Eddie Cockrell

Tale of an idealistic local caught in the crossfire of an illicit affair is too pat and pretty to connect with upscale audiences.

The film overstays its welcome by punctuating his story with ill-advised dramatic fantasy sequences that are meant to illustrate the anguish of a gay man in mid-century America, but come across as heavy-handed and mean-spirited.

Stands reasonably well on its own as an urgent, updated genre meditation on nurture vs. nature.

A natural crowd-pleaser.

A stately, intermittently gripping, ultimately overlong drama.

Sixty years after World War II, descendants of a prominent Nazi responsible for implementing Hitler's policies in Slovakia reignite debate over their heritage in emotional docu 2 or 3 Things I Know About Him.

A so-so pic on an incendiary subject, Full Battle Rattle follows the training regimen of one battalion during engagement and occupation in one of 13 fake "villages" comprising a massive Iraq simulation somewhere in the Mojave Desert.

The writer discovers a people physically and psychologically worn down by decades of dictatorship, sanctions, war and occupation.

Picture raises pithy questions sure to provoke animated discussions pro and con. Credit Davenport for a mostly unbiased presentation that presents her own disenchantment in a balanced manner.

A deliberately coarse character style that's more Gumby than Gromit.

Helmer Douglas Mackinnon does what he can to make the most of emotional bullet points and gloss over the lack of connective tissue.

Scrub away a needlessly fussy visual style, trendy narrative tweaks and a climax both morally repugnant and logically absurd, and there’s a tough little noir about buried transgressions coming out of the past in Renny Harlin’s lackluster thriller “Cleaner.” Too mainstream to attract genre interest, and too tangled in its character motivations to sit well with the multiplex crowd, this is a minor stain that should fade quickly and leave only faint traces in ancillary.

A seesaw chronology and generally chaotic approach plagues Haven, an overly ambitious, multicharacter love story-cum-underworld revenge drama set on a fleetingly exotic island.

Explores another courageous, little-known chapter in the saga of resistance and heroics during World War II.

Lanthimos’ point seems to be that everyone has their own private weaknesses, but after a Lynchian first act in this strange world, he avoids any mainstream dramatic or satiric elements.

An intermittently gripping story about an idealistic young boxer who becomes disillusioned with the Third Reich during his elite training, Napola is finally KO'd by an overdose of Nazi fetishism.

A plea for attention to despicable conditions of female servitude in contempo Iran.

Links narrative fiction filmmaking to avant-garde with vision and authority.

The miscalculated and overlong Julia proves a startling misfire for "The Dreamlife of Angels" writer-helmer Erick Zonca and dependably fearless actress Tilda Swinton.

Washington reveals himself to be a filmmaker with a clean, uncluttered storytelling style. Too often, overtly inspirational material such as this can become strident or mawkish.

Picture's cliched underlying story of restless youth plays as too naive for an older audience and too provocative for teens.

Director Bert Marcus’ Champs is the moviegoing opposite of a prize fight, a slick but not particularly stylish documentary that actually becomes more focused and energized in the late rounds.

As interesting as all this is, and as challenging and perilous it must have been to capture these images, Jirga’s elliptical approach to plot and selective use of subtitles does the finished product no favors.

Helmer Bruce David Klein's near-reverential treatment is a nice contrast to the rough-and-tumble of tour life.

Topolski and his story are so engaging that the resulting discord of voices and agendas can't drown out the voice of the little guy questioning the system.

Writer-producer Rishi S. Bhilawadikar’s too-busy script nevertheless scores legitimate points about the complexities and paradoxes of the visa application process, the resulting limbo in which many legitimately productive immigrants find themselves, and other frustrating and soul-searching issues facing ethnic communities.

The Time We Killed reps avant-garde vet Jennifer Todd Reeves' most ambitious work yet, a dense-packed feature-length black-and-white journey into a beautifully restless mind.

Will be of keen interest to fans but plays to the unwashed as cringingly pompous.