being repeatedly censured for fighting and warned about his poor academic record, Erik finds his entire future hanging in the balance. No state school will accept him unless he improves his grades and gets his antisocial behavior under control, and without a university-level education, he'll never be able to better his lot in life. In desperation, Erik's mother sells off some heirlooms and scrapes together a year's tuition at Stjarnsberg, a prestigious boarding school, hoping that an atmosphere of discipline and academic excellence will turn her son around.

But Erik quickly discovers that Stjarnsberg is a hotbed of relentless, ferocious bullying rooted in the belief that members of the hereditary aristocracy are inherently intellectually, physically and morally superior to the lower classes. Upperclassmen are given free rein to terrorize younger students, and the faculty — whose ranks include at least one instructor who openly applauds Nazi eugenics programs — turn a blind eye.

Unable to fight back without risking expulsion and his last best hope of making anything of himself, Erik keeps his head down hunkers and adopts the doctrine of passive resistance counseled by his brainy and probably gay roommate, Pierre (Lundstrom), whose bookishness and complete lack of interest in competitive sports make him a natural target of the school's self-styled ubermenschen, led by aristocratic Otto Silverhielm (Skarsgard) and his toady, Dahlen (Salen). Erik refuses to knuckle under to the escalating punishment and petty humiliations his stoicism provokes, and adds insult to injury by proving himself an accomplished athlete. He breaks school swimming records and snatches a coveted trophy from the sneering student whose wealthy father endowed it. Needless to say, no good comes of Erik's victory.

Ondskan isn’t subtle: Erik's stepfather, Otto and his minions and the faculty who tacitly endorse their behavior are so wickedly loathsome that they might as well be twirling one collective black mustache. But didactic though it is, it’s part of a growing body of work — fiction and nonfiction — that explores Sweden’s discomfiting and largely unofficial ties to Nazi Germany. Director Hafstrom made his U.S. debut with the 2005 thriller Derailed.

Is The Expendables a self-conscious joke or a sly throwback to grindhouse fare like Enzo Castellari’s The Inglorious Bastards, which pitted the B-list likes of Fred Williamson, Bo Svenson and Peter Hooten against a pack of barking Nazis? How you perceive it depends on which side of the age divide you fall, but either way it’s a strong contender for the title of manliest movie ever made.

Mercenaries Barney Ross (Stallone), Lee Christmas (Statham), Ying Yang (Li), Hale Caesar (Crews), Toll Road (Couture) and Gunner Jensen (Lundgren) have been all over this dirty world, collecting hefty paychecks to kick ass from Mombasa to Sarajevo and keep their mouths shut when they come home. They may be getting a little long in the tooth, but they’re impressively lean and mean without being heartless bastards. Really — they fall out with longtime companion Jensen because he wants to hang him a Somali pirate, and that’s just not their style. They garrote, gut and blow bad guys to smithereens, sure, but hanging a man is barbaric, Neanderthal crap and they don’t roll that way. Oh, and they don’t roll with junkies either, so strung-out Jensen gets the heave-ho after the gang finishes rescuing a bunch of bedraggled hostages in the Gulf of Aden.

After getting his lavish tattoos touched up by former Expendable Tool (Rourke), Ross gets a new gig from the mysterious “Mr. Church” (Willis, uncredited despite the fact that he’s featured prominently on the movie’s poster), after trading barbs with best frenemy Trench (Schwarzenegger, also uncredited and not on the poster), who declares the job a fool’s errand. The assignment involves deposing Third World dictator General Garza (Zayas of TV’s Dexter), who, with the help of sleek Ugly American John Munroe (Roberts) and his sadistic sidekick Paine (Austin), has turned the banana republic of Vilena into an insanely lucrative, ruthlessly efficient cocaine-producing machine.

Ross aborts the mission when he realizes that Church is with the CIA and they’re all Agency pawns in some cynical, black-op power struggle, but not before being profoundly moved by the efforts of Garza’s tough-yet-idealistic daughter (Itie) to help her brutally oppressed countrymen. Haunted by the fact that she refused to abandon them to save her own skin, Ross resolves to go back into the mouth of Hell and polish up his tarnished karma.

Yes, the marks of tongue-in-cheek snark are all over The Expendables, from the characters’ ludicrous names (none of which is as slyly preposterous as “Randy Couture,” and that one’s for real — no wonder the guy became a mixed martial-arts fighter) to Christmas and Ross’ cover for their reconnaissance trip to Vilena. Sure, they’re ornithologists from the Global Wildlife Conservancy, and love that logo stenciled on their company plane — a glowering raven perched on a wireframe sphere (the ultimate insider’s nod to Stallone’s long-languishing Edgar Allan Poe biopic). And let’s not even get into the bits of business meant to humanize the muscle-bound anti-heroes — Li’s constant complaints about money (he deserves a bigger cut because he works harder than the rest, on account of being so small), Christmas and Ross’ ongoing debate about whether a blade is more efficient than a bullet, Road’s sensitivity about his cauliflower ear, Caesar’s fetishistic love for exotic ordnance... they're shorthand so short they barely register.

But when push comes to shove, The Expendables

Commercial and music-video director Singh's second feature— his debut was the formulaic but visually stunning Jennifer Lopez thriller The Cell (2000) — is a tale-within-a-tale that glides between a hospital in 1915 Los Angeles and a surreal, fairy tale world of exotic adventure inspired by the Bulgarian film Yo Ho Ho (1981).

Five-year-old Alexandria (Untaru), her collarbone and left arm awkwardly splinted, is recovering from the tumble she took while picking oranges with her mother and sister — they fled their Eastern European homeland after political unrest claimed her father and their home. Stuntman Roy Walker (Pace) broke his back while filming a Western and may never walk again; his girlfriend (Waddell) broke his heart when she threw him over for movie star Sinclair (Caltagirone). Outgoing and perpetually restless, Alexandria befriends the despondent Walker, who tells her an epic tale cobbled together from movie cliches and his own shattered dreams, periodically adjusted to suit Alexandria's firmly stated criticisms — she may not speak English fluently, but she knows when a plot point is stupid.

After some false starts, it settles into the story of a motley and colorful crew — tthe Black Bandit (Pace), a dreadlocked mystic (Bleach) who emerges from a blasted tree, an Indian prince (Verma), a former slave (Wesley), an Italian explosives expert (Smith) and Charles Darwin (Bill), who travels with a wise, talking monkey named Wallace — who band together to seek revenge on the man who has wronged each of them: Governor Odious (also Caltagirone). Along the way, they're joined by a princess (also Waddell) and the Bandit's long lost daughter (also Untaru). But Walker has an ulterior motive in captivating Alexandria, and her devotion to both the story and the storyteller ultimately endangers her life.

Allow me to begin by saying I have little patience for Wes Anderson’s twee tales of love and pain among the adorably quirky, and less for Noah Baumbach’s mewling chronicles of brittle, self-absorbed brattiness. And yet I loved Fantastic Mr. Fox, their sly, witty and utterly enchanting adaptation of Roald Dahl’s mordantly whimsical book.

Though faithful to Dahl’s sensibility, Anderson and Baumbach’s screenplay expands on his slight story, which begins with the raffish Mr. Fox (voice of Clooney) and his free-spirited girlfriend (Streep) conducting a daring raid on a squab farm, only to be tripped up by Mr. Fox’s reckless bravado. “I’m pregnant,” announces the future Mrs. Fox as the iron bars of a ridiculously avoidable trap crash down and her cocky swain assesses the umpteenth fine mess he’s gotten them into.

Seven years later, Mr. Fox has made good on the promise he made that day: He’s abandoned the thieving life to write a frivolous newspaper column no one reads and a life of shabby contentment in the modest but homey burrow the Foxes share with their cub, Ash (Schwartzman). But Mr. Fox pines for days when the world respected his wildness; he secretly thrills to the memory of local lads whispering conspiratorially about Mrs. Fox’s racy reputation and wishes his sullen, perpetually seething son were a little less klutzy comic-book geeky and a little more effortlessly cool. Since none of that is going to happen, he channels his discontents into real estate. Mr. Fox no longer wants to live in a hole in the ground and moves his family — temporarily expanded to accommodate Kristofferson (Eric Chase Anderson, Wes' baby brother), the handsome, spiritually enlightened, athletic vixen-magnet of a nephew, whose dad is hospitalized with double pneumonia — to a handsome aerie in a capacious beech that overlooks lush fields, rolling hills and the walled fiefdoms of the meanest farmers in Christendom: Portly poultry magnate Walter Boggis (Hurlstone), stunted smoked-duck mogul Nathan Bunce (Guinness) and lean, mean cider czar Franklin Bean (Gambon).

Mr. Fox inevitably feels the cold breath of mortality on his handsome tail and concocts a plan to savor the buzz one last time: Abetted by natural-born sidekick Kylie (Wolodarsky), a possum with a heart of gold and a disconcerting hypnovision stare, Mr. Fox plots a series of raids on the Boggis, Bunce and Bean farms, the one last score that will ease him into comfortably numb retirement. And just as inevitably, things don’t go as planned: The thuggish Bean rallies his neighbors to mount a full-out assault on the insolent creatures who dare invade their homes and barns, and Mr. Fox must face the fact that his devil-may-care irresponsibility has endangered not only his own nearest and dearest but the entire animal community, from badger to beaver to bunny, mole and weasel.

Fantastic Mr. Fox’s aesthetic is rooted in Beatrix Potter’s deceptively bucolic yarns (like Mr. Fox, Squirrel Nutkin and the Fierce Bad Rabbit sacrifice their tails to impudence) by way of Nick Park’s cheekily eccentric Wallace & Gromit films. It’s impressively handmade and soothingly tactile; Fox and his friends have the air of old nursery-room toys come to life, which ought to be a little scary (I’m sure I wasn’t the only child who carefully secured certain dolls and stuffed animals before going to bed) but instead feels sweetly reassuring. Yes, toys do wake up at night, but they simply go about their business, reading newspapers, eating dinner and playing little games of oneupmanship amongst themselves. There are no ambiguously sinister teddy bears’ picnics here, only Willem Defoe voicing a southern-fried Richard Widmark of a rat, Brian Cox mouthing the urgent cliches of a local you-are-there! TV reporter and Owen Wilson ambling through the inanities of every middle-school gym coach who unerringly said the wrong thing every single time. Mr. Fox gamely straightens his spine and throws back his shoulders to deliver inspirational speeches, handy summations (“He redeemed himself!") and pithy pronouncements with the self-deprecating panache of a dab hand who knows you get it but is nonetheless contractually obligated to dot and cross the thematic “i”s and “t”s. A spoonful of insouciance not only helps the medicine go down but lends it a cheerful “Hey, we’re all in this together” offhandedness.

Children can delight in the movie’s whimsical conceits (like the meticulously engineered blueberry sedatives that neutralize the farmers’ hell hounds), identify with Ash’s insecurities and giggle at the anarchic sight of debonair Mr. Fox suddenly ripping into his dinner with the restraint of a starving shoat at an all-you-can-at trough or literally baring his fangs during a dispute with Badger (Murray), his relentlessly sensible lawyer. Mr. Fox’s reason for moving — living below street level makes him feel poor — is designed to resonate with the big kids, but think back — how young were you when you grasped the semiotics of lunch-bag snacks? Oreos cool, Hydrox (or worse, generic sandwich cookies) not. Like all the best children’s tales, Fantastic Mr. Fox’s charms are less timeless than disconcertingly mutable.

God save us from the curse of dyspeptic holiday films! Make no mistake: I hate Christmas as much as the next person — perhaps more, because unlike the Hollywood screenwriters who invariably cave in to holiday sentiment I have the courage of my convictions. For all of its snarky holiday/family bashing, Four Christmases wimps out in the third act and reaffirms all the traditional values it affects to mock.

Childless and happily unmarried Kate (Witherspoon) and Brad (Vaughn) dodge their holiday obligations by telling their respective divorced parents and assorted siblings they're doing overseas charity work when they're actually taking an indulgent couples' vacation in the sun. I can get sort of with that: I once claimed to be volunteering at a soup kitchen to avoid the family festivities. But I was young — like, in college young — and the next year I bit the bullet, skipped the excuses and just said I wasn't coming. Kate and Brad are in their 30s, plenty old enough to stand up for themselves. And boy, are their faces red when a local news crew catches them fuming at the Fiji Air counter after a mega-fog grounds all flights out of San Francisco, forcing them to put in appearances at four family get-togethers, each ghastlier than the one before.

Brad's father (Duvall) and no-neck brothers (actor-turned-director Favreau and country singer McGraw) are white-trash losers who mock him mercilessly for having had the temerity to get an Ivy league education and become a successful lawyer. Kate's mother (Mary Steenburgen) is dating mega-church messiah Pastor Phil (Yoakam) and presides over a coven of oversexed cougars (Chenoweth, Carol Kane and Jeanette Miller) who delight in reminding Kate that she was once a fat girl whose best friend was a dyke to watch out for, and Brad's hippie-dippy mom (Sissy Spacek) is sleeping with his former best friend. By the time they get to Kate's dad (Voight), who's finally settled down with a good, stable, age-appropriate woman, Brad and Kate are on the verge of breaking up, their picture-perfect relationship torn to shreds by their awful relatives.

So, do Kate and Brad come to the realization that family is the most important thing in the world? Well, gee, what do you think? And therein lies my problem with Four Christmases: For all the movie's jabs at puking babies, white-trash relatives, insidious underminers and selfish parents, it lacks the nerve to step up and admit that some families are so awful that their children are better off without them, and that some holidays are too debased for reclamation.

It's hard to believe that once upon a time, some 30-odd years ago, millions of Americans turned on their TVs and sat riveted by 90 minutes of two men talking. Four times. Granted, one was the disgraced former president Richard M. Nixon, whose ignominious resignation three years earlier was still painfully fresh in the country's collective mind. But still. And UK writer Peter Morgan's play about the behind-the-scenes research, negotiation and fundraising that produced the Frost-Nixon interviews, may not sound like natural-born movie material: It too is a whole lot of talk. But the talk is choice, and the film, directed by Ron Howard, is mesmerizing.

In the 1960s, English TV personality David Frost (Sheen) was everywhere. He made his name as host of the live sketch-comedy show That Was the Week that Was, whose biting political humor briefly got it banished from the airwaves. A string of subsequent hits allowed the telegenic writer-producer-actor to live the life of an international bon vivant, jetting around the world accompanied by a series of beautiful women, including actresses Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson and siger Diahann Carroll. Not bad for the son of a dirt-poor minister from Kent. But by the mid-'70s, Frost's star was fading; he was in need of a career jump start, and found it in the glowering Richard Nixon (Langella). The man who had resigned from the highest office in American politics in disgrace and vanished into luxurious exile, shielded by a presidential pardon, had never spoken publicly about his precipitous fall from power. Nixon was the get of the century, and Frost got him.

The behind-the-scenes machinations required to pull off this media coup provide the film's plot and occupy the supporting cast, including Matthew Macfadyen as Frost's long-suffering producer; Rockwell and Platt as James Reston, Jr. and Robert Zelnick, longtime political journalists who coached Frost prior to the interviews; Bacon as Nixon's head of staff, Jack Brennan, and Jones as his cutthroat agent, Swifty Lazar. But the main event is the verbal thrust and parry between Nixon, whose first presidential campaign died by the camera, and Frost, who was to the medium born.

Written, produced and directed by: James Roland Whitney.

Just as TV's Candid Camera prefigured reality shows like Punk'd and Scare Tactics, the Candid Camera feature What Do You Say To a Naked Lady? (1969) paved the way for this independent spin on extreme pranking.

Writer-producer-director Whitney began his filmmaking career with Just, Melvin, a lacerating documentary about his own family's miserable history of child abuse that feels a little too lurid for its own good intentions. This feature-length provocation chronicles the first round of "America's Most Uninhibited Game," which Whitney concocted and orchestrates with smarmy glee.

Six contestants, handpicked from a grueling audition at which they must confess deep emotional traumas and improvise explicit sex scenes, are placed in a series of embarrassing situations, directed to accomplish certain goals and given points based on how well they fulfill their assignments. Over a 72-hour period, the three men and three women — Joshua Coleman, Scott Ryan, David Maynard, Sarah Smith, Dani Marco and Elisha Imani Wilson — must complete tasks that range from persuading complete strangers to give them a urine sample to seducing unsuspecting delivery boys. The most elaborate prank involves pairs of contestants coyly enticing a stranger to their hotel room for "a naked trio," only to reveal that what they meant was that the three of them were going to do a hokey nude song-and-dance number.

Between rounds they're questioned by the game's judges, mediagenic therapist Gilda Carle and singer-comic Jim Caruso, who encourage them to pick at their deepest psychic scars until they bleed. Drawing blood takes very little picking, since the contestants have a lot of issues: compulsive-eating, sexual disorders, childhood abuse, parents lost under traumatic circumstances, part-time hustling... the range of dysfunction is breathtaking. Is this the ultimate sleazy reality project, a contrived and degrading spectacle or a biting satirical expose of the lengths to which people will go for fleeting fame?

Director-star Eastwood's bizarre cross between All in the Family and Death Wish is the kind of movie Don Siegel and Sam Fuller used to make, a blunt but perceptive slice of American discontent filtered through the prism of B-movie conventions.

Wiry former auto worker Walt Kowalski (Eastwood) is the sum total of everything he's lost. The film opens at his wife's funeral, where his soft, self-centered children and their families can't contain or even bother to hide their boredom and impatience to get the hell out of there. Walt's job is gone, and even if it weren't, the Ford that spawned the mint-condition, 1972 Gran Torino crouched in his driveway — the one he helped build — is a thing of the past, as are his buddies from the line; they've died or moved. His neighborhood is overrun with foreigners and no one cares about old white guys like him; his grandkids have no respect, and their middle-aged parents wish he'd vanish into an old folk's homes and stop bitching about hard work and sacrifice. It's enough to make a man growl like a junkyard dog, and Walt does. Grrrr.

That Walt should ever befriend Hmong college student Sue (Ahney Her) and her younger brother, Thao (Bee Vang), seems the height of sentimental dramatic contrivance. But it happens the way things do when people of different races and similar finances wind up in the same neighborhoods. They walk the same streets, shop in the same stores, worry about the same things: Will that abandoned house become a crack den and haul down the whole block? Where are their taxes going, and will they still have jobs next year? Lives intersect. Walt spontaneously rescues Sue from some street corner thugs because he hates their profane, brutal bullying more than he hates her, even if she is, in Walt's formidablerepertory of racial slurs, a gook. Grrrr.

Thao gets off on every wrong foot possible: He first tries to borrow a set of jumper cables during the funeral reception and later, coerced by local gang, makes a pathetic attempt to steal Walt's Gran Torino. But Sue forces her brother into an abject apology, and pleads with Walt for a chance to mitigate the shame he's brought upon his family, by working for Walt. Neither Walt nor Thao is happy with the deal, but Sue is a breezily unstoppable force and Walt eventually discovers that Thao isn't a bad kid, though his gangbanging cousins are hellbent into hauling him into the kind of life that will chew him up and spit him out faster than you can say … well, anything Walt might say would be incendiary. Grrrr.

Sue even persuades Walt to come over for a party, where it can't fail to escape his notice that grandparents, aunties and uncles, parents, toddlers and teenagers are rubbing elbows. And those old ladies know how to cook, too. They're not some kind of Hallmark family or anything, but they beat the hell out of Walt's kids, who dutifully come by for his birthday bearing large-button phones and retirement-home brochures and dropping hints about what they'd like to inherit. Grrrrr.

Walt's growing engagement with the family next door comes to a dramatically expedient conclusion (if you introduce gangbanging cousins in the first act…), but it's surprisingly powerful. Gran Torino is a thornier movie than, say, Unforgiven, whose tone is clear from the outset. Gran Torino starts off on a note of queasy comedy; anyone old enough to have seen All in the Family when it first aired will recognize the exquisite discomfort engendered when Walt says something so casually, unthinkingly racist that you have to laugh. Something like, "Get me another beer, dragon lady. This one's empty," to Sue. It helps that she can hold her own: When Walt warns that she and her dog-eating family better stay away from his aging Labrador, she blithely retorts, "We only eat cats." So it's a little disorienting when Eastwood goes all Dirty Harry — foreshadowing, and the fact that if anyone is going to it might as well be him, notwithstanding.

Let's talk demographics: As in, 18 to the 24-year-old men who are the target audience for this lewd, crude comedy about baby-men behaving badly. That's not me, and yet I laughed my ass off.

In two days, Doug (Bartha) is marrying the rich and beautiful Tracy (Barrese). But before he ties the knot, his best friends — thoroughly whipped dentist Stu (former Daily Show correspondant Helms) and smarmy middle-school teacher Phil (Cooper) — are taking him for a Vegas blow-out. It would be nice if they weren't stuck with Tracy's big, fat, socially retarded brother, Alan (Galifianakis), but on the plus side, their dad (Tambour) lends the gang his totally sweet, vintage Mercedes for the trip.

The pals book a deluxes suit at Ceasar's Palace, sneak up to the roof for verboten toast and then… well, therein lies the problem. Phil, Alan and Stu wake up the next day with absolutely no memory of what happened then, which might not be a problem were there not a baby in the closet, a tiger in the bathroom, a chicken scratching around the pricy suite, a police car in the garage where the Mercedes should be and no sign of Doug anywhere.With the wedding less that two days away, Stu, Phil and Alan must reconstrucy their lost night o' debauchery in hopes of getting Doug to the church on time without letting on to their various wives, girlfriends and sundry relatives that anything is wrong. This naturally proves harder than they could imagine, given that every clue leads to further proof that the preceeding 12 hours were a marathon orgy of bad decisions, reckless behavior and misguided choices.

It's all-too easy to imagine the crappy movie The Hangover could have been, so kudos to screenwriters Lucas and Moore, whose previous credits (Four Christmases, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past) gave no indication that they were capable of writing a witty, razor-sharp variation on bachelor-party horror tale Very Bad Things in which the testosterone-poisoned hijinks have slightly less dire and considerably funnier consequences.

There’s an obvious human-interest angle on Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, the NYC couple who spent 30 years amassing a world-class collection of contemporary American art on the salaries of a librarian and a postal worker. But Japanese-raised local documentarian Megumi Sasaki steps back and lets them tell their own tale, supplemented by testimony from the artists they befriended when they were all young, broke and driven—such as Chuck Close and Christo.

The U.K. trio behind 2004’s bitingly funny Shaun of the Dead — director/co-writer Edgar Wright, costar Nick Frost and co-writer/star Simon Pegg — found their next target at the intersection of noisy American balls-to-the-wall action pictures and the kind of British mystery in which comfy little towns prove to be rotten with dirty secrets. And against all odds, it's as laceratingly entertaining as its predecessor.

Supercop Nicholas Angel (Pegg) is the best damned officer on London's Metropolitan Police Force, and his fellow officers are sick to death of him. He's humorless, annoyingly PC, relentlessly competitive and exasperatingly by-the-book, and his arrest record makes everyone else look like useless layabouts. So the powers-that-be (Freeman, Nighy and the uncredited Coogan) exile him to quaint little Sandford, a finalist for the title of most picturesque village in England and a hotbed of, well, not much.

The town's zealous neighborhood-watch group is less concerned with what little petty law-breaking there is than with getting rid of that tacky mime whose faux-bot antics are mucking up Sanford's carefully calculated "ye olde" vibe and Angel's vigorous campaign to arrest and prosecute underage drinkers and intoxicated drivers irritates the hell out of everyone, cops and citizens alike. Angel just can't get it through his law-and-order head that all the Sanford police force is expected to do is mediate squabbles between neighbors and collar the occasional renegade swan that decides to run amok rather than floating serenely in its pond. And the beauty of Wright and Pegg's sly sense of humor is that, having introduced an obstreperous swan in the first act, they make sure it plays an integral part in the film's ludicrously bloody conclusion.

In between, Angel tumbles onto a bizarre crime wave that everyone from Chief Butterman (Broadbent) to the preening supermarket mogul (Dalton) who heads the neighborhood watch, pooh-poohs as nothing more than unfortunate accidents. The unctuous local lawyer and his tarty girlfriend? They were merely decapitated in a simple car accident. That fellow who was blown up in his tasteless McMansion? Just a drunk trying to make beans and toast — sad really, but a match plus a gas leak equalsboom. The crusading local reporter squashed by a piece of falling masonry? Tragic, and that's exactly why the vicar was hosting a benefit for the church's building fund — so such awful mishaps could be averted.

Angel's only ally is Butterman’s fat, clueless son, PC Danny Butterman (Frost), whose idea of real police work is entirely shaped by American action pictures whose marathon shootouts, reckless car chases and tough-guy snarkiness have nothing to do with policing in Sandford. At least, not until Angel cuts loose.

Hot Fuzz’s mix of compulsive politeness and head-spattering gore is inevitably less startlingly fresh than Shaun of the Dead's, but that only makes it all the more astonishing that the film's poker-faced outrageousness works so well.

How long has it been since you saw a good movie about resurrectionists? A while, I'll wager: There's the atmospheric Body Snatcher (1945) with Boris Karloff, one of the tiny gems turned out by Val Lewton's legendary RKO unit; the lurid Flesh and the Fiends (1960), based on the real-life exploits of Scottish resurrectionists Burke and Hare; and 1985's The Doctor and the Devils, inspired by the same case and based on a 1953 screenplay by poet Dylan Thomas. Writer-director

Glenn McQuaid's I Sell the Dead is as good as any of them, but he places the basic elements — 19th-century setting, grinding poverty, a doctor willing to pay well for fresh corpses and a city full of derelicts and drifters who won't be missed — at the service of a fresh, darkly funny blend of crime and supernatural hijinks.

In the movie's opening sequence, veteran body snatcher Willie Grimes (producer Fessenden) is guillotined for his crimes as his younger partner, Arthur Blake (Monaghan), receives a temporary reprieve. Hulking holy man Father Francis Duffy (Perlman), who worries for Blake's soul and wonders about Blake's state of mind, has paid the executioner for time to speak with the condemned man. Blake obliges with the story of his association with Grimes, who began teaching him the tricks of the trade when Blake was just a child.

For a long time they were just work-a-day resurrectionists, says Blake, always devising new ways to pilfer squishy corpses and turn them into hard cash. Everything changes the night they get a tip about a woman buried at a remote crossroads: Who would inter a pretty young woman in the middle of nowhere, bulbs of garlic strung around her neck and a stake through her chest? The resurrectionists are shocked to see a real resurrection when they remove the stake: They've dug up a vampire and she's hungry. Clever lads that they are, Blake and Grimes figure out a way to rid themselves of their most demanding client, a well-connected doctor (Scrimm) who always needs new corpses for his dissecting class and threatens to denounce Grimes and Blake if they don't keep the merchandise coming. Once he's out of their lives, Grimes, Blake and Blake's ambitious girlfriend, Fanny (Cooney), start serving the specialty market for weird corpses — aliens, zombies and sundry monsters.

That's a nifty premise and McQuaid has some fine fun with it, delivering an offbeat but carefully balanced mix of shocks, homages and uneasy chuckles. A lifelong fan of the Hammer studio's gothic horror, McQuaid manages to make Staten Island look like 19th-century England by way of the Universal backlot and populates his story with colorful characters, including a thug with a mouthful of dog's teeth and Valentine, a burn victim who hides her disfigurement behind an Eyes Without a Face-style mask.

I Sell the Dead is the kind of surprise that keeps trickling out of the House of Fessenden, a micro-budget production operation equally at home with art-house dramas like The Liberty Kid and gritty little horror movies, including The House of the Devil, The Roost and actor-producer-director Fessenden's own The Last Winter. Clever and resourcefully art-directed though though the film, the I Sell the Dead's success ultimately depends on the low-key chemistry between Grimes and Blake. Whether bickering like an old married couple or shrieking their way through an odd little tip of the hat to E.T., they're a scruffier Hope and Crosby, forever on the road to the next fresh hell and determined to make the best of it.

(1999)
Directed by: Aris Iliopulos
Written by: Edward D. Wood Jr.
With: Billy Zane, Abraham Benrubi, Sandra Bernhard, Karen Black, Tippi Hedren, Eartha Kitt, Ann Magnuson, Andrew McCarthy, Conrad Brooks, Will Patton, Christina Ricci, Bud Cort Max Perlich, John Ritter, Summer Phoenix, Carel Struycken, Jonathan Taylor Thomas , Ron Perlman, Rich Schroder, Nicollette Sheridan, Steven Weber and Maila Nurmi.

Take an unproduced screenplay by Edward D. Wood Jr., widely acclaimed as the best worst filmmaker of all time, and persuade his widow that its time has come. Add a first-time feature director and a cast chock full of indie movie icons and Hollywood oddballs. Shoot it without dialogue, and add music, sound effects and snippets of demented voice-over narration in post production. The result: A prefab “cult classic” whose deliberate amateurishness lacks the threadbare charm of Woods’ own work — what the poverty-row auteur lacked in skill and resources, he made up for with a pure, passionate love of filmmaking.

I Woke Up… is an amazing object, from its decor and lighting (which mix 1970s tackiness with odd '50s touches) to its elaborate sound design. But the marvel of its elaborate faux artlessness wears very thin, very fast. Then it’s just dull, the one thing Woods’ movies never were.

In a not-too-distant future, no one’s secrets are safe, not even those buried in the deepest recesses of their minds: High-tech “extraction” technology allows teams of spies-for-hire to manipulate the dreams of others, creeping around their thoughts and riffling through their subconscious minds.

Dominic Cobb (DiCaprio) is the best in the business —good enough that even former victims like corporate hotshot Saito (Watanabe) turn to him when they need someone to do the impossible. Saito is in a position to offer Cobb the one thing he wants most in the world: a way home. Saito’s connections can erase the murder charge that forced Cobb to flee his country and abandon his children to the care of their grandfather (Caine), and all he has to do in return is get inside the head of Richard Fischer (Murphy), heir to a multinational empire, and plant the idea to dismantle it so deep that Fischer will believe he thought of it all by himself.

Conventional wisdom has it that mental capital only flows one way: You can dig it out, but you can’t sneak it in. Cobb knows otherwise and assembles a team willing to do the mindwarp with him: chameleon Eames (Hardy), who can assume any identity within a dream; chemist Yusuf (Rao), whose concoctions facilitate deep, prolonged sleep; architect Ariadne (Page), who imagines every physical detail of the dream world; and point-man Arthur (Gordon-Levitt), who sweats whatever details need sweating.

By their nature, rubber-reality movies walk a thin line between clever and stupid. But when they work, the balancing act is breathtaking: Just think back to 1999, when The Matrix had fanboys, mall rats and cineastes alike lined up for a tumble down the rabbit hole. Inception owes both The Matrix and the all-but-forgotten Dreamscape (1984), in which a psychic is unwittingly drawn into a plot to assassinate the President of the United States in his dreams, a debt of imagination. But writer-director Christopher Nolan is much more than a crass recycler of other people’s cool ideas, and his greatest strength is the ability to tether pop-culture spectacle to authentic emotions.

If Inception were all spectacle, it would be nothing more than magic trick of the month: nifty but disposable, at the mercy of smart alecks eager to reveal the cogs and wheels behind the illusion. But while one day soon the eye-popping effects will inevitably look dated, Cobb’s misery — a messy mix of grief, guilt, denial and resentment — will continue to feel painfully real. Whether or not history validates comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Inception is a superior summer movie, one with heart and brains and loads of razzle-dazzle.

This review originally appeared in Film Journal International.

Shocking revelation du jour: History is written by the victors and rewritten by movies. And frankly, a whole lot of history could do with some rewriting: It's full of downbeat endings, dubious moral lessons and the kind of soul-numbing despair people pay good money to escape. That said, the brazenness of Quentin Tarantino's revisionism is in a class all its own… and speaking of class, woe betide the slacker who regards movies as cheat sheets and ignores Inglourious Basterds' opening words: "Once upon a time… in Nazi-occupied France."

1941: Colonel Hans Landa (Waltz), Hitler's notorious "Jew Hunter," descends on the small farmhouse of widower Perrier LaPadite (Menochet) in a swirl of smiles and disingenuous pleasantries. By the time Landa's done, he's cruelly coerced LaPadite into trading the Jewish neighbors he's been sheltering for the lives of his own daughters. Only teenager Shoshanna Dreyfus (Laurent) survives the subsequent slaughter of her family.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Pitt), a straight-talking cracker from the Tennessee mountains, has assembled a very special squad for a very special mission: His eight-man squad will parachute into France and put the fear of God into those Nat-zi bastards. Or more correctly, the fear of God's Chosen: Raine charges his G.I. Jews with killing, maiming and generally terrorizing the Master Race's foot soldiers, and the man who fails to accumulate 100 German scalps had better die trying. Raine's right hand, Sergeant Donny Donowitz (Hostel director Roth), whom the Nazis have nicknamed "the Bear Jew," hammers men to death with a baseball bat, while Raines carefully carves swastikas into the foreheads of the occasional soldier they set free to serve as an example to the rest.

Three years later, Shoshanna has acquired a new identity — Mlle Emmanuelle Mimieux — along with a small Parisian cinema called Le Gamaar and a devoted boyfriend (Ido) with whom she runs it. Her troubles resume when she acquires a persistent suitor, boyish movie buff and war hero Fredrick Zoller (Bruhl), whom propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels (Groth) is grooming to be Germany's very own Audie Murphy. In fact, Zoller is in Paris for the upcoming premiere of his first film, a morale-stoking account of his battlefield exploits, and everyone who's anyone in party circles will be there.

The high-powered guest list hasn't escaped the attention of the OSS, whose preposterous plot to kill the Fuhrer — endorsed by Winston Churchill (an unrecognizable Taylor) himself — is put into play, a plot that hinges on the German-language skills of a supercilious film critic-turned-spy (Fassbender) and the wiles of dazzling double agent Bridget von Hammersmark (Kruger), darling of the silver screen. Once the smitten Zoller persuades Goebbels to move the glittering event to Le Gamaar, the individual plotlines begin their inevitable dovetailing.

Contrary to received opinion, Inglourious Basterds is not a remake of Eurotrash auteur Enzo G. Castellari's 1978 Dirty Dozen knock-off; Tarantino just borrowed its English-language title and parked it atop his delirious pastiche of WWII movie tropes as seen through a very particular filter: the naughty Nazi pictures that briefly hijacked the Italian film industry in the wake of The Night Porter, Liliana Caviani's 1974 success de scandale. Italian producers smelled money in stripping the kinky hijinks of Caviani's artsy angst, but the sheer gorgeousness of Salon Kitty and company speaks to Italy's eternal affair with style, which the Nazis had in spades. Kitschy, fetishistic style, to be sure, but oh, those billowing, blood-red swastika banners and impeccably tailored uniforms — all that leather, all those silver skulls!

To call Inglourious Basterds Nazi porn is to ignore Tarantino's self-awareness — he knows exactly how vulgar it is to spin pulp entertainment from the iconography of mass murderers (which is more than can be said for, say Frank Miller, if The Spirit is anything by which to judge), and he also knows how bracingly provocative vulgarity can be.

Basterds is crammed with Tarantino's trademarks: in-jokes, exploitation shout-outs (Donowitz calls himself Antonio Marghereti when he's pretending to be an Italian cinematographer), cameo appearances (including uncredited voice roles for Samuel L. Jackson and Harvey Keitel), slyly allusive dialogue ("There is no Dietrich! There is No Riefenstahl! There is only Bridget von Hammersmark," declares a smitten fan, anticipating/paraphrasing Henri Langlois' famous declaration), throwaway movie allusions (of course Le Gamaar is playing Le Corbeau — keep a sharp eye on those posters and marquees) and brashly thrilling anachronisms. And who but Tarantino would have scored Shoshanna's final preparations for her apocalyptic revenge with David Bowie's lushly sinister "Putting out Fire With Gasoline" (the theme from Paul Schrader's Cat People remake) and dared that tight, Sergio Leone-like close up of her feline eyes?

You wouldn't think a single performance could begin to overshadow such a cornucopia of film-geek delights, but you'd be wrong: Viennese actor Waltz just about walks away with the whole shebang. Tarantino handed him the role of a lifetime, and he doesn't waste it: Waltz imbues Colonel Landa with such malicious charisma that the lights seem to dim whenever he's offscreen. What Waltz doesn't do is play the sympathy-for-the-Devil card: Landa is a great character, but Waltz never lets you forget that he's a hideous person, a preening, opportunistic sadist in love with the sound of his own voice. If pulp nihilist Jim Thompson had written Nazis, he'd have invented Hans Landa instead of Pop. 1280's Sheriff Nick Corey. Pitt's strutting, good-old-boy performance can't compare: Raine is a rip, but Landa is the carny geek show you can neither take your eyes off and nor forgive yourself for enjoying.

Not since the nuclear-nightmare thriller The China Syndrome (1979) opened less than two weeks before an accident shut down Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island plant has a movie lucked into such eerily serendipitous timing as Tom Tykwer's icily cynical film about devious doings in the international banking industry.

Interpol agent Lou Salinger (Owen) and Manhattan Assistant DA Eleanor Whitman (Watts) have been trying to get the dirt on the Luxembourg-based International Bank of Business and Credit, a vast financial institution involved in money laundering, arms dealing and God only knows what else. The trouble is proving it, which boils down to finding an IBBC (the initials pointedly invoke a real company that went down in scandalous flames in 1991) insider whose conscience has overcome his avarice, and it looks as though they've finally caught a break. One of Whitman's colleagues, Tom Schumer (Burfield), has made contact with a high-level executive who appears ready to give up his employers. Is it coincidence that immediately after their first face-to-face meeting, a clandestine rendezvous in a Berlin parking lot, Schumer succumbs to a fatal heart attack? Salinger doesn't think so, especially after he finds a fresh needle puncture on Schumer's back, but the Berlin police refuse to investigate. Salinger's suspicions are confirmed when he finds that police reports concerning the death of an IBBC executive — in a one-car accident mere hours after Schumer's death — have been tampered with.

Salinger and Whitman finagle an interview with Italian businessman Umberto Calvini (Luca Giorgio Barbareschi), who recently pulled out of a huge arms deal with IBBC, perhaps concerned that the association might derail his political ambitions. It falls to Calvini to lay out the players and the game: IBBC's excursion into direct arms dealing has nothing to do with the profit in selling pistols and everything to do with debt. Waging war costs money, IBBC is famous for lending it to warlords, dictators and guerrilla rebels, and debt is better than a chain around the neck for manipulating and controlling nations. Not surprisingly, Calvini is assassinated shortly after, the upside being that his assassin left a footprint behind — if Whitman and Salinger can find the shooter (O'Byrne), maybe he'll lead them to the puppet master. The complications continue to multiply well into the third act, as Whitman and Salinger are constantly challenged to reassess how far they're willing to go to bring down IBBC.

Despite the fact that The International opened as the world economy was spiraling into free fall as a direct (if not necessarily deliberate) result of debt manipulation by global financial institutions, its cool reception probably had more to do with the fact that thrillers in which the bad guy is a system rather than an individual are hard put to deliver a satisfying resolution. It's easier to take out a rogue CIA agent than, say, the IMF, and even in the dyspeptic '70s the average moviegoer preferred a James Bond movie to the bleak paranoia of The Parallax View.

Tykwer's mise en scene makes it clear from the outset that Whitman and Salinger are raging against a machine of inhuman proportions: Bird's-eye views of crowds dispersing like bugs, low-angle shots of sleekly impersonal glass-and-steel office towers, panoramic images of coldly angular buildings squatting in the magnificent isolation of otherwise pristine natural beauty. The globetrotting locations change — Lyon, Milan, Berlin, Istanbul — but the proportions remain the same. Even the bravura shootout at New York's sensuously curved Guggenheim Museum, a beautifully choreographed exercise in ever-escalating mayhem, emphasizes the contrast between small, scurrying people and the building's symmetrical white ramps, as serenely curved as the ribs of a vast, indifferent ship.

”I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul.” So read the last lines of Victorian poet William Ernest Henley’s 1875 “Invictus,” lines that inspired Nelson Mandela during 27 years of imprisonment for acting on his belief that the future of Africa should be determined by Africans.

A modest, self-effacing movie about extraordinary events, Clint Eastwood’s Invictus chronicles one battle in Mandela's war against the bitter memories and simmering discontents that threaten to destroy post-apartheid South Africa before it can find its feet. The recently-elected president's plan: To persuade all South Africans — Afrikaners and indigenous Africans alike — to rally behind a rugby team. Yes, a rugby team: The virtually all-white Springboks, despised by black South Africans as a nagging reminder of apartheid and its systematic injustices. The Springboks are so reviled that people attend their games for the express purpose of cheering the other team.

1994: Less than a year after his historic election, Nelson Mandela (Freeman, once again playing god) is trying to pilot a country whose giant step into the future hasn't yet extricated it from the tar pit of the past. Black South Africans burn with suppressed fury just waiting to erupt into mob violence; Afrikaners are terrified they’re going to reap the whirlwind sown by their ancestors. Mandela at this juncture seizes upon an idea that seems tailor-made for a glossy Hollywood "triumph of the human spirit" movie: Why not maneuver them to common ground on a level playing field? That turns out to be a literal playing field when Mandela enlists the aid of rugby star Francois Pienaar (Damon), captain of the Springboks, in rehabilitating the team’s divisive reputation so that all South Africans will become emotionally invested in the Springboks' efforts to win the 1995 World Cup, and thus forget their differences. The makeover includes outreach efforts like sending the virtually all-white team into the all-black townships that ring Johannesburg to play rugger with the kind of poor, ragged, dark-skinned kids they habitually ignore like stray dogs that just happen to be walking on their hind legs.

Eastwood is a deeply old-fashioned filmmaker, and that's not a bad thing: As befits a director who spent decades as an actor, he's more interested in character than special effects, cutting-edge film technology or eyeball-rattling editing. That's why it doesn’t matter that the average American knows little soccer and less rugby: By the time the Springboks reach the decisive game against New Zealand, no one will care about the finer points of the game. And in selecting this particular story, Eastwood does an end run around the false inflation of significance wrapped around the typical Hollywood sports movie. Yes, Invictus relies on genre clichés, but the stakes are genuinely, breathtakingly high. Victory for the Springboks isn't just about personal bests, galvanizing a downtrodden neighborhood or proving that dreams sometimes come true: The soul of a troubled, broken nation hangs in the balance.

Writer-turned-director David S. Goyer's vapid remake of the Swedish Den Osynlige (2002) is a textbook illustration of the American movie industry's ability to take an offbeat foreign film and systematically excise or soften every provocative and original thing about it.

Eighteen-year-old Nick Powell (Chatwin, whose one-note mopiness gets very old, very fast) gets good grades, steers clear of substance abuse and typical teenage hell-raising, and has never, ever disobeyed the cold, widowed mother (Harden) who's devoted her life to plotting his shining future with the steely ruthlessness of a five-star general. And he's desperately, suffocatingly unhappy; Nick wants to attend a writing program in London rather than go to college. Unable to openly defy his mother, he plots his escape in secret. Nick’s sideline — writing term papers for lazy jocks — pays for his ticket, and on the eve of his graduation from Burnaby Mountain High, he’s packed and ready to go. All he has to do is keep mom in the dark for a few more hours.

And then everything goes to hell. Pete (Marquette), Nick’s spineless best friend and the only person in whom he confided, runs afoul of high-school hellcat Annie Newton (Levieva), an underprivileged delinquent who dabbles in stolen goods and ultra-violence. She wants to know who turned her in to the police and puts the screws to Pete, who has no idea that Annie’s older boyfriend, parolee Marcus (O'Loughlin), gave her up to keep himself out of jail. But he figures he can safely accuse Nick, who’s safely on a plane to London. What he doesn’t know is that Mrs. Powell has found out what Nick had in mind and lays on the guilt with a trowel, crushing his fragile determination to break free. Annie and her thuggish pals abduct Nick, beat him with an inch of his life and dump him in an out-of-the-way drainage culvert to die.

Nick awakes the next day a ghost, condemned to wander unseen and unheard among his classmates, family and the police investigating his disappearance. Except that he's not; he’s actually an unmoored soul trapped in a limbo that will end when his battered but not-quite-lifeless flesh finally gives out. If Nick were to be found and treated, body and soul might be reunited and his tragically truncated future reclaimed. The trouble is that the only person who seems to sense his presence is the sullen, deeply damaged Annie; even if he can open a genuine line of communication, she’s the last person in the world inclined to help him.

Den Osynlige is a dark, downbeat story of capricious fate and hard, haunting choices, right down to the bittersweet ending that manages to be uncompromising without being entirely bleak. The Invisible, by contrast, is a formulaic tale of redemption and teen angst: Annie seizes the opportunity to do one good thing with her wasted life, Mrs. Powell reveals the vulnerability beneath her dragon-lady exterior, the bullied Pete gets a second chance and spiteful Marcus reaps what he's sown. No surprises, no food for thought and really, no reason to bother.

The red and gold super-suit is cool, but Iron Man belongs to Robert Downey, Jr.: His effortlessly nuanced performance as Tony Stark, a heedless, billionaire playboy and arms manufacturer cast into a brutal crucible that forces a top-to-bottom reassessment of his life so far, is a dark delight that combines pop-culture wit and genuine emotional depth.

Brilliant, hedonistic industrialist Tony Stark (Downey) inherited a clutch of companies invested in everything from medical research to alternative energy, but the pulsing heart of Stark Industries is weapons: The bigger and more destructive the better. Stark's sound-bite patriotism lies over a genuine, if not deeply considered, belief that Stark munitions are making the world safe for his fellow Americans, a position he's compelled to rethink after being wounded and taken hostage by Afghan terrorists during a mega-missile demo/photo op. Held in a mountain camp bristling with Stark products and tethered to a primitive device buried in his chest — the only thing standing between his heart and stealthy shards of shrapnel lurking in his flesh — Stark is ordered to build his captors their very own super WMD.

He instead forges an iron robo-suit and escapes; his first act back in the US is to make the startling announcement that Stark Industries is out of the weapons business until further notice. While Stark devotes himself to constructing an improved version of the suit that saved his life, rumors that he's suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome threaten to destabilize Stark Industries. The three people closest to him — loyal assistant Pepper Potts (Paltrow); friend and military liaison James "Rhodey" Rhodes (Howard); and longtime right-hand Obadiah Stane (Bridges) — react to this new Stark in very different ways, both before and after they discover exactly what he's been working on and what he plans to do with it.

(2010)
Directed by: Jon Favreau.
Written by: Justin Theroux, based on the Marvel comic book created by Stan Lee, Don Heck, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby.
With: Robert Downey Jr., Mickey Rourke, Scarlett Johansson, Sam Rockwell, Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Samuel L. Jackson, Clark Gregg and Gary Shandling.

Fans can relax: Despite pre-release whispers that Iron Man 2 was a disaster, it’s a perfectly watchable comic-book movie given a hint of depth by Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as Tony Stark. “Not a disaster” is, to be sure, faint praise. But it’s not damnation: Let’s just say that if Iron Man 2 is no Spider-Man 2 — a sequel that actually improves on its predecessor — it’s also no Batman & Robin.

Billionaire playboy and weapons genius Tony Stark has spent the six months following his public admission that he was the man inside the smokin’ iron suit to bring the world’s warmongers, tyrants and terrorists into line. But he’s still kind of a jerk, a self-centered, skirt-chasing smartass whose every half-smile and calculated tilt of the head says, “Hey buddy, not only am I richer, smarter and cooler than you’ll ever be, but I also care about peace, love and understanding. And the chicks love it.”

Is it any wonder that tight-ass Senator Stern (Shandling) and his government cronies are so determined to appropriate that Iron Man technology? Yes, they have some legitimate concerns about having allowed a capricious, narcissistic gadabout to singlehandedly privatize the business of keeping the world safe for truth, justice and the American way. But mostly they just want to wipe that smirk off his face. What they don’t know is that things aren’t actually going all that well for him.

First and foremost, the palladium arc reactor that keeps Stark’s damaged heart beating is also poisoning him, and his efforts to crack the problem have so far amounted to sweet FA. Unaccustomed to being thwarted, he’s back to drinking intemperately and making a public spectacle of himself… he even sinks so low as to steal another guy’s punch line. And once Apollo 11’s Buzz Aldrin has made an illusion-shattering joke about pissing in his space suit (on the moon, yet), there’s nowhere to go with it. Worse still, Stark is so preoccupied and sozzled that he ha,s no idea there’s a seething, tattooed Russian physicist Ivan Danko (Rourke), plotting to screw Stark the way Stark’s father screwed his, let alone that Danko has joined forces with weasely defense contractor Justin Hammer (Rockwell), who’d like nothing better than to put Stark Industries out of business once and for all.

So there’s a whole lot going on, and we haven’t even gotten to Stark’s battle of wills with cold warrior Nick Fury (Jackson), who’s hell bent on persuading the ultimate non-team player to join his superhero A(vengers) Team. Or to Stark’s strained relationships with old pal Lt. Colonel Rhodes (Cheadle, replacing Terrence Howard) and briskly besotted gal Friday Pepper Potts (Paltrow), to whom he hands the reins of Stark Industries. Or to his new assistant Natalie Rushman (Johansson), who is so ridiculously lush, slinky, super-efficient and endlessly attentive that she must be up to no good. Or to the inevitable army of iron drones and other bits of CGI hardware that figure into the film’s many self-consciously spectacular action sequences.

The high-tech three-ring circus pales beside Downey’s perfectly calibrated performance, a mix of bravado, arrogance and secret insecurity. Even more than Iron Man, Iron Man 2 is all about Downey, and like Christian Bale and Tobey Maguire he’s up to the challenge of playing both the person and the persona. It’s easy to tut-tut that Downey is wasting his talent on trash; it’s also lazy and condescending.

Pulp characters live and die on how deeply they’re rooted in abiding human fears and desires; Tarzan, Robin Hood, Dracula, Zorro, Batman, Hercules, Dr. Frankenstein, Fantomas and Sherlock Holmes are still around because they’re dug in deep — change some superficial details and each is good to go decades, even centuries, after he were created. Captain Satan, Boston Blackie, Sally the Sleuth and the Spider died with their times. Downey doesn’t take actor-turned-screenwriter Justin Theroux’s failure to transcend the cliches as license to phone it in: His Tony Stark is simultaneously an individual shaped by his time and circumstances, and every flawed schmuck who ever resisted the greatness thrust upon him and rose to it anyway. He's so perfectly imperfect he's nothing short of mesmerizing.

Directed by: Baltasar Kormakur.
Written by: Kormakur, based on the novel Tainted Blood, by Arnaldur Indridason.
With: Ingvar E. Sigurosson, Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson, Olafía Hronn Jonsdottir, Agusta Eva Erlendsdottir, Thorsteinn Gunnarsson , Atli Rafn Sigurosson and Rafnhildur Rosa Atladotir.

In Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur's downbeat procedural thriller, based on Indridason's literary thriller, the routine investigation of a "messy and pointless" murder leads to a 30-year-old crime whose ramifications extend into Iceland's ambitious and controversial gene-mapping project.

Four-year-old Kola (Atladotir) lies dying in her hospital bed, her grief-stricken father, Orn (Sigurosson), is petitioning the national data protection commission — charged with safeguarding the privacy of Icelanders who contributed genetic data to Iceland's Central Health Database — for information.

Loosely based on two popular young-adult novels novels by science-fiction writer Steven Gould, Doug Liman's effects-heavy adventure fantasy revolves around a young man's discovery that nifty powers — like the ability to teleport himself around the world in a heartbeat — always come with a catch.

For Ann Arbor high-school student David Rice (Thieriot), life is unrelenting misery: His mother decamped when he was five, leaving David to be raised by his brutal, embittered and alcoholic father (Rooker). Jocks pick on the bookish 15 year old, and girls ignore him — with the exception of sweet-natured dreamer Millie Harris (Robb), who hopes one day to leave town and see the world. A near death experience changes David's life forever: One minute he's drowning, trapped between the frozen Huron river and a layer of ice, the next he's in the public library, soaked and shivering. Everyone assumes he's dead, so David vanishes, learns to control his new-found power and supports himself by robbing bank vaults.

Eight years later, David (Christensen) has a fabulous Manhattan apartment and an awesome lifestyle: Breakfast in Tokyo, surfing in Fiji, lunch atop the Great Sphinx, late-night hook-up in London… all in one day. But the fun ends abruptly when white-haired Roland (Jackson) turns up in his living room, armed with cruel high-tech gizmos that immobilize jumpers — yes, jumpers. David isn't the only person in the world who can teleport. After a hairsbreadth escape, David quickly reconnects with Millie (Bilson), takes her on a whirlwind trip to Rome and meets fellow jumper Griffin (Bell), who fills him in on Roland and the paladins, an ancient society dedicated to cleansing the world of space-bending freaks whose powers are an affront to God.

Whitney's documentary about his family's legacy of child abuse is so lurid the tone threatens to overwhelm the material, particularly the allegation that his step-grandfather, Melvin Just, literally got away with murder.

But it's a fact that Just served eight years for child molestation and was suspected in the murder of county nurse Josephine Segel, and Whitney's mother, Ann, her three siblings, two half sisters and four step-sisters are clearly damaged; Ann attempted suicide repeatedly while Whitney was growing up.

Whitney (Games People Play) took refuge in studying dance and music, and later competed on the 1980s TV game-show Body Language and the talent contest Star Search. As an adult, Whitney delved into his family's miserable history, interviewing his aunts, uncle and step-aunts about their childhoods. With the exception of Whitney's mother and aunts, twins Jan and Jean, they're are a sad collection of life's casualties. Marginally employed Uncle Jim, whom Whitney says molested him as a child, lives in a trailer with his frail, failing mother, Grandma Fay, and tried to persuade his half-sister, Jerri, to become his live-in lover. Melvin Just was Fay's second husband, stepfather of Ann, Jan, Jean and Jim and father of June and Jerri; Just left Fay for a neighbor named Vernise, who had three small daughters: Pambi, Denise and Bobbie.

June and Jerri are both alcoholics who live in their cars. Pambi, born with congenital hip, knee and foot deformities, is withdrawn and sad; Denise and Bobbie say they saw Just kill Nurse Segel after she paid a surprise visit to their home and caught Just in bed with Denise. Jenise, Vernise's youngest daughter and her only natural child with Just, seems the best adjusted of her family; she lives in a trailer with her boyfriend and two children, Clarissa and Frankie. All have histories of alcohol and/or drug abuse; most have attempted suicide and struggle with violent fantasies rooted in deep, poisonous rage.

Whitney holds off introducing Just himself for nearly an hour, and even as a fat, wheelchair-bound old man, he radiates malevolence even as he denies everything. The film concludes with Just's funeral, which his extended family's conflicted emotions turn into a sad, sorry spectacle.

“Maybe you are who you are and that’s just that. How and when you got that way doesn’t make any difference… there just isn’t any sense in trying to be anything else,” muses genial sociopath Deputy Lou Ford (Affleck), the dark heart of this bleak thriller.

It’s hard to imagine now what a sucker punch to the gut Jim Thompson’s novel about a small-town lawman genial whose Southern-fried charm lies lightly over a seething pit of sociopathic rage was back in the days when everybody and his brother wasn’t an armchair expert in serial-killer pathology. But close to 60 years after oulp paperback The Killer Inside Me was first published, it still packs a wallop and director/co-screenwriter Michael Winterbottom nails both the tragedy and the pitch-black humor.

Deputy Sheriff Ford was born and raised in Central City, Texas, as nice a small town as you could ever want to see. Unless, of course, you look closely enough to notice that local businessman Chester Conway (Beatty) has gobbled up just about everything worth having for himself and his idiot son Elmer (Ferguson), or that most everyone who works closely with Lou — like, say, Sheriff Bob Maples (Bower) — is always throwing him little sideways glances, the way people do when they're trying to keep an eye on an apparently friendly but awfully toothy dog whose leash looks a little frayed.

Still, real trouble doesn't come bubbling up through that veneer of all-American mom-and-apple-pieness until Lou, who’s been engaged to respectable Amy Stanton (Hudson) for so long even she’s started to wonder whether he ever intends to marry her, is dispatched to roust prostitute Joyce Lakeland (Alba), who’s set up shop on the outskirts of town. It’s not that Joyce isn’t conducting her business in an acceptably suitable low-key manner: She is. But Elmer Conway has taken a shine to her and that just won’t do.

Unfortunately, Lou finds a sort of kindred spirit in Joyce; she's the match that ignites the gasoline coursing through his veins. And her plan to blackmail Chester Conway so she and Lou can blow town and start anew somewhere — just about anywhere else, as long as it’s far away — gives him an ugly little idea. The subsequent domino effect bares Lou’s darkest secrets and leaves Central City so blood-spattered that the town fathers might as well rename the place Sin City and be done with it.

Winterbottom’s Killer Inside Me is the second adaptation of Thompson’s novel, following a little-seen 1976 version starring Stacy Keach and Susan Tyrell. Keach was a good Lou Ford, but Affleck is a great one, in part because his oddly high-pitched, slightly squeaky voice gives Lou’s disingenuous folksiness a grating, fingernails-on-blackboard edge that hints at his dangerously divided nature long before the film puts all its cards on the table. Affleck’s Lou is the classic unreliable narrator in the sense that you can’t always trust his version of the facts. But when it comes to what he feels Lou never lies, and Affleck’s reading of Lou’s observation that “I got a foot on both sides of the fence. I can’t move… all I can do is wait until I split right down the middle,” is nothing short of chilling.

Alba, by contrast, can’t hold a candle to ’70s anti-ingénue Tyrell’s Joyce Lakeland. Alba looks like buffed-and-polished movie star playing at being a tumbleweed hooker, while Tyrell is so convincingly broken, disillusioned and worn-out stupid that she’s painful to watch. That said, Winterbottom’s version has the edge, starting with the fact that it's more faithful to the novel — slavish fidelity to the source material isn't inherently a good thing, but Winterbottom and co-screenwriter John Curran restore the most sordid bits of Lou's back story, from his incestuous, sado-masochistic relationship with his mother to a youthful experiment with child molestation for which his adopted brother took the rap, along with the flat-out sadism that shatters his mask of sanity when he coolly sets about beating Lakeland to death — a scene that outraged many critics with its matter-of-fact brutality. By now you may be wondering where the dark humor comes in: Suffice it to say that Lou's efforts to sidestep the foot fate keeps sticking out to trip him up are grimly funny, right up to that final twist.

The supporting cast is incredibly strong, from Beatty to Simon Baker, Bill Pullman and Elias Koteas, star of the earlier Thompson adaptation Hit Me (1996), and the atmosphere of sun-baked menace is so stultifying that it’s hard to breathe. If that’s not Thompson to a Texas T, I don’t know what is.

This review first appeared in slightly different form in Film Journal International

Two heterosexual girly-girls decide to give lesbian love a try in this cuddly romantic comedy.

A veteran of the dating wars, high-strung, strenuously quirky New York City copy editor Jessica Stein (Westfeldt) is beginning to wonder whether she'll ever meet Mr. Right. Everyone says she's too picky — especially her mother (Feldshuh) and her boss, Josh (Scott Cohen), whom she dated in college — but is it really so unreasonable to expect a man not to say "self-defecating" when he means "self-deprecating?"

On a whim, Jessica answers a personal ad that includes one of her favorite quotations from Rilke, recklessly ignoring the fact that it's in the "women seeking women" section. The ad was placed by Helen (Juergensen), a sexually adventurous, downtown art-gallery curator looking for a new sensation; although she's never been with a woman, she's intrigued when she gets the once-over from a lesbian at a gallery reception and, with the encouragement of her gay friends, Martin and Sebastian (Mastro, Elrod), figures it couldn't hurt to give the girl/girl thing a whirl.

The first date is awkward — in fact, Jessica gets cold feet and tries to flee — but they wind up having plenty to talk about over drinks and dinner, and Jessica experiences a tangle of conflicting feelings when Helen impulsively plants one right on her lips. Their subsequent relationship is of the one-step-forward, two-steps-back variety: They flirt, Jessica freaks. They touch, Jessica freaks. They kiss again, Jessica freaks. "I'm a Jew from Scarsdale!" she exclaims — as much to herself as anyone else — by way of explaining her amazement that she should even be considering what she's considering. And after they finally take the plunge, Jessica is faced with a new set of problems. What should she tell her friends? How can she explain this to her parents? Why won't Helen just agree to keep their relationship a secret? Where is it all going?

Were you to combine the new-age wonder of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the apocalyptic revelations of the Left Behind books and films and the brilliantly nutty historical revisionism of Swiss provocateur Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods? the result might approximate this big-budget action thriller in which both faith and science are put to the test and found wanting.

A year after his wife's horribly random death, MIT astrophysicist John Koestler (Cage) is a shadow man, estranged from his deeply religious family and grimly convinced that life is a sad, pointless march towards eternal nothingness. Koestler's precocious, hearing-impaired son, Caleb (Canterbury), is the only reason he gets out of bed in the morning. And even with Caleb to keep him tethered to the land of the living, Koestler is teetering on the edge of the black pit of despair, unable to forgive, forget or move forward.

Until the 50th-anniversary celebration at Caleb's school, a tediously well-intentioned event featuring sanctimonious speeches, beatifically singing children and a guest appearance by Miss Taylor (Carter), who taught the school's very first class. She supervises the opening of a time capsule containing drawings of the far-away future of 2009 as drawn by the long-ago tykes. But while Caleb's classmates tear open long-sealed envelopes stuffed with sweetly childish drawings of rocket ships and flying cars, his contains a sheet of paper dense with numbers, painstakingly arranged in tidy but apparently meaningless rows. Creepy.

And creepier still once Professor Koestler, whiskey-fueled and sleep deprived, discerns a pattern, sets of digits that resolve themselves into dates and death tolls. The whole thing is crazy: How could high-strung schoolgirl Lucinda Embry (Robinson) have predicted every major disaster of the latter half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st? Who are the duster-clad suicide blondes lurking in the woods outside Koestler's home and what does the neurotic Diana (Byrne, of TV's Damages), loony Lucinda's daughter, know or suspect about her mother's encounters with the "whisper people" who are now murmuring blandishments in the ears of both Caleb and her own little girl (Robinson again)? And most important, why do the numbers end in October 2009?

No one will remember Knowing for its performances (wooden), plotting (careless) or underlying cosmology (bughouse crazy). But its disaster set pieces are nothing short of stunning: The plane that comes screaming out of a rain-smudged sky, one wing sparking on the asphalt as it slices through a traffic jam and explodes in a hellish fireball; the New York City subway train that goes off the rails and pulverizes steel, cement and human flesh before coming to a rubble- and dust-shrouded halt; and… well, the last is so intimately intertwined with the film's late, great twist that it's better left undescribed. Suffice it to say that the screenplay's flaws don't include failure of nerve.

Legendary East End gangsters Reginald and Ronald Kray inspire fiercely divided opinions in their native England, where they're both fondly recalled as the quintessential gentleman villains or reviled as brutal, depraved thugs. Peter Medak's film, written by Philip Ridley, splits the difference, capturing the twins' self-conscious style without losing sight of the fact that they were stone killers.

Born in a working class London slum, Ron and Reg (brothers Gary and Martin Kemp, of Spandau Ballet) are forged in the fire of WWII-era deprivation, doted on by women — notably their resourceful, strong-willed mother, Violet (Whitelaw), and her equally formidable sisters, Rose and May (Fleetwood, Cornwell) — whose men are either in the army or assiduously dodging the draft. Bullied as youngsters for being mama's boys, the twins remade themselves as amateur boxers and further toughened up in jail and the army, which to their anti-authoritarian way of thinking amounted to the same thing.

Thoroughly uninterested in being working chumps, Reg and Ron parlay their ruthlessness and panache into running a protection racket, then branch out into gambling, eventually acquiring a posh casino that caters to wayward aristocrats and celebrities. But beneath their united front, the twins' lifelong devotion is beginning to fray. Reg, the cooler-headed of the two, aspires to certain respectability, while Ron is becoming increasingly arrogant and reckless, perhaps even sociopathic.

I wish I could say I loved the midlife-romance movie Last Chance Harvey, writer-director Hopkins' first feature since his 2001 debut, Spring Forward. But it's an awkward mix of formulaic contrivance and ruthlessly poignant moments, most of them Thompson's: Her unsentimental portrayal of a woman who's given up on love because it hurts too much when it goes wrong is quietly heartbreaking.

Harvey Shine (Hoffman) once dreamed of being a jazz pianist, but wound up writing commercial jingles. Now he's a graying veteran in a young man's business, and his pragmatic boss (Schiff) has started hinting that his best clients are looking for fresh, innovative talent, not the tried-and-true material Harvey has been delivering all these years. Naturally, Harvey's career crisis dovetails with his daughter Susan's (Balaban) wedding in London, an event fraught with its own set of tensions. Harvey and Susan have barely spoken in years, and his ex-wife's (Baker) second husband (Brolin) is everything Harvey isn't: A dignified, patrician WASP who never looks ruffled, sweaty or rumpled. Worse still, Harvey finds he isn't even staying in the same hotel as the rest of the wedding party and Susan has asked Brian to walk her down the aisle.

Never-married Kate Walker (Thompson) works at Heathrow Airport, nurses dreams of being a writer and escaping to a rural cabin and dutifully squanders her emotional energy on her needy, widowed mother (Atkins), who's convinced her next-door neighbor is a serial killer — he's always digging around his garden and anyway, he's Polish, and aren't foreigners capable of anything? Kate is so accustomed to disappointment that it's come to feel like a comfy blanket, and it's easier to put other people's feelings first than to bare her own. Harvey and Kate cross paths twice before meeting at an airport bar, where he's drowning his sorrows in scotch as she hides behind a book and a glass of wine. Is it too late for them to gamble on love one more time?

Given the success of Alexandre Aja's 2006 remake of Wes Craven's seminal shocker, a new version of his Last House on the Left (1972), arguably the most reviled film of an era filled with cinematic outrages, was inevitable. But this new House is softer than the old House, a cautionary revenge tale in which the avengers are forced to confront the fact that they're as tainted by the outrageous cruelty of which they're capable as those they seek to punish.

Overall, Adam Alleca and Carl Ellsworth's screenplay follows Craven's closely: Pampered, slightly naive Mari Collingwood (Paxton), who's spending the summer with her parents, Jack and Emma (Goldwyn and Potter), at the family's isolated lake house, hooks up with her pal Paige (MacIsaac) at the general store where Paige works. City girl Mari is a straight arrow who channels her energy into competitive swimming, while the small-town Paige is a little wilder and less goal oriented; when scruffy, baby-faced stranger Justin (Clark) offers to sell them some good weed, it's Paige who leaps at the offer. Mari tags along in the spirit of being a good sport, and frets when she realizes the rundown motel where Justin and his family are staying is out of cell phone range — she's the kind of kid who actually checks in with her mom when she says she will.

A storm gathers, Paige and Justin party and Mari hangs out gamely, but the fun screeches to a halt when Justin's family comes home early. Justin's fugitive dad is a sadistic sociopath named Krug (Dillahunt, of TV's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles), who was en route to a maximum security prison when his brother, Frank (Paul, of TV's Breaking Bad), and girlfriend, Sadie (Lindhome), engineered his escape, cold-bloodedly killing two police officers in the process. The fugitives are big news and their pictures are everywhere: They need to get out of town fast and need Mari's SUV, but the girls have to go.

Krug and company (the title under which Craven's version was shot) take off with the teenagers in tow, taunting and abusing them as they drive. Though terrified, Mari keeps a cool head and, after steering her abductors onto a road tantalizingly close to the sanctuary of her parents' house, makes a bold attempt to escape. It fails dismally: Frank and Sadie catch Paige just before she makes it to a busy construction site, and her desperate show of bravado so enrages Krug that he stabs her and rapes the virginal Mari; Justin watches in mute horror. As Krug and his minions regroup, Mari makes one last break for freedom, diving into the nearby lake and attempting to swim to safety. Krug shoots her in the back and leaves her to die in the water.

With the SUV damaged and the storm intensifying, Krug and his bleeding, bedraggled crew make their way to the nearest shelter, which just happens to be the Collingwood house. Jack and Emma welcome them with food, drink and medical attention — Jack is a doctor — but it's only a matter of time before they realize they're sheltering the beasts who brutalized their beloved daughter. What will they do? Well, the fact is pretty much everyone knows what they do, either because they're familiar with the original film or because they've seen the trailers for the remake, which give away the whole plot, right down to the last gruesome fillip that's tacked on to the end like a roadshow square-up reel. So it's no spoiler to reveal that Jack and Emma wreak bloody vengeance, torturing Frank, Sadie and Krug as cruelly as they did Paige and Mari.

You can see why Craven got solidly behind a Last House remake: His brutal reimagining of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring was a cri de coeur born of late 1960s disillusionment, when the Rolling Stones' concert at Altamont, the Manson family murders and the attenuated carnage of the Vietnam War came together to stain cherished American ideals with blood and cynicism. Fast forward to the Iraq War's grisly fallout, the abuses of Abu Ghraib and the cynical erosion of values wrought by the war on terror: Last House's underlying concerns, particularly the psychic toll exacted by tit-for-tat retribution, are as relevant as ever. And it's hard to imagine that 2005's Chaos, a totally unauthorized, virtually scene for scene remake of Last House, wasn't a contributing factor.

The trouble is that the tweaks and tucks made by the new Last House team — director Iliades and screenwriters Alleca and Ellsworth — all undermine the brutal directness of the original. They include the totally extraneous invention of Mari's late brother, Ben (presumably to raise the stakes on the Collingwoods' investment in their surviving child); the fact that Mari has sworn off smoking dope (read: she's an unambiguous good girl) and lives to make her way home (not a spoiler, by the way &mdash it's in the trailer); and the recasting of Justin as an innocent and fundamentally decent kid helpless to resist his domineering dad. Put it all together and you have a film designed to make audiences root for the Collingwoods to give Krug, Frank and Sadie exactly what they deserve, a satisfying thrill ride rather than a downbeat examination of the ways in which violence — even when morally sanctioned — eats away at the souls of the perpetrators. None of which will have much to do with the success or failure of the new Last House: If it can bring in both genre buffs familiar with the original film's reputation but unwilling to watch old movies (which is to say anything made before Jaws and/or Star Wars) and thrill seekers whose curiosity is piqued by the atrocities promised by the tell-all trailers, it should do just fine.

Producer Matthew Vaughn's directing debut is a briskly paced, stylish and bracingly bitter adaptation of J.J. Connolly's novel about a sleek London cocaine dealer who doesn't understand his business as well as he thinks.

That layer cake is a metaphor, alluding both to England's class system and to the stratification of the underworld, from gutter punks to polished crime lords. The nameless protagonist (Craig) — call him X — has made a pile of money in drugs, established a successful realty business as a front and laundered his ill-gotten gains through the same accountant used by his boss, prosperous, aging cockney hard-case Jimmy Price (Cranham).

X stays away from his product, never underestimates the police or chisels his associates and never, ever works with the kind of loudmouthed poseurs who inevitably screw up and bring down everyone in the immediate vicinity. X hates guns, but knows that to keep the peace you have to be ready for war and, above all, recognizes that you have to quit while you're ahead. He's about to do just that when Price drags him into a pair of gigs that reek of trouble: tracking down the junkie daughter of his old pal Eddie Temple (Gambon) — who, unlike Price, has managed to polish off some of his rough edges and rub elbows with the upper crust — and moving an enormous shipment of ecstasy from Amsterdam.

The ecstasy belongs to the Duke (Foreman), exactly the kind of volatile gangster wannabe X makes it his business to avoid and, more to the point, the ecstasy doesn't really belong to the Duke at all. He and his bumbling crew stole it from Serbian war-criminal Slavo (Iures), who's already dispatched a ferocious hit man to bring back both the goods and the head of the thief who took them. Suddenly X is getting the screws put to him from all sides, and no amount of spinning the situation reveals a way out.

Bloated and incoherent, this big-budget adaptation of Alan Moore's brilliant graphic novel jettisons its clever amalgamation of 19th-century pulp fictions in favor of 21st-century Hollywood action formulas. The product of this reverse alchemy is numbingly ordinary.

London, 1899: Acting on behalf of Her Majesty's government, the mysterious M (Roxburgh) assembles a group of peculiar and uniquely talented individuals: aging African adventurer Allan Quatermain (Connery), shape-shifter Dr. Henry Jekyll (Flemyng), immortal dandy Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), invisible cut-purse Rodney Skinner (Tony Curran), enigmatic submariner Captain Nemo (Shah), vampire Mina Harker (Wilson) and American detective Tom Sawyer (West). Their mission: To go to Venice, where a top-secret summit of world leaders is convening to avert a world war, and protect them from the nefarious Fantom, who seems determined to fan the flames of international conflict for his own benefit.

The issue isn't that screenwriter James Dale Robinson and director Stephen Norrington made radical changes to Moore's intensely literary, densely allusive work of steam-punk meta-fiction in the name of making it palatable to people who don't even read comic books, let alone 19th-century novels. It's that they turned an engaging story filled with flawed, complicated characters into a series of CGI-heavy action set pieces, each duller than the one before, and flattened the extraordinary personalities into one-note caricatures.

Brooklyn-based filmmaker Ilya Chaiken's follow-up to the sharply observed Margarita Happy Hour (2002) is a surprisingly expansive study of two young Latino men who lose their low-level service jobs after 9/11.

Tico (Savinon) and Derrick (Thompson) grew up together in Brooklyn. Both dropped out of high school when they were in their late teens, live at home and work at the Statue of Liberty ferry concession stand.

While Tico is content to drift through life partying, fooling around with girls and protecting his tough-guy reputation, Derrick is studying for the GED so he can go to college. He's also struggling to help his overwhelmed mother (Ramos) and support his twin 3-year-olds, who live with an ex-girlfriend. When the first plane hits the World Trade Center, Derrick and Tico's supervisor assures his staff that what they're seeing is just an accident; nothing to worry about. When the dust clears, the Statue of Liberty has been closed to visitors and Tico and Derrick are out of work. Nine months later, Tico is drifting into small-time drug dealing and Derrick, who's been unable to find a decent job, becomes his reluctant partner.

Larry Blamire's pitch-perfect parody of poverty row horror/sci-fi pictures of the 1950s is a meticulous takeoff could easily be taken for the real thing, which is both its genius and its Achilles heel. In addition to being as charmingly silly as the films that inspired it, it also reproduces the inevitable dullness produced by murky photography, minimal action, cheapo special effects and long stretches of expository dialogue.

Scientist Paul Armstrong (Blamire) and his perky, bubble-headed wife, Betty (Fay Masterson), rent a cabin near the remote spot where a meteor recently landed. Nearby, Dr. Roger Fleming (Howe) is looking for the fabled lost skeleton of Cadavra Cave, whose legendary power Fleming hopes to harness for his own ends. And in the nearby woods, two aliens from the planet Marva — Kro-Bar and his wife, Lattis (Parks and McConnell) — are taking stock after the emergency landing that damaged their spaceship and allowed their dangerous mutant to escape. Dr. Armstrong locates the meteor, which contains a substance called atmosphereum, which happens to be what the skeleton requires to regain its strength and conquer the world — cue the power-mad skeleton laugh! — and the substance that powers Lattis and Kro-bar's spaceship. Dr. Armstrong, in turn, hopes his research into the nature of atmospherium will advance his scientific career.

And so everyone converges on the Armstrongs' cabin: Kro-Bar and Lattis posing awkwardly as regular Earth folks while Fleming secretly borrows their shape-altering "transmutatron" and transforms "four different forest animals" into feral seductress Animala (Blaire) to bolster his cover story. Adopting the relentlessly loopy logic of desperate screenwriters, Fleming reasons that it will seem more plausible that he's been stranded by a car crash if he's accompanied by his "wife"… even if she's a total weirdo in a beat-girl unitard. The persistently polite Armstrongs ignore the peculiar behavior of Animala, Lattis and Kro-Bar — it would be rude, after all, to draw attention to their guests' eccentricities — but after a local forest ranger (Conroy) stops by with the news of a mutilation murder nearby, even the Armstrongs realize something very odd is going on.

Miss Mabel "Madea" Simmons (Tyler Perry) is — as always — in a mess of trouble, because she just doesn't know how to suffer fools. Not gladly, mind you, just without making the kind of scene that winds up on the local newscast. This time she's ordered to undergo anger-management therapy, and if she doesn't go, her next stop is the big house. (Click here for complete review.)

Loosely structured but sharply observed, this darkly comic drama revolves around a group of not-as-young-as-they-once-were scene makers trying to reconcile the conflicting demands of motherhood and a sex, drugs and rock-and-roll lifestyle.

Various feckless lovers have decamped or been given the heave-ho, leaving these one-time riot grrrls holding the baby bag; in one of the film's many throwaway ironies, the only married mom in the bunch may have to divorce her blue-collar husband to qualify their ailing baby for affordable health care. The group's center is Zelda ( Hutchins), an artist who shares a rambling Brooklyn loft with seven roommates, including boyfriend Max (Fessenden), an underemployed writer whose ambivalence about fatherhood is straining their relationship to the breaking point. Dressed like glam-punk sex kittens, the newly minted moms gather at the same Lower East Side Mexican restaurant they frequented as unattached scene makers, gossiping, trading tips about social services and sucking up $2.00 happy-hour margaritas while their toddlers romp underfoot.

Zelda and her friends, Graziella (Sicuranza), Raquel (Vogel), Sofia (Ross) and Marie (Dispaltro) are suspended in various stages of willingness to negotiate new self-images and the lives that go with them; some are making the trasition more easily than others. Zelda's life is complicated by the arrival of best friend Natali (Ramos), who's fresh out of rehab and hoping for a fresh start, but ripe for relapse. The fragile and directionless Natali needs more attention than Zelda has left to give after long days of looking after her daughter (Leland); negotiating freelance jobs (like a gig drawing busty ladies for Screw); and wrangling with Medicaid. Meanwhile, some of the happy-hour regulars have pooled their resources to buy a house upstate; there's still time for Zelda to join them if she's willing to kiss her New York life goodbye.

Until Maximum Risk, director Ringo Lam was known only to die-hard Hong Kong movie buffs and Quentin Tarantino haters who knew that the plot of Reservoir Dogs owed more than a little to Lam's City on Fire, unreleased in the US but made famous by the short film Who Do You Think You're Fooling?

This sleek and highly competent action thriller features Jean-Claude Van Damme as twins, as he did in 1991's gimmicky Double Impact. But there's little special effects trickery here: French cop Alain Moreau's (Van Damme) partner, Sebastien (Anglade), escorts him to a crime scene, where he comes face to face with a body that looks exactly like him. After discovering that the dead man, Mikhail Suverov, was also born on the same date as he was, Alain confronts his mother (Audran), who confesses that Mikhail was Alain's twin, whom she put up for adoption at birth. Mikhail was on his way to introduce himself to the brother he never knew when he was brutally murdered.

Alain follows Mikhail's trail to New York's Little Odessa, a little piece of Russia in Brooklyn, where everyone takes him for Mikhail, including his brother's gorgeous and profoundly practical fiancee, Alex (Henstridge). He soon learns that his brother joined the Russian Mafia as a teenager, but had recently devised a plan to get out, a plan that apparently involved the brother he never knew.

2001
Directed by: Satoshi Kon.
Written by: Satoshi Kon and Sadayuki Murai.
With the voices of: Shozo Iizuka, Miyoko Shoji, Mami Koyama, Fumiko Orikasa, Syouko Tsuda, Kohichi Yamadera and Hirotaka Suzuoki.

Past and present, reality and fiction blend seamlessly into each other in Satoshi Kon's dream-like animated drama about a reclusive actress and the documentary filmmaker determined to find out why she abruptly abandoned her career 30 years earlier.

Middle-aged filmmaker Genya Tachibana (Iizuka), has been enthralled by actress Chiyoko Fujiwara (voiced at different ages by Shoji, Koyama and Orikasa) since he was a young man. Beautiful, unaffected and perpetually breathless with enthusiasm, Chiyoko began acting as a teenager in the 1940s and continued through the early 1970s, making family melodramas, Godzilla movies, war pictures, period films and even a 2001-style science fiction epic. Her face graced the covers of hundreds of magazines, until one day she stepped out of the limelight and never returned. Now Tachibana has finally secured an interview for the documentary he’s making about her.

Chiyoko’s house turns out to be nestled in the wooded hills behind the Ginei Studio lot, where she spent her career, and Tachibana shoots some melancholy footage of its demolition en route to the long-awaited audience. White-haired, but still graceful and lovely, Chiyoko graciously accepts the gift Tachibana has brought: a key she lost decades earlier while shooting her last film. Prompted by the key's return, Chiyoko reminisces freely about her youthful shyness, disapproving mother, rivalry with slightly older actress Eiko Shimao (Tsuda), marriage to director Otaka and unrequited love for a revolutionary artist (Yamadera) who disappeared during WWII. And as she speaks, Tachibana and his cameraman (Suzuoki) find themselves into Chiyoko's memories, interlopers whose presence unveils Chiyoko's secrets, as well as some of Tachibana's own.

Are they unstuck in time as a result of drinking Chiyoko's home-brewed herbal tea? Could the earthquakes that shake the ground three times in one day be symptomatic of a rift in the time/space continuum, or is everything — including Tachibana's documentary — unfolding within Chiyoko's mind? Kon never clarifies, and it doesn't matter. His film is a lovely meditation on memory, movies and the near-magical power of images to fire the imagination and keep the hope of happiness and beauty alive in the face of real-life ugliness and despair. (In Japanese, with English subtitles.)

What seems to be a pathetic excuse for a comedy is actually something even worse: A feature-length effort to reposition Playboy's brand of squeaky-clean titillation as relevant to young men weaned on internet porn.

High school sweethearts Eugene (Cregger) and Cindi (Alessi) are old-fashioned romantics who forgo taking their relationship to the next level until they're absolutely sure of their commitment to each other. But as senior prom looms, they decide it's time for them to consummate their relationship. Unfortunately, Eugene takes a tumble down a flight of stairs that leaves him comatose.

Four years later, Eugene's moronic best bud, horndog Tucker (Moore), snaps him out of it with a baseball bat. And boy, does he have news: Former Miss Abstinence Cindi is now Playboy's Miss March — ain't that a kick in the head! Eugene just wants to talk to Cindi — appearances notwithstanding, he wants to believe she hasn't turned into a airbrushed slut. And as it happens, the annual Playboy bunny convention (or something equally nonsensical) is taking place in three days' time at Hugh Hefner's Los Angeles mansion, and Tucker knows someone who could get them in: His old pal Horsedick.MPEG (Robinson), whose rap career blew up while Eugene was sleeping. Of course, the fact that Trip van Winkle has little control over his muscles and none over his bowels presents a problem. But hell, bunnies await and time's a-wasting, so Tucker hauls Eugene into his car and they strike out for Chicago in search of Horsedick.MPEG. Complicating matters is the botch Tucker made of his 13-month anniversary celebration with older girlfriend Candace (Stanton) — suffice it to say that a disco ball, an unfortunately timed epileptic seizure and assault with a deadly fork were involved — and she's out for vengeance, assisted by her brother (Meed) and his fellow firemen.

A dark western about the short life and bad times of "iron outlaw" Ned Kelly, Australia's answer to Jesse James.

Victoria Province, 1871. Born to an impoverished Irish convict in English-ruled Australia, young Ned's (Ledger) teenage joyride on a stray mare earns him three years in prison for horse theft. Older and angrier, Ned nevertheless returns home to his mother (McQuade) and younger siblings Dan (Kinlan), Kate (Condon) and Grace (Browning) determined to stay out of trouble.

Ned gets a job working for English gentleman rancher Richard Cook (Bell), but flirts incautiously with Cook's beautiful young wife, Julia (Watts), and feuds with perpetually drunken Officer Fitzpatrick (Paramore) of the Victoria Police. Fitzpatrick's lust for Ned's sister Kate starts the wheels of injustice turning: Dan gives Fitzgerald a hiding and Fitzgerald spreads the story that Ned, who wasn't even there, shot him. Ned can't use his alibi — Julia was with him but won't admit it for fear of ruining her reputation — so he and Dan decide to lay low until everything blows over. But it never does. Mrs. Kelly is arrested in their stead and the brothers, by now accompanied by longtime friends Joe Byrne (Bloom) and Steve Hart (Barantini), kill three police officers sent to gun them down.

With a government bounty on their heads, Kelly and company rob banks and share the loot with poor immigrant families, who embrace them as folk heroes and close ranks against the authorities. But the fugitives are eventually run to ground; pursued by a small army of policemen under the command of implacable Superintendent Hare (Rush), the 25-year-old Kelly and his gang, clad in homemade armor made from plowshares, stage their last stand in the isolated railway town of Glenrowan.

There's less to the Coen brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 somber thriller than meets the eye, but it's a hugely entertaining slice of sunbaked Gothic.

1980, West Texas: Llewelyn Moss (Brolin) is the definition of ordinary: a Vietnam veteran living in a Desert Aire trailer park with his younger wife, Carla Jean (Scottish actress Macdonald), scraping out a living, driving a battered pickup truck, and partial to solitary hunting trips. It's on one such trip that Moss stumbles across the aftermath of a massacre: five trucks, half a dozen bodies (including a dog) and twice as many serious firearms, a dying man moaning for agua, a truckload of drugs, and a case crammed with $2 million. Moss knows better than to steal dirty money but does it anyway, and then lets his better nature ensure that he doesn't get away clean.

Haunted by the dying man's plea, he returns to the scene with a jug of water and runs smack into a shadowy pack of thugs. He escapes — barely, and battered — but knows his abandoned truck will lead them to his door. So Moss sends Carla Jean to her mother in Odessa and hits the road with the money, figuring he'll lay low and come up with some kind of plan to keep the money and disappear. But there are two men on his trail, utterly different but united in their dogged determination: laconic Sheriff Bell (Jones), whose rueful ruminations (many aimed at designated deputy dumbass Dillahunt) give the film its wryly comic edge, and stone psycho Anton Chigurh (Bardem), the supposedly humorless murder machine who whimsically favors a pneumatic humane killer for the disposing of rivals, witnesses and anyone who has the misfortune to get in his way.

Married since 1995, the Johnsons may not make it to their next anniversary. Small-time contractor Dave's (Chestnut) dreams of playing professional baseball were scotched by a knee injury, while Clarice (Henson), a successful realtor, pays the bulk of their bills. And bulk is the word: Clarice's ambitions exceed even her considerable income, and she's too career oriented to be a good wife, let alone consider having the baby he so desperately wants. Dave channels his fatherly instincts into coaching an underprivileged little league team with comic relief buddy Tree (Hart), who's thoroughly under his wife's thumb, and token white friend Brock (Cibrian), a lawyer in the midst of a toxic divorce. Clarice bitterly resents the time Dave with the kids she contemptuously calls ""little gangbangers-in-training," and the marital discord comes to a roiling boil when Clarice is seriously injured in a car accident and her bitter, mouthy mama (Lewis) moves in to pour poisonous advice into her daughter's ear.

The film's awkward title comes from the braided rope Bishop Wilkes (Albert Hall) lays across the couple's shoulders at their wedding: Two strands represent the bride and groom while the third symbolizes God, whose love and guidance strengthens their union. Dave and Clarice, of course, have pretty much forgotten about Him: She's wrapped up in material things, so focused on getting ahead that she's even internalized racist attitudes about disadvantaged African-Americans, while Dave is too whipped to rise to the challenge of being the kind of man his wife can look up to.

Jakes, Perry and playwright-turned-filmmaker David E. Talbert (First Sunday) have their fingers firmly on the pulse of a sizable segment of the 21st-century African American community, for whom piety and bawdy humor are the spoonfuls of sugar that make the moral tale go down. Not Easily Broken hits all the familiar notes: Fathers who abandon their sons, women who equate strength with emasculation and drive their men into the arms of white women, children whose lack of moral guidance and family support leaves them vulnerable to drugging and thugging, mothers who teach their daughters to worship financial security rather than the Lord. But their underlying message makes Mildred Pierce look like a feminist tract: Men need to man up, women need to back off and meddling gal pals and mothers need to shut up.

For the full review, please click here here.

This review originally appeared on the Film Journal International website.

George Tillman, Jr.'s biopic is a big, fat wet kiss of a tribute to Brooklyn-born rapper Notorious B.I.G., whose 1997 murder (chronicled in Nick Broomfield's 2002 documentary Biggie and Tupac (2002) ) remains unsolved more than 10 years later.

The chubby son of soft-spoken, fiercely proud Voletta Wallace (Bassett), nerdy little Christopher Wallace (Christopher Wallace Jr., the late rapper's son) dreamed of escaping the mean streets of Bedford Stuyvesant by becoming a rap star. Before he was out of high school, Wallace (Woolard) was well on the way to becoming just another cautionary ghetto tale, dropping out of school, selling crack and getting his girlfriend pregnant. He even does a stint in jail for dealing, but holds on to his dream and emerges to strike the inevitable deal with the devil, here in the guise of music-business entrepreneur Sean "Puffy" Combs (Luke). Puffy makes Wallace a star, freeing him to smoke weed, drink Champagne, bang banji sluts, get freaky with trash-talking Lil' Kim (Naughton) and marry platinum blonde dream girl Faith Evans (Smith). Wallace also befriends the charismatic Tupac Shakur (Mackie), only to see their friendship curdle when Shakur is shot and robbed in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio. Believing that Wallace and Combs masterminded the attack because he refused to sign with Combs' Bad Boy Entertainment, Shakur moves to Los Angeles, signs with Suge Knight's Death Row Records and busies himself stoking the fires of a nascent feud between the East Coast and West Coast rap scenes.

Daniel O'Connor and Neil Ortenberg's engrossing documentary about the life and times of publisher Barney Rosset, who spent much of his career advancing the cause of free expression, is a flawless match of style and subject.

Born into a wealthy Chicago family, Rosset grew up to be a restless free thinker with the means to drift through life, fraternizing with writers, artist and political rebels until he figured out what he wanted to do. The answer came in the form of a peace offering from his second wife, painter Joan Mitchell, who had just left him: A small, Greenwich Village-based publishing company called Grove Press, whose three-book catalogue consisted entirely of vintage obscuriana, was for sale. Rosset bought it and in 1958 published D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, copies of which the US Postal Service confiscated on the grounds that it was pornography rather than literature. Rosset went to court, won and proved the old adage about bad publicity.

Chatterley was a hit and Grove Press had a niche: Politically and socially controversial literature and non-fiction, including Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Allan Ginsburg's Howl, William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, a portion of Che Guevara's diaries and Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn.

Rosset created a separate imprint, Black Cat, to publish Victorian erotica; introduced a 1961 television production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot starring Burgess Meredith and Zero Mostel; and briefly branched out into film distribution, starting with 1967's censorship-defying I am Curious (Yellow). He founded the magazine Evergreen Review, whose text and illustrations rivaled those of Grove Press' most provocative books; hosted a radio show; and made and lost several fortunes, at one point keeping Grove afloat by selling off chunks of prime East Hampton real estate he bought as a young man. Rosset made friends and alienated people in equal numbers, was spied on by the FBI, indulged liberally in drugs and alcohol, burned through four marriages and eventually sold Grove Press, only to be fired unceremoniously by the new owners.

Swedish filmmakers Joel Bergval and Simon Sandquist's haunting adaptation of Mats Wahl's 2000 young-adult novel revolves around a high-school golden boy whose apparently perfect life is shattered when he runs afoul of a deeply troubled classmate and finds himself trapped in a hellish limbo between life and death.

To all appearances, high-school senior Niklas Ericcsen (Skarsgard, the son of Stellan Skarsgard) has everything: good looks, brains, a mother (Bradhe) who adores him, a beautiful girlfriend (Ulving) and a bright future. He's a top student, doesn't drink or do drugs, and is both pragmatic — he maintains a lucrative little trade in term papers for lazy jocks — and compassionate — Niklas regularly defends his plump, passive best friend, Peter (Hagman), a born victim from a strict immigrant family, against bullies.

But beneath the surface, Niklas is desperately unhappy, tired of living up to his widowed mother's expectations but too dutiful to openly defy her. On the eve of high-school graduation, Niklas has decided to bolt: Having told his mother he‘d defer to her wishes and study economics in Stockholm, he secretly applied to and was accepted by a prestigious writing program in London. He’s packed in secret and bought his plane ticket, telling no one but Peter, and only on the day of his intended departure.

And then everything goes wrong: Peter, who's managed to incur the wrath of troubled delinquent Annelie Tullgren (Novotny), whose thriving business in stolen goods has somehow come to the attention of the police. He tries to save himself a beating by blaming Niklas, reasoning that his friend is already safely en route to England. Peter’s lie is great for Annelie's older boyfriend, car thief Marcus (Luttrop), since he’s the real culprit: He gave her up rather than risk being thrown back in jail. But it’s disastrous for Niklas: Mrs. Ericsson discovered his plans and he’s still in town. So Annelie and her bully boys (Sobrado, Kinnaman) are able to hunt Niklas down, beat him within an inch of his life and dump him in an out-of-the-way ditch to die.

When Niklas regains consciousness the next day and finds himself invisible to family, friends and the police investigating his disappearance, he makes the reasonable assumption that he's a ghost. And to his horror, death is even more frustrating than life: He has no idea how to continue his journey into the afterlife and can only watch as the his friends and neighbors carry on living. Annelie, for example, is sullenly stonewalling the cops, who rightly suspect she had something to do with Niklas’ disappearance.

And it gets worse: He gradually realizes that he isn’t dead — his battered body is stubbornly clinging to the last glimmer of life, and his soul has come loose. So he can neither proceed to the great beyond nor let anyone know where he is… except, perhaps, Annelie. She alone among the living seems to sense his presence and as he tries shadows her, trying to communicate, he begins to realize she isn't quite the unrepentant, stone-cold sociopath she appears.

A thorny, heartrending story of bad choices and devastating consequences, things don't work out for the conventional best in Den Osynlige. Skarsgard, who subsequently played a sadistic schoolboy in Mikael Hafstrom’s Oscar-nominated Ondskan/Evil (2003), is a convincingly conflicted Niklas and the film's bittersweet end is truly haunting. The same can’t be said for the 2007, Disney-financed American remake, The Invisible, which softens and undermines everything that makes the original so compelling.

Chiara Clemente’s group portrait of five successful artists uses New York’s creative allure as a way of discussing the challenges and rewards of being a woman in the art world.

1998
Directed by: Satoshi Kon.
Written by: Sadayuki Murai, based on the novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi.
With the voices of: Junko Iwao, Rika Matsumoto, Shinpachi Tsuji, Okura Masaaki, Yosuke Akimoto and Yoku Shioya.

Satoshi Kon’s breathtakingly beautiful animated thriller feature revolves around a bubble-gum pop star whose efforts to branch out into acting attract the attentions of the worst kind of very fan.

Rumi’s concern proves to be right on the money: Mima quickly begins getting unnerving phone calls and faxes, Tadakoro opens a fan letter that explodes in his hands and someone poisons Mima's beloved fish. She also discovers a disturbing web page called "Mima's Room," full of intimate information about her life. Things worsen after a Double Bind episode in which Mima's character is raped; soon after, the show's screenwriter is brutally murdered. So is a photographer who shoots some steamy magazine pictures of the up-and-coming starlet. Worst of all, Mima is being haunted by the taunting image of her clean-cut, pop-star self... is she going mad, or is a murderer — perhaps the obsessed fan behind that creepy web page, who adored his unspoiled Mima and wants her back — playing sadistic mind games with her?

Anyone familiar with thriller conventions will have little trouble figuring out who’s behind the assault on Mima’s sanity, but the pleasures of this film lie elsewhere. Originally conceived as a live-action feature, Perfect Blue’s surreal images, which increasing blur the line between reality and artifice as Mima succumbs to her tormentor’s psychological reign of terror, are gorgeously realized, begin with its haunting evocation of the gleaming, depersonalized Tokyo in which Mima lives out her superficially charmed but deeply lonely life. First-time director Satoshi Kon went on to direct three more exceptional anime features, as well as six episodes of the TV series Paranoia Agent, before succumbing to pancreatic cancer at the age of 46. (In Japanese, with English subtitles.)