Lisa Nesselson

An enjoyable and entertainingly cast fable about love, death and fitting revenge, "Plots With a View" (AKA Undertaking Betty) strikes a near-miraculous balance between the silly and the morbid.

Fantasy sequences, including animation, keep the melancholy tone from overwhelming the proceedings.

Snappy, affecting documentary.

A small, affecting road movie peopled with sharp vignettes.

An uncompromising portrait of thwarted emotions and small-town tedium, The Life of Jesus is a luminous and disconcerting feature debut from scripter-helmer Bruno Dumont. Pic’s deliberate pace, as it details the actions of adolescents with stifled inner lives, poses a commercial obstacle in markets unfriendly to leisurely fare, but film holds definite rewards for patient viewers and fest auds.

Sure to inspire debate in France and Germany and of obvious interest to anyone who follows the roots of modern international terrorism, doc probes gray areas in the colorful life of its controversial, limelight-courting subject.

The motivations and the performances are solid in Jane Got A Gun, an attractively mounted post-Civil War revenge drama with plenty of shooting and a well-placed twist or two.

Although occasionally both overwritten and overly symbolic, tale carries a satisfying emotional charge.

Brisseau trains his deft camera on the crescendo of female sexual pleasure and how women can heighten the intensity of already blissful sensations via transgressive flourishes. If exiting viewers could all be asked "Was it good for you?" the likely answer is "Yes."

Any buyer who's had success with Troma fare in the past will find the makings to delight the self-selecting audience that generates grosses from gross-out humor.

A solidly entertaining, cross-generational two-hander, The Butterfly strikes the right balance between humor and observational bite.

A refreshingly unpretentious cocktail of karmic serendipity and a tongue-in-cheek look at Hollywood values vs. ecumenical verities.

Both pertinent and discomfiting, this sober, well-cast drama remains quietly riveting, despite its 140-minute running time.

A spy spoof that -- rarity of rarities -- represents a remake actually worth making. Current comic fave Jean Dujardin plays title character OSS 117 as a kind of James Bond crossed with Maxwell Smart.

Companion piece to Teboul's "Yves Saint Laurent -- Time Regained" nicely complements that excellent film but is less riveting as a free-standing experience.

Romania-set scare-fest deploys the full cinematic vocabulary of creepy sounds and hostile intruders.

A well-oiled script is nicely served by a multigenerational cast, a bittersweet and consistently entertaining mainstream comedy that tackles the big themes of Life and Art with unpretentious brio.

Quietly rewarding thanks to an excellent cast whose faces we observe in frequent close-ups as their dirt-poor characters do their very best with scant resources.

Docu's pace will be a little too meditative for many, but the rigorous, sinewy lensing will have Hypnotic power on those so inclined.

The pleasures are modest but consistent in John Carpenter's Vampires, a part-Western, part-horror flick that doesn't aim too high but nails the range it occupies.

Moral ambiguity is the real star of Ben Affleck's helming debut, Gone Baby Gone, an involving Boston-set tale of mixed motives, selflessness and perfidy in the wake of a 4-year-old girl's disappearance.

Compact, ultra-explicit two-character pic about what transpires when a beautiful straight woman hires a handsome gay man to "look" at her is gloriously mannered, proudly pretentious and undeniably compelling.

While not a classic, this is a pleasantly disturbing, nominally voyeuristic romp in the territory Chabrol knows best.

All-American adaptation by Paul Haggis of Gabriele Muccino's 2001 Italian hit "L'Ultimo bacio" is chummy, consensual and always watchable in Tony Goldwyn's polished rendition of emotional messiness.

Co-scripter/helmer Pierre Salvadori serves up an enjoyable riff on genuine romance versus the pay-as-you-go variety, in crowd-pleasing, exportable picture.

Issues of class, wealth and power are woven into the tale but this is a bittersweet love story at heart.

Enjoyable, if sometimes scattered, comic exploration of the quest for integrity and depth in a world wowed by artifice and superficiality.

Layers of intrigue mesh with Hollywood-style efficiency, pitting sincere feelings against ruthlessly mercenary machinations. Also in Hollywood style, sincerity and integrity carry the day.