Jeannette Catsoulis

Engrossing, poetic and often very funny, "Position," like its predecessors, uses the lens of a single family to view the tumult of an entire country.

Where Soldiers Come From is, more than anything, a commentary on class. In its compassionate, modest gaze, the real cost of distant political decisions is softly illuminated, as well as the shame of a country with little to offer its less fortunate young people than a ticket to a battlefield.

His film opens with a lullaby, and while there is indeed something soothing in his images of repetitive, backbreaking toil, the music also serves as a reminder of childhood lost.

As the uniformly annoying characters stumble around, screaming and cursing, we don't give a hoot for their survival. Quite the reverse: we're counting the minutes until the asylum's ghostly inhabitants silence them for good.

The result is a movie that isn't crummy, exactly, just blah: when the freakiest teeth on screen belong not to one of Walt Conti's animatronically realized sharks but to a good-ol'-boy called Red, you know you have a problem.

Merging the sacred and the profane, the bloody and the batty, Love Exposure tunnels into serious topics - warped parenting, sexual intolerance and the way religious cults enslave damaged souls - with a hilariously blasphemous shovel.

Though at times too determined to avoid dramatic highs and lows, Little Girl strikes gold in the casting of the 2-year-old Asia Crippa.

That it eventually - if barely - succeeds is due more to the resilience of its actors than to the discipline of its makers.

None of Mr. del Toro's classy fiddling, however, can improve on the original's marvelously economical scares. But if you've always wondered what the tooth fairies want with all those teeth - or if you just need proof that a terrified Katie Holmes looks not that different from the everyday version - this is the movie for you.

What follows is something rarely seen in American movies: a sincerely humane examination of what it means to experience a crisis of faith. Tender, bittersweet and often gently comedic, Corinne's 20-year journey toward (and around, and away from) her God has a loose, searching rhythm that's engrossingly unpredictable.

Fusty research, aging interviewees and decades-old advertising campaigns offer background to the uninitiated, but Mr. Warrick's muddled, undisciplined approach destroys even the possibility of a cogent overview.

Viewed simply as a horror movie, A Horrible Way to Die is diverting; viewed as commentary on our willingness to tune out evil for the sake of emotional connection, it's devastating.

Brilliant, bizarre, dazzling and utterly demented, The Last Circus views Franco-era Spain through the crazed eyes of two clowns doing battle for the love of one magnificent woman.

Not until the film's surprisingly touching finale do we learn the source of that friction, in a delicately handled sequence that retroactively floods the story with satisfying context.

Mr. Murray creates a beguiling, visually rich canvas.

Lively, swift, vibrantly colorful and for the most part wonderfully acted, the film is slyly aware of the daytime talk show as a vehicle for women's concerns.

Evincing more visible intelligence than any of his human co-stars aside from Lithgow, Caesar is disquietingly lifelike.

Dipping in and out of luminous black and white, Protektor has a distancing glamour that prevents the story from digging in. Burdened by a central relationship so lacking in passion that its fate becomes negligible, the film's narrative feels trivialized by jaunty musical fragments and repetitive cycling and rowing motifs that belabor Emil's metaphorical treadmill of appeasement.

An exhausted pileup of rock-movie clichés, The Perfect Age of Rock 'n' Roll presents artistic self-destruction with the solemnity of a movie that has invented a spanking-new genre.

A deliciously warped wallow in misogyny, depravity and dead-eyed manipulation, Cold Fish charts the twisted alliance of two tropical-fish salesmen with baleful glee.

A strangely bifurcated film, Gun Hill Road comes to life only when focused on Michael, and Ms. Santana (who was just beginning her own gender transition when she won the role) holds the screen like a pro.

Swerving from bland to brutal, endearingly coy to shockingly explicit, the Canadian import Good Neighbors finds pitch-black comedy among white-bread lives.

A gay tragedy in three acts and more than a dozen excellent songs, House of Boys conveys an emotional honesty that overrides its dated style.

This fabulously inventive debut feature, written and directed by the British comedian Joe Cornish, never flags.

Anyone looking for the lowdown on haute cuisine will be sorely disappointed: devoid of emotion, context or narrative, the baffling avant-garde techniques and extreme politesse of the lab become oppressively dull.

Though the enjoyable prickliness of the film's early scenes soon dissolves into cozy solutions, a sturdy supporting cast - even Ron Leibman's scenery-chewing turn as Laura's blowhard father is more amusing than annoying - balances the scales.

Pitching uncertainly between cute and creepy, engaging and weird, this farcical story draws energy from a wickedly eccentric Ann-Margret, having a high old time as Ben's doting mother.

Not one for climactic endings or predictable histrionics, the director, David Barker (who wrote the script with Ms. Meierhans and Mr. Godere), sticks to the stylistic template of his debut feature, "Afraid of Everything," which was filmed in 1999. Preferring the tease over the tell, his films coax us into looking beneath the surface. What we find is mostly up to us.

Nonetheless, the film's homespun quality (Ms. Canty, whose childlike voice provides intermittent narration, simply describes herself in the publicity notes as "the mom of four kids") works in its favor, as does its maker's agitated sincerity.

"How are we going to get out of here?" Sarah squawks at one point, a question that Mr. Dourif ought to have asked his agent long before the cameras began to roll.

Quaintly old-fashioned in style, plot and special effects, this familiar tale of female derangement and institutional abuse is too tame to scare and too shallow to engage.

A lackadaisical dive into backwoods barminess and masculine neuroses, this low-budget paean to indoor plumbing and rampant facial hair doesn't unfold so much as unravel.

Recording every success and setback, the wrenching documentary Crime After Crime favors the personal over the political, creating a no-frills portrait of a stoic and remarkably unembittered woman.

If you are going to be this mean-spirited, you had better deliver the jokes, but the film's attacks on pretentious parents - not to mention put-downs of hardworking immigrants - consistently come off as more hateful than humorous.

Making sadomasochism appear less erotic than stamp collecting, Leap Year is a slow flare of emotional agony.

Jig begins light on its feet but soon becomes leaden. Legs pinwheel, and fake ringlets fly, but competitive tension is sacrificed to repetition and an unnecessary focus on complicated numerical scoring.

Woven throughout is a deeply rewarding recognition of the sustaining power of female companionship.

A surpassingly silly monster movie with a side helping of satire, Trollhunter beckons mainly for its stunning Norwegian scenery and slyly effective government-bashing.

A laudable if lightweight argument for broader minds and thicker skins.

Mr. Siegel is no Cassandra: retaining the waggish tone of his previous documentary, "The Real Dirt on Farmer John" (released in 2007), he balances the doom-talking heads with cute animation and characters like Yvon Achard, a French "bee historian" who caresses the swarm with his elaborately styled facial hair.

Repackaging the revenge thriller in parakeet colors and distinctive African beats, the Congolese writer and director Djo Tunda Wa Munga gives Viva Riva! a playful sensuality that goes a long way toward disguising formula.

Beautiful Boy is the antithesis of melodrama. Painfully perceptive and relentlessly raw, this intimate observation of a couple in extremis plays out with such subdued intensity that, by the end, audiences will very likely feel as wrung out as its embattled stars.

This weirdly engaging tale of banking and bad behavior makes 19th-century China look uncomfortably like 21st-century America.

A movie that feels like punishment for a crime you can't remember committing.

If Mr. Haney sometimes struggles to find focus, he has no trouble locating heroes, including the doggedly energetic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a slew of stalwart locals and fearless outsiders. And the black heart of coal country - and, as the film shows, our national energy debate - has never seemed so in need of white knights.

A love triangle with fangs but no bite, the German import We Are the Night is mostly infatuated with its own stylish excesses.

Insulting several nationalities and most of the filmgoing public, Tied to a Chair lurches through acting atrocities, continuity glitches and narrative gaps with grating insouciance.

A cringingly awkward tale of sexual predation and female lunacy.

As one bloody encounter treads on the heels of the next, all that remains is a tiny indie undone by its own vicious ambitions.

Though leaning too heavily on period tunes and the templates of Mr. Linklater and John Hughes (to whom the film is dedicated), Mr. Burns has a distinctly spacious style that gives female characters room to breathe.

Filmed on Hatteras Island, N.C., Vacation! meanders like an endless summer's day; even its tragic conclusion feels incongruously fragile.

Merging old-fashioned comedy routines with up-to-the-minute politics - all of it enabled by fun-loving personalities and a gift for rousing original songs - the ladies emit a genuine warmth that reels audiences in.

Against all reason, Byron's televangelist-led quest for clarity compels us to follow, the film's melting, naturalistic images softening the occasional scream of dialogue repeated beyond all necessity.

While at times fascinating, this trudge through statistics, graphs and grainy film of cholesterol bubbles and arterial plaque may challenge even the most determined viewer.

Cuter than a basket of puppies licking a litter of kittens, An Invisible Sign is an excruciatingly whimsical collision of adult themes and kid-friendly aesthetic.

Somber and insubstantial, October nevertheless suggests that the Vega brothers are developing a careful, painterly style. Whether they will be able to match it with narrative depth remains to be seen.

Red White & Blue proves the director a bona fide storyteller with more tools in his arsenal than shock and awe.

With its whispery conversations, sepulchral atmosphere and soothing play of light and shadow, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is probably best enjoyed in a chemically enhanced state of mind.

More successful at conjuring atmosphere than at plot, We Go Way Back is nicely acted but frustratingly slight.

Imagine spending an afternoon watching a bunch of vagrants putter around on an abandoned city lot, and you've pretty much nailed the viewing experience of Earthwork, a painfully dull account of a year in the life of the Kansas crop artist Stan Herd.

Like a Ken Loach drama stripped to bare bones, The Arbor springs to life in the bright bitterness of Dunbar's prose, showcased in alfresco performances of contentious scenes from the play.

It's the film's geometrists who enthrall most, revealing that many of the shapes - one of which famously made the cover of a 1990 Led Zeppelin album - hold entirely new answers to Euclidean problems.

This unusually taut sophomore feature from Jim Mickle is more abnormal than most in that its creatures are capable not only of evolving but also of embracing religious fanaticism.

The writer and director, Mark Goffman, sticks to a no-frills style that makes the film feel longer than its 1 hour 24 minutes.

Why, then, do we care not one bit when Pulitzers are won and bullets unsuccessfully dodged? The answer lies partly in Mr. Silver's refusal to elucidate the racial politics or engage with the world outside the film's incoherently chaotic bubble.

Taking a coolheaded approach to hot-button issues, Fly Away overcomes its neatly bow-tied ending with strong performances (including Greg Germann as a sensitive neighbor) and a spare, intelligent script.

Using de Chabannes as the film's conscience and moral fulcrum, Tavernier - just as he did in his 1996 film "Captain Conan" - exposes the shame of a meaningless war and the psychological damage borne by those fighting it.

From its "once upon a time" beginning to the anticlimactic end, Footprints remains fatally lodged in La-La Land.

Fair to a fault, "Elephant" omits what could be considered crucial voices - like lawmakers, the Humane Society (which helped finance the film) and mental-health professionals - in its attempt to understand those who believe their particular beast is as harmless as a kitten. At least until it rips someone's face off.

Buoyed by a fully integrated soundtrack, Kati With an I delivers a lovingly personal observation of young people at a crossroads. The film's sound is not always crisp, but no matter: Kati's story is written in every vital, vérité frame.

This is Ms. Cattrall's movie all the way. Photographed more cruelly than a tabloid victim, she gives Monica a grubby dignity that her "Sex and the City" alter ego, Samantha Jones, would wholeheartedly applaud.

An oddly sterile documentary inspired by a particularly fecund imagination, American: The Bill Hicks Story recounts a bright-burning life while leaving us mostly in the dark.

The mantle of social relevance can be a heavy one, but Trust, a smooth drama about a girl's seduction and rape by a middle-aged Internet predator, is neither preachy nor hysterically overreaching.

Circo offers a touching chronicle of a dying culture harnessed to ambitions that remain very much alive.

Fat, Sick may be no great shakes as a movie, but as an ad for Mr. Cross's wellness program its now-healthy heart is in the right place.

Information leaks into the film via the radio and a few flashbacks, but Wrecked is mostly free of dialogue - and, unfortunately, suspense.

Leavening the rather grim atmosphere with luminous earth tones (photographed by Suzie Lavelle) and a smidgen of wry humor, this low-budget beauty draws you in.

Coming in at a tight 75 minutes, this strikingly original travelogue glides on the lovely lilt of Mr. Santos's Portuguese narration.

Screaming "vanity project" from every hackneyed frame, Drawing With Chalk is yet another example of midlife American males doing all they can to avoid acting their age.

Immersed in the alien beauty of the Kazakh steppe, "The Gift to Stalin" moves slowly but engages thoroughly.

An extravagantly corny ode to the collapse of the Cleveland mafia in the 1970s.

Here, excessive piety and rampant paganism are equally malevolent forces, the film's baleful view of human nature mirrored in Sebastian Edschmid's swampy photography. As is emphasized in a nicely consistent coda, the Lord's side and the right side are not necessarily one and the same.

A droll Nietzschean fable that's fully aware of its lapses into absurdity.

A disappointingly shallow story in which only the dead are named, and the living are reduced to stereotypes.

Everybody loves a do-over, but this could become tedious were it not for the undeniable chemistry of the two leads, whose dialogue crackles like cellophane.

Ms. Uberoi's straight-shooting style is a perfect match for her salt-of-the-earth subject, a hard-working husband and father with more on his plate than most.

This drippy dramedy embraces every inappropriate-oldster cliché with depressing calculation.

A highly respectable piece of genre entertainment, one with a little more class than most.

Though cinematographer Flavio Labiano turns the city into an alien maze of steel and glass, his chilling work is undercut by a script with more logical craters than Martin's.

Offensive only in Mr. Wortham's dreadful acting, Now & Later is part of a series at the Quad called "Unrated: A Week of Sex in Cinema" - a title that should ensure plenty of backsides on seats.

Sluggish and derivative, I Am Number Four is another elaborate puberty metaphor with superpowers substituting for testosterone.

This ghastly scenario of poor preying on poor is, like the film's gray-green palette, profoundly depressing and entirely pitiless.

Explores the link between female sexuality and corporate profits with a style that's as entertaining as it is revelatory.

Teeming with smart American humorists - and a passel of Arquettes - all unconditionally admiring. What's astonishing, then, is that not one of them stepped in to dissuade their friend from participating in such an embarrassingly awful project.

At heart an unlovely love story illuminated by sudden flares of violence, the film reeks of hopelessness and moral destitution, offering its lovers few means of escape.

Smartly written and flawlessly acted, Lovers of Hate is a Trojan horse, the kind of movie that begins so self-effacingly that we don't expect any surprises.

Substituting sex for suspense and pop music for ideas, the director Christian E. Christiansen drags The Roommate from limp beginning to lame conclusion.

We've heard it all before, if not in the schoolmarmish tones of Glenn Close, whose patronizing narration ("The earth is a miracle") makes the film feel almost as long as the life of its subject.

Even those viewers who share the film's conviction that preparing a collection for New York Fashion Week is inherently fascinating may lose interest long before the final frock is fitted.

Offsetting its outlandish premise with believable performances, Rage (Rabia) delivers a heavy-handed metaphor for immigrant invisibility.

Though filming his hulking hero off and on for nine long years, he (Levy) has created a work that feels remarkably out of time, a snapshot of a man - and a relationship - running in circles.

Does little but raise an alarm, then leave it jangling.

Patiently directed by Hans Petter Moland, Ulrik's journey back to life slowly draws you in.

This bizarre sort-of satire featuring insane characters doing incomprehensible things might be forgivable if it were even mildly amusing. It's not.

The entire film seems to be happening on the other side of a dirty window - good news for the dreadful computer-generated effects, if not for our eyes.

Beautiful in its minimalism, Nénette is no antizoo rant but a melancholy meditation on captivity.

Soulless, joyless and depressingly graceless, Alien Girl plays like an early Guy Ritchie knockoff without the jokes or Cockney accents.

Best appreciated drunk or otherwise impaired, Satan Hates You is the kind of horror movie that appears to have been shot in someone's basement using a box of old Halloween costumes.

Cool It finally blossoms into an engrossing, brain-tickling picture as many of Al Gore's meticulously graphed assertions are systematically - and persuasively - refuted.

Visually distinctive and aurally delightful, "Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench" has style to burn. A soulful black-and-white commentary on love, art and their competing demands, this Boston-based musical from Damien Chazelle floats on a wave of spontaneity and charm.

Not since "Flashdance" has a lobster dinner been seasoned with so much unspoken emotion.

Teasing and shrewd, Rabbit à la Berlin is a floppy-eared fable about the uneasy trade-offs between liberty and security.

At its best, The Fighter takes on the chasm between televised boxing and its mostly working-class, aspirational origins with grit and intelligence.

For all its many irritations, You Wont Miss Me has undeniable punch, a frayed energy that feels janglingly unstable. Is Shelly crazy or just a pain in the neck? We're not really sure, and neither is she.

The plot of Mars owes at least as much to bodily fluids as it does to science fiction.

There is something cozy and a little claustrophobic about Henry Jaglom's indulgent Hollywood satires.

The focus of this bizarre Finnish fairy tale - as black as anything the Brothers Grimm could have dreamed up - is a sinister old codger who chews off ears and whose demon minion kidnaps innocent children. Ho ho no!

For all its dazzling allure, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, a feverishly psycho thriller set in the hermetic world of classical ballet, proves a meaningless exercise in Grand Guignol exhibitionism.

Willets Point may not be the slickest of movies, but what it lacks in polish it more than makes up for in heart.

A sugary, aggressively anthropomorphized story of one avian interloper and a whole bunch of human obsessives.

Sensitive without being unrealistically utopian (this isn't a fairy tale), Me, Too movingly represents the frustration of the high-functioning yet falling-short individual.

The filmmaking is rough and rather clumsy, but by ceding the floor to his open, highly articulate sisters, Mr. Colvard has created a fascinatingly raw study of ferociously wielded male power.

Helena From the Wedding has a little more to offer than many films of its type.

Like the best westerns, Red Hill is a stripped-down morality tale; like the best horror movies, its true monsters remain cloaked until the final reel.

Jolene's skin may smell like warm milk to Brad, but to the rest of us it has curdled long before she leaves his bed.

Monsters effortlessly compels. The ending may be pure sci-fi schmaltz, but it's schmaltz that this viewer, at least, could believe in.

A creaky, sometimes forced drama that burrows under your skin if you let it, Welcome to the Rileys lurches along like Lois' car as she tries to exit her garage for the first time in years.

An overwrought, undercooked tale of crazy love and crazier revenge.

Frozen camera setups and blurry night-vision images raise goose bumps without the assistance of eerie music or showy effects, though the strain of stretching the gimmick to a second movie is palpable.

You may see scarier movies this year, but none so redolent of decomposition.

Too leaden for adults and too baffling for kids.

The film version is now being granted a limited release. Exactly how limited will depend on your tolerance for tasteless behavior, extravagant overacting and a decibel level to rival the unveiling of Oprah’s Favorite Things.

More a designer frame for actors than nourishing entertainment. Like the Chinese food the leads are always arguing over, the story leaves you hungry for more.

By ignoring Israeli voices and focusing only on the immigrants, Mr. Haar has produced a documentary filled with immediacy but free of analysis, a fascinating but ultimately unenlightening record of their plight.

A novel teenage comedy with an astute understanding of adolescent sexual confusion and the nebulous nature of desire, Zerophilia suggests an elastic view of gender that's alternately gleeful and terrifying.

Knowing but never jaded, Hollywood Dreams is driven by Ms. Frederick's no-boundaries commitment to her broken character, a performance that's as startling as it is touching. In Mr. Jaglom's maverick hands, the appeal of illusion over reality is both fatal and irresistible.

The movie's amoral momentum is fatally slowed by an acronym-heavy script and flimsy characterizations that offer fine actors -- including Rip Torn as Tom's contemptuous father and Naomie Harris as his missed opportunity -- little to play.

One of those rare ensemble dramas whose actors work toward common goals rather than individual awards, the movie resolves its creeping escalation of poor judgment and reprehensible behavior with surprising emotional force.

The movie speeds up and slows down as though controlled by a director in the grip of competing medications. For those who make it to the final beatdown, however, the only pill worth taking is the one that makes you forget.

This is no splatter movie: spare, suspenseful and brilliantly invested in silence, Bryan Bertino's debut feature unfolds in a slow crescendo of intimidation.

Any comedy that can combine death, abortion, Jewish ritual and a mariachi band without curdling into complete lunacy deserves a modicum of respect. In the case of My Mexican Shivah, more would be pushing it.

Cool-headed, lighthearted and outrageously entertaining.

A jubilant documentary about a place where power chords and empowerment go hand in hand.

The film, fluidly shot by James Adolphus, remains deeply sensitive to the complexities of a culture whose attachment to monarchy contravenes its best interests. This dilemma is gradually becoming clear to Princess Sikhanyiso, the oldest of the king's 22 children and a student in California. Intelligent, articulate, caring and strong-willed, she could be her country's best hope.

More an infomercial than a movie, Rollin Binzer’s awed documentary is, at best, a well-earned tribute to one man’s unwavering vision and unrelenting hard work.

As depressing as the résumés of its 9-to-5 characters, The Strip sweats to wring laughs from overworked themes and underwhelming performances.

A serviceable burst of high-end hokum, Devil classes up a flimsy, religion-themed plot (by M. Night Shyamalan) with the kind of limber cinematography only someone like Tak Fujimoto can deliver.

Alison Chernick's film skims the surface of a strange and celebrated career. After a meager 72 minutes, the man who once stretched an obsession with testicles into a five-film cycle remains as unknowable as ever.

Despite leaden direction and a story crammed with pseudoscientific flotsam -- including palm reading, levitation, time travel and telepathy -- The Last Mimzy is a wholesome, eager entertainment that doesn't talk down.

A Michael Keaton outing is always cause for celebration, no matter how ramshackle the vehicle ("First Daughter," anyone?) or paper-thin the role.

More tired than the fantasy it promotes, A Previous Engagement aims at middle-aged women with the subtlety of a pitch for bladder-control medication.

Nine years in the making and timeless in its observations, Highway Courtesans is an intimate look at some of the youngest practitioners of the world’s oldest profession.

Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin isn't exactly known for slapstick, so Soul Kitchen has the feel of a palate cleanser. After the hard-edged drama of "Head-On" and "The Edge of Heaven," this boisterous comedy milling with scruffy misfits goes down more easily than an oyster on the half shell.

Though playing at times like an extended sitcom, Ira & Abby radiates a breathless charm, due in no small part to Ms. Westfeldt’s sharp dialogue and engagingly unmannered performance.

Uninvolving and cliché-ridden (even shape-shifters, it seems, deserve a falling-in-love montage), Blood & Chocolate is "Romeo and Juliet" with fewer manners and more exotic dentition.

This strikingly humane film may function as a prequel to Animal Planet’s “Whale Wars” but is light years ahead in visual clarity and narrative ambition.

After a particularly brutal, attention-grabbing start, Breaking Point quickly devolves into a flavorless stew of murder, corruption, blackmail and baby tossing.

Strewn with some surprisingly decent effects, this unevenly paced film delivers, if nothing else, on the promise of its title: lots of surgically enhanced nude dead women strutting their stuff.

A tale of two siblings -- one basking in memories, the other fleeing them -- Prodigal Sons grapples with identity through the prism of sibling rivalry. In the end its conclusions have little to do with gender and everything to do with acceptance.

Almost holding things together is the marvelous Ms. Elsner: there’s more depth in her weary gaze and disappointed mouth than in any line of dialogue. Not since Bette Davis lit and flicked has smoking been so evocative, or so heartbreaking.

Good Dick surmounts its indie-movie quirkiness with exceptional acting and a sincere belief in the salvation of its wounded characters.

Packs more sadness than the familiar fairy tale but offers its own fantastical delights. Ye Xian's party dress, made of teardrops, suits her -- and her story -- perfectly.

Harnessing mostly fine actors to a wholly asinine script, the directors, Melisa Wallack and Bernie Goldmann, have created a movie as spineless and dithering as its benighted namesake.

What’s really missing here is a story of artistic regeneration: by the time we encounter a dazzling excerpt from the studio’s post-trip film, “Aquarela do Brasil,” we are only reminded of what might have been.

Charts a sentimental struggle toward manhood with period-appropriate charm.

Starter for Ten offsets its rite-of-passage clichés with relaxed performances and an extremely likable lead.

A lively romp through terrain less traveled than you might think.

Unfolding in a decrepit, present-day Moscow, Day Watch dazzles and confuses with equal determination.

Though occasionally inflammatory -- one interviewee talks about being "slingshotted into slavery" -- American Blackout isn’t a conspiracy rant. It's a methodical compilation of questions and irregularities that deserves a wider audience.

Ignoring critical issues like financial transparency, Ms. Sackler sells her viewpoint with four admirable, striving families, each of whose tots could charm the fleas off a junkyard dog.

Driven less by civic duty than by the need to escape his dreary life, Zebraman is a tragic, touching figure too often obscured by Kankurou Kudo’s hyperactive screenplay and a special-effects team drunk on alien slime.

A dreary, interminable drama written and directed by Eva Aridjis, is exactly one-third of a good movie. That third is Frank Wood's beautifully modulated and modest central performance.

Memories of Tomorrow finally understands that the real victim of this terrible affliction is the partner left behind.

Yawningly directed by Jim Isaac, Skinwalkers is a slavering mess that buries its clunky addiction metaphor beneath a welter of genre clichés, all delivered in extra-slow motion.

Tame and inoffensive, The Haunting of Molly Hartley is no more than a big-screen lasso for the "Gossip Girl" and "Supernatural" demographic.

Unfolding like a medieval horror movie, Delta is sometimes laughable but often admirable.

Never forgetting the rush of the game, the directors regularly serve up fleet footage of the team’s highs and lows, allowing the rhythms of the field to set the film’s volatile beat.

Underdog may have been originally created to sell cereal for General Mills, but this latest incarnation couldn't sell Frisbees at a dog park.

Border Post is notable for representing all of Yugoslavia's former member republics among its producers and for a tone that juggles humor and harshness without sacrificing either.

Smothering insightful moments in verbal and musical treacle (courtesy of Harriet Schock’s sticky songs), Mr. Jaglom displays an endearing lack of cynicism but an equal lack of discipline.

Thought-provoking rather than deeply philosophical, Ever Since the World Ended features many engaging performances and several outstanding ones.

The escalating hysteria and grisly set pieces of Bug may strain credulity, but Ms. Judd has never been more believable as a woman condemned to attract the wrong kind of man.

Barbaric, elegant, primitive, erotic, revolting, thrilling: the movie, like bullfighting itself, is all of these.

Paying to see Countdown to Zero is like tipping a fortuneteller to predict the manner of your death.

Since his debut in 1987 with "Red Sorghum" Mr. Zhang has made more controlled films but never one that's more fun. With Curse of the Golden Flower he aims for Shakespeare and winds up with Jacqueline Susann. And a good thing too.

There’s a riveting story lurking inside Holly, a documentary-fiction hybrid about sex trafficking in Cambodia. It’s just not the one the filmmakers want to tell.

Exquisitely captured in natural light by the cinematographer Alexis Zabé, Juan’s journey is framed by sherbet-colored houses and lemon sidewalks, dipping palm fronds and a burnished, turquoise horizon. The director calls his style "artisan cinema"; I just call it dreamy.

Though clearly aimed at teenagers, this unashamedly heartstruck movie is neither obsessed with sex nor driven to humiliate its characters. Compared to those of the average American teen movie, its ambitions are so innocent they’re almost childlike.

Consistently smart and delicate as a spider web, Bridge to Terabithia is the kind of children’s movie rarely seen nowadays. And at a time when many public schools are being forced to cut music and art from the curriculum, the story’s insistence on the healing power of a nurtured imagination is both welcome and essential.

For a tale spiked with so much torment, Fugitive Pieces feels remarkably soothing.

A sedate chronicle of the highs and lows of the environmental movement, Earth Days is less a rousing call to action than a bittersweet stroll down memory lane.

Rehashing characters and plots from the "Law & Order" playbook, the director, Rafal Zielinski, supplements his material with religious iconography and more gauzy close-ups than a Barbra Streisand marathon.

This crude, rowdy movie is also unexpectedly touching in its embrace of surfing as an escape from the stigma of poverty and broken homes. Escape from Russell Crowe’s droning narration, however, is impossible.

A muddled morality tale more interested in coming of age than getting of wisdom.

Somewhere between documentary and dramatization, fact and impression, Strange Culture molds one man’s tragedy into an engrossing narrative experiment that defies categorization.

Gives you the creeps, the giggles and the groans in almost equal measure.

The humor is delicate, and the performances sweet and sure; the script (by the director, Max Mayer) is not entirely predictable, and the Manhattan locations (lovingly photographed by Seamus Tierney) have a starry-eyed glaze.

Sweetness and whimsy fill the screen to capacity in I'm Reed Fish, a rural coming-of-age tale that's so laid-back that its cast is almost horizontal.

Whether on a Middle Eastern battlefield or the streets of New York, characters converse in stilted, expository mouthfuls that smother emotion.

A perceptive and beautifully acted drama.

The most depressing thing about this series is not the creativity of the bloodletting but the bleak view of human nature.

The film’s guileless, heartfelt style veers perilously close to corniness at times, but the superb cast dares you to mock.

La Soga moves with a crazed energy that denies moral nuance. But the banal narrative (based on events in Mr. Perez's life) is elbowed aside by Josh Crook's eccentric direction and images that the cinematographer, Zeus Morand, brands with near-poetic intensity.

Unsubtle, condensed and bullet-point simple, “War Made Easy” avoids fancy visuals for a uniformly drab and dispiriting aesthetic. Sporadically narrated by Sean Penn (evincing all the personality of a potato), the movie is cinematically inert if ultimately persuasive.

Plays less like a documentary than an E! exposé of lowlife skulduggery.

Replacing the earlier movie's more depraved sequences with sustained tension and truly unnerving editing, the director proves adept at managing mayhem in cramped spaces.

A disturbing look at reprogramming that masquerades as rehabilitation. Having been forced to drink the Kool-Aid, Mr. Gaglia has produced a work that's as much an act of emesis as of filmmaking.

Roger Spottiswoode directs with old-fashioned style, avoiding the saccharine with realistic depictions of a war-ravaged China (where he filmed) and a cast well versed in stiff-upper-lip.

Prostitutes are not the only things butchered in The Lodger, a spooky story ruined by lumpen dialogue, cloddish performances and a director and writer (David Ondaatje) oblivious to both.

This laughably clichéd dive into sexual masochism and hardscrabble survival replaces story with outline and characters with place holders.

An intimate, elusive drama about the boundaries of friendship and nationality, Fräulein presents immigrant lives with significantly more empathy than detail. For some, though, the movie’s narrative shorthand will be enough.

A faux documentary grounded in ethnicity and mired in absurdity, Finishing the Game is a terrific idea still waiting to be fashioned into a real movie.

A raunchy romantic comedy that, like its heroine, rarely has both feet on the ground.

Presenting neither an argument for medication nor its rejection, Billy the Kid is a deceptively simple portrait of a shockingly self-aware and articulate young man.

More than anything, a Tyler Perry movie is an interactive experience, and Why Did I Get Married? is no exception. At the screening I attended, it was often difficult to hear the dialogue between bouts of enthusiastic applause and shouts of “You go, girl!”

Crammed with colorful interviews, digital animation and live performances, this frisky and forthright film by Dean Budnick chronicles a vision of financing social progress with really great tunes.

Expelled is an unprincipled propaganda piece that insults believers and nonbelievers alike.

Mixes method and madness to chart the evolution of a counterculture phenomenon.

The movie has been thoroughly eclipsed by "Captivity" the marketing.

Intermittently beautiful but frustratingly leaden, Shutterbug labors ineffectually to promote authenticity over artifice. A heavily stylized paean to undoctored images, the movie never quite clicks as a succession of moving ones.

As its brilliantly choreographed -- and appropriately modest -- climax proves, given the right ingredients, even the simplest story can leave you gasping.

This dissociation leaves the supporting cast to its own devices, with no one suffering more than the appealing Eva Mendes as Johnny's true love, Roxanne. If Ms. Mendes ever finds a director willing to allow her to perform with her shirts fully buttoned, there will be no stopping her.

Despite its immersion in tragedy and decline, So Much So Fast is leavened by unexpected humor.

Like many relationships, Breaking Upwards starts in bed and ends on the street. The journey in between, however, feels as new as anything a tiny budget and a boatload of talent could produce.

The cannibals, coconuts and landlocked locations have been replaced by the high-seas high jinks that made the first film so enjoyable.

Sweet but ho-hum adaptation of Wendy Orr’s novel, a comedy-adventure that never quite finds its tone.

Much like its subject: affable, quotable and emotionally guarded in the extreme.

The film is not a primer on this heartbreaking condition. Instead it recounts a deeply personal, highly subjective and inarguably thought-provoking story of one family’s quest for a certain kind of peace.

Offers one man's extraordinary life as a gateway to a larger history of tragedy and transition. It's an unflinching account of what farming takes -- and, more important, what it gives back.

Its straggling, true-crime narrative, leaping hither and yon like a dog chasing butterflies, is not what holds the film together; the real glue is the emergence of a parallel between location and suspect, between literal dumping ground and figurative. This is so effective that there was no need for the directors to conduct a handheld, "Blair Witch"-y foray into the nighttime woods -- their film is creepy enough in broad daylight.

Rare enough to make NoBody’s Perfect an exemplar of fresh-air filmmaking that addresses the devastating legacy of the drug thalidomide with acidic wit and grumpy honesty.

This is nature defanged and declawed for kiddie consumption, so the emphasis is on awwww-filled moments.

A movie that reveals its toxic intentions only gradually. Until it does, there is much to enjoy in the prickly odd-couple relationship of Henry (Billy Crudup) and Rudy (Tom Wilkinson), successful writing partners and longtime friends.

Offers agony in a vacuum, a villain without a motive and a hero with more personal problems than lines of dialogue.

The narrative may flag, but the doomsday atmosphere and George Liddle’s production design remain vivid until the final, blood-splattered reel.

Everyone's Hero enters multiplexes already shadowed by tragedy. And while that may not be the best start for a kiddie feature, the movie's sentimental provenance could earn it a critical pass it doesn't deserve.

Ms. Bledel works her “Gilmore Girls” charm to the hilt, but no amount of cerulean-eyed sparkle can transcend this level of thudding mediocrity.

Puzzles more than it pleases.

Employee of the Month is more tired than a Wal-Mart greeter at the end of a Saturday shift. One can only hope its halfhearted suggestion that winning isn't everything is some comfort if the movie's grosses are as disappointing as its jokes.

The trick to enjoying The Town, Ben Affleck's follow-up to his impressive 2007 directing debut, "Gone, Baby, Gone," is to expect nothing but pulpy entertainment.

The animation is uninspired (with so much ice, the creatures need to be twice as good-looking), and the story is humdrum. (The saber-toothed tiger learns to swim!)

The result is a lovers-on-the-lam blast of pure pulp escapism, so devoted to diversion that you probably won’t even notice the corn.

If some of the characters won't be returning for the sequel, no matter. In all likelihood, neither will the audience.

The movie’s stunning underwater photography (fearlessly captured by Mr. Ravetch) effectively dilutes the saccharine tone.

A picture so modest and minor-key that the emotional bruise it leaves may take days to develop.

Imaginatively filmed by Peter Sova, Push has a dizzying, chaotic energy that pulls you along. Paul McGuigan directs with maximum efficiency and minimum use of computers, creating effects that feel satisfyingly tangible.

It's just as awesome as the tv show only bigger and prettier.

Puberty causes an exponential increase in evil -- and in incoherence -- in The Grudge 2.

Tailor-made for those who like their violence multifaceted and their women monosyllabic.

By anyone's reckoning, Predators is a middling 1980s B movie; too bad this is 2010.

Shot in luminous whites, pulsing blacks and gorgeous grays, the stories explore sexual insecurity, rural superstition and sociopolitical anxieties with an inventiveness that's seldom scary but never less than mesmerizing.

Part tribute, part musical mystery, ’Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris shines an overdue spotlight on a great who got away.

A familiar underdog story told with unusual sensitivity.

Mr. Fox may be a romantic, but he understands that love is rarely all you need.

Features annoying characters navigating unbelievable situations.

Overkill is what Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer do best: as the uncontested titans of the parody genre (with fingers in everything from the “Scary Movie” franchise to the more recent “Epic Movie”) they continue to prove that ridiculing other movies is much easier than making your own.

Like the director's cover story, the movie is a Trojan horse: an exceptionally well-made documentary that unfolds like a spy thriller, complete with bugged hotel rooms, clandestine derring-do and mysterious men in gray flannel suits.

An eagerly prurient dip into the sex-trafficking trough, Trade teeters between earnest exposé and salacious melodrama. Minus the film’s near-visible weight of conscience, success in the second category would have been virtually guaranteed.

Easy on the eyes but brutal on the ears.

This saga, set in Berlin, is more committed to its bloodletting than to any of its characters.

Silly, slack and unforgivably tedious, Thomas Harris's screenplay is padded with interminable flashbacks and a bombastic score that telegraphs every emotion Hannibal represses. And there are a lot of them.

The turtles themselves may look prettier, but are no smarter; torn irreparably from their countercultural roots, our superheroes on the half shell have been firmly co-opted by the industry their creators once sought to spoof.

Not even the august presence of Maximilian Schell can dispel the odor of fusty smut that clings to House of the Sleeping Beauties, a clammy meditation on sex, death and the endless fascination of unclothed innocence.

Art house meets grind house in Cargo 200, Alexey Balabanov’s morbidly compelling thriller set in the Soviet Union.

Probes class consciousness with rather more sensitivity than originality.

Propelled by an eccentric cast of characters and increasingly seamy locations, Fix dashes headlong through Los Angeles with a little charm and a lot of verve.