Laura Sinagra

What makes Winter Solstice, a nice little Jersey vignette about a widower and his two teenage sons, so striking is writer-director Josh Sternfeld's respect for the verbal shorthand of family interaction.

With just the right balance of epic grandeur and break-into-song goofiness, this Bollywood love legend does double duty as a women's-rights manifesto and a plea for amity between India and Pakistan.

On a dark set, between strums and archival clips, this master raconteur exudes his own brand of obnoxious charm, the kind that can only be possessed, never imitated.

Aims for a mix of "Heathers" wit and "Batman" TV-show camp.

Fellowes's larger goal seems to be making sympathetic characters of Anne and Bule, who for all their lovey-doveyness never emerge as much more than rich twits à la "The Great Gatsby."

Unfortunately, during the inevitable "what every woman wants" breakdown, Zellweger can't muster Doris Day's detached fume.

In the central romantic push-pull, Elster and Harold achieve a rare, edgily hopeful chemistry amid emotional ruins.

These flashes push Dig! beyond recording-industry kvetch, causing it to stay with you longer than either band's ephemeral music.

In this study of keeping up appearances while everything falls apart, the stakes never seem as high as the title suggests.

Theron's empathetic victim-wrath and elemental female outrage almost trump the otherwise cartoonish gender-bending and award-grubbing po' folk put-on.

Blue Car gets so much of the hard stuff (including Meg's Plath-via-Tori poetry) that it assumes the easy stuff will take care of itself. It doesn't.

Potter's anachronistic rhyme schemes tumble forth with an out-damned-spot verve that rages against irrelevance.

The real charm of this trifle is the deadpan comic face of its star, Jean Reno, who resembles Sly Stallone in a hot sake half-sleep.

Most importantly, the environment feels real: the accents, the snaps, the working moms and warehouse crack nooks, every dilapidated stairwell, every bodega and lovingly appointed teenage bedroom sanctuary.

When ditching the mawk to follow his daredevil muse, the director delivers stunning shots of cliff dancing and stunt pilotry.

The filmmaker achieves the desired sense of remoteness and claustrophobic doom, and though the story could be told more economically, her slow approach conveys the distended chronology that attends an indentured servitude resembling slavery.

Northfork's overall ponderousness prevents it from becoming a transcendent fictive poem on the violent domestication of the West.

Holder and Parker tread lightly on issues of sexism, and sex in general, and leave us wishing more questions were asked.

It's Filippo Pucillo who gives the youngest son such mellifluous southern sass that you wish the camera would abandon the whole woman-as-sadness retread and scooter off in his direction.

Doubles as a narrative of the nascent women's movement.

Miller's women share the affliction of scars left by dominating fathers. But the stories lean toward self-importance, and used verbatim in heavy voice-over, they register as a parody of spareness. Posey is the only one who has fun puncturing the solemnity, turning the real surreal in a softer version of her usual attack.

This "Last Waltz"–like doc is almost funereal, full of reverent banalities spliced between overly folksy takes on melancholic Leonard Cohen bombshells.

With a premise this screwy, nobody has any choice but to follow the savvy lead of Bebe Neuwirth, who, as Hudson's "Composure" editor, hams her queen-bitch-mother-hen role to glazed perfection.

Clive Owen proves he can just about save anything.

The opposition of Christian spirituality and the bad religion of drugs is enough to send you down to the feel-good bodega just on principle.

Never really finds a fresh groove.

Our counselors' lawyer-ese is illegally bland, and their committee-penned banter meticulously Botoxed.

An odd blend of passionate performance footage and maddeningly shallow analysis of Cuba's music and politics.