David Rooney

What's most notable about Kyle Rankin's slick and compulsively watchable genre entry Run Hide Fight is the utter shallowness of its psychological perspective.

The spirit of the late Federico Fellini -- with whom Benigni talked of doing the project together -- surfaces repeatedly. But that spirit fails to enliven a film substantially lacking in personality, energy, magic and humor.

An elegant but empty and frustrating meditation on desire, obsession, love and possession, The Captive intellectualizes those subjects almost beyond the level of art-film parody.

Spanish writer-director Cesc Gay and Argentine co-director Daniel Gimelberg cook up one or two agreeably tart episodes in this uneven pic, but ultimately, it plays like "Four Rooms" without a budget.

A moderately successful attempt to ape the standard Hollywood teen movie.

The level of socially accepted discrimination exposed here provokes both heartbreak and anger.

Wolf and Sheep is an absorbing ethnographic docudrama hybrid, marbled with a curious vein of phantasmagoric storytelling

While the well-acted film's unselfconscious depiction of male desire and homoeroticism is also distinctive, it's undone by muddy storytelling and a shortage of emotional payoff.

It's refreshing to see a portrayal of socially engaged Americans who think not according to the divide between red and blue, but rather in terms of what's good for their families, their long-range livelihoods and the natural world on which they depend.

The film becomes somewhat overplotted and a tad too clever for its own good as the frantic, farcical complications continue to pile up. But the cast across the board is engaging, mirroring the loose, limber touch of director Salvadori as he establishes order out of chaos and smoothes all the rough edges into a harmonious ending for everyone.

torm Lake is an elegiac heartland portrait, often melancholy in its reflections on compromises to the traditional fabric of local life, and yet colored by the hope of endurance, both for the newspaper and the community it represents.

Milkwater is a modest film that acquires pleasing depth as it progresses.

After a compelling first hour, the director can’t seem to get to the dramatic and emotional crux of the epic story, which runs a bloated three hours. When he finally does get there it’s in the dreaded Big Speech, which even an actor of Rogowski’s generous gifts can’t make into anything but a teachable moment.