Jessica Winter

One of Gitaï's greatest assets in Kadosh is such stillness, which leaves facile outsiders' judgment out of the frame and thereby deepens our immersion in the narrative.

Utterly necessary film.

Carion is no Jean Renoir, but he does strike an appealingly low key of tender, faintly goofy affinity between the combatants.

Cédric Klapisch has been compared to Truffaut, but the new-waver's weakness for glib sentimentalism seems to have left the biggest impression on L'Auberge Espagnole.

Occasionally smirky.

Cahiers-savvy cinephiles will recognize Fanfan as the type of handsome prestige production that the French New Wave overthrew in the early '60s, but this example of the "cinéma de qualité" is hardly a musty artifact, with its compact editing, its breezy and mischievous tone, and, in a country not yet a decade removed from the Nazi occupation, its acrid anti-militarism, clear from the ash-dry narration of the opening battle sequences onward.

The whole of Sunshine State is less than the sum of its parts, but the parts are often lovely, and always true.

Amiable and hollow.

Having established Josey as the focus of the entire iron range's enmity, the filmmakers panic, and North Country spectacularly self-destructs in a climactic courtroom free-for-all.

Burnt Money arranges a triumphant martyrdom for its bad boys -- a redemptive blaze of glory, dozens of faceless corpses notwithstanding.

The Edukators smiles indulgently as the kids rage belatedly against the dying of the SDS light.

The elliptical, even fragmented editing style clashes with the reiterative voice-over, which could indicate a stylistic choice or cutting under duress.

Sargent's whole enterprise doubles as a '70s archaeological dig.

With wit and empathy to spare, waydowntown acknowledges the silent screams of workaday inertia but stops short of indulging its characters' striving solipsism.

The idea isn't as odd as it might first appear, since running a salon is one of the few socially acceptable means for a woman in Afghanistan to earn an income. The execution, however, evokes a particularly outlandish Christopher Guest mockumentary.

An international cast of curious creatures in their native habitats stars in this charming Gallic duo (Animals and Ice/Sea) of featurettes.

The Business of Strangers goes too far in dramatizing Julie's primal, Paula-fied surge of female fury, and the script finally mistakes respectful ambiguity for vaporous drift.

Doesn't quite know how to take its leave; it tapers off like a curling cigarette trail, but it lingers like a ghost.

Depp and Highmore's final scene together strikes a muted blow of desolation -- bottomless but just bearable -- that Forster rather bravely lets stand as the last word on all the fanciful solace that Barrieland had to offer.

Not to imply that our Claude's gone native, but here his unabiding fascination with bourgie-style repetition compulsion bears some resemblance to sympathy.

Once Drake reaches the candlelight vigil that acts as his penultimate set piece, he sustains an impossible balance between mordant wit and articulate bewilderment.

An aura of dust and mothballs evidently leaves a capable cast feeling woozy.

The director has a fitfully deployed gift for droll humor, but Chutney Popcorn mostly provides evidence that the ins and outs of the improvised multiparent family can be as prosaic as the nuclear Eisenhower model.

Director Waters and screenwriter Tina Fey (also cast as the voice-of-reason math teacher) aim less for the usual high-gloss caricature than acutely hilarious sociology, nailing the servile malice of 15-year-old girls.

Me You Them can't find a rhythm or a consistent tone.

An endless chain reaction of cartilage-crunching, organ-pulping brawls.

Scott Elliott's palsied directorial debut, from a mine shaft-ridden script, is a sick joke, and Weaver's part in it screams of temporary insanity.

Only silent Becks himself rises unstained from this reheated ethno-niche stew.