Mark Jenkins

To judge from his film’s style, it also seems likely that Dewey just doesn’t have the patience for a subtle approach.

Enzo Ferrari was a real person, not just a narrative device. No matter how ardently he sang of speed and danger, there must have been more to his character than Ferrari manages to find.

The thing that really doesn’t translate is the movie’s melodramatic sensibility. What New York New York presents as profound tragedy may strike non-Chinese viewers as simple bad timing.

The rest of the film has a cozy TV-commercial vibe, pumped by tunes from Katy Perry and the inevitable Neil Diamond. It’s no champion, but it’s still a reasonably good cry.

It’s just a question of what route Angie and Marco will take to happiness. Yet their unsurprising journey is lively and entertaining, thanks in equal measure to the movie’s star and its director.

In place of catharsis, the climax provides gross-out slapstick, but writer-director S. Craig Zahler takes his handiwork so seriously that viewers may do the same.

The Best of Enemies is perhaps the first account of the United States’s traumatic racial history that could be adapted into a sitcom.

The movie’s climactic sequence is less expected, and a bit messier than the other episodes. It’s powerful because it effectively evokes the chaos and cost of war. Most of the rest of Devotion just apes clunky old war movies.

On some level, Chevalier understands that the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was the bad old days. Yet it just can’t help but make them look really good.

What works best here comes between the movie’s heavy opening and its lightweight conclusion.

The inspirational docudrama nicely evokes the havoc of the initial cave-in, but spends too much time above ground to convey the existential horror of the almost-buried men.

Donald Cried succeeds on its own modest terms, but watching its title character can be painful. This is not a movie for people who’d just as soon forget their own teenage mortifications.

Like most mysteries, this one relies heavily on coincidental discoveries, even if they arrive via Gmail or FaceTime, rather than more traditional means. But the plot’s contrivances are less problematic than the movie’s insistence on maintaining its artifice even after it becomes a hindrance.

Boy Erased is a showcase for Hedges, who played a closeted boy in “Lady Bird” and who plays a teen with a different sort of burden in the upcoming drama “Ben Is Back.” In each of those roles, the boy-next-door actor finds just the right combination of ordinary and anomalous.

An action thriller in which the Irish actor plays Nels Coxman, a snowplow operator at a Colorado ski resort with the death-dealing skills of a special-ops commando. This time, the absurdity is intentional.

Overlong and overstuffed with Southern rock and blues numbers, Burden is not exemplary filmmaking. But for viewers who can endure another spin through white-supremacist malice and ignorance, Hedlund and Riseborough make it a compelling ride.

The result is a solid if conventional bio.

The lack of tension between Morris and his subject diminishes the film’s energy.

Ip Man 3 credibly conjures the period with soundstage sets, rock-and-roll oldies and slicked-back hair. But director Winston Yip shows less concern for authenticity in Ip’s antagonists.

Blade goes for the carotid while offering a classic look and a comic-book story. It’s part Kurosawa, part “X-Men,” part “Ichi the Killer.”

The plot fails to deliver a single surprise, however, and the characterizations are thin even by the standards of the tough-guy genre.

Here and There has been compared to such Jim Jarmusch films as "Stranger Than Paradise," and "Lungulov" does emulate Jarmusch's deliberate pace, minimal dialogue, deadpan humor and strong sense of place. In fact, Belgrade is the movie's most compelling character, its tattered charm underscored by back-street New York locations that oddly evoke Eastern Europe.

The movie is crisp and contemporary enough to inaugurate another franchise for Statham.

The broad comedy clashes with the movie's final message: that 6,000 girls face genital mutilation every day.

As an investigation into American municipal corruption, Broken City is, well, damaged. But as an opportunity for hard-boiled types to trade threats, blows and caustic banter, this modern-day noir works reasonably well.

Historical records being what they are, the filmmakers are forced to speculate about certain things, but where facts are known they generally adhere to them.

Triumph seems the wrong note for a feature film about mass murder. Yet Gallenberger insists on an old-school historical melodrama, with the darkest of terrors leavened by humor, tenderness and even romance. It's only the terror that rings true.

Thanks to his major role in songwriting, Krieger is credited repeatedly, but the other two players recede as the band increasingly becomes The Jim Morrison Show.

The protagonists of Late Bloomers have a problem, but it's not that they're getting older. Their dilemma is that they're reacting so differently to aging.

Teresa's doggedness parallels the movie's own. Paradise: Love would be more compelling if it had a second act in which either its protagonist or one of her boy toys came to some sort of realization. Instead, Seidl's strategy is to reiterate and escalate, which is finally more exhausting than illuminating.

The deliberate pace may suggest that the film is being thoughtful, but Let Me In is really just an exploitation movie with the confidence to take it slow.

Freakonomics' commercial success reflected the once-fashionable notion that economics could explain, well, everything.

Rickman is too theatrical, and too British, to vanish entirely into the person of Hilly Kristal. But he's entertaining to watch, and ultimately one of the more persuasive actors in a movie that suffers from as many odd casting decisions as Lee Daniels' The Butler.

After nearly 90 minutes of human folly, though, Surviving Progress can't very well conclude with a tribute to mankind. So, to end on a hopeful note, the movie turns to a chimp.

For a hymn to panic and hostility, the movie is curiously artful. But only the most sympathetic viewers will find that its poetry outweighs its belligerence.

Oddly, Countdown to Zero ends by suggesting that viewers get those nukes abolished by texting their disapproval to a phone number listed in the credits -- as if the governments of China or North Korea (or the United States, for that matter) are just waiting for a gentle rebuke from civic-minded documentary viewers.

A preachy parable of suburban discontent, Shorts probably has enough kid-oriented slapstick to please the under-12 set. But it's not likely to rival writer-director Robert Rodriguez's "Spy Kids" series in long-term appeal.

An entertaining concert film, but not an incisive character study.

Puzzle has some gentle fun with the clash of staid and hip.

Ultimately, this intriguing but scattershot movie turns on the incompatibility of two worldviews - the corporate-financial vs. the environmental-spiritual.

It was frantic sex that earned Shame an NC-17 rating, but this arty drama is mostly slow and methodical. And thoroughly unsexy.

This China/Hong Kong co-production flips the formula: The fantastic images are solid, but the action is less substantial.

German history and culture are among Sokurov's concerns in this visually compelling, intellectually scattershot movie.

The effect is weirdly lulling. Viewers with a special connection to this story, or a weakness for little boys and single dads, may find The Boys Are Back moving. For everyone else, the movie is merely picturesque.

By concentrating so intently on the psychically unattached Joby, Kim hinders dramatic and character development. Her "Treeless Mountain," the Korea-set saga of two young sisters, was also quiet and open-ended. But the interplay between the two girls provided warmth and depth. For Ellen feels both colder and slighter.

As "Blood Simple" fans should expect, Noodle Shop is a comedy of presumed deaths and unexpected revivals, with some victims flat out refusing to stay in their shallow graves.

An incestuous payoff might be expected, given the casting of Green; she first attracted widespread attention in Bertolucci's "The Dreamers," as a young woman who is unusually close to her brother. But whatever happens, Womb is more melancholy than erotic.

The movie has more sensibility than sense, but it seems cunning next to such silly tough-girl fare as "Kick-Ass" and "Sucker Punch."

Winterbottom's 2004 film "9 Songs" is the most sexually explicit picture ever to get general release in Britain. Oddly, given its subject matter, The Look of Love turns out to be much tamer; as Raymond's shows and magazines become raunchier, the director sidesteps or actively censors the steamiest material.

Circumstance is best during its simpler, more naturalistic moments. In one, Mehran rebuffs a junkie who stumbles into the mosque, only to see that an Islamic hardliner is more compassionate.

In a rare bit of explication, the movie notes that "buffalo" has two connotations in Thailand. For rural folks, it refers to the strength and perseverance of the large animals, called "kwai" in Thai. To urbanites, however, a buffalo is a hick.

The House I Live In shows Nannie Jeter as she hopefully watches Barack Obama's 2008 electoral victory, but doesn't analyze the current president's apparent reluctance to significantly alter anti-drug policies.

Provocative yet far from definitive, Pink Ribbons, Inc. is a critique of "breast-cancer culture." It could even be called a blitz on pink-ribbon charities and their corporate partners - though to use that term would be to emulate the war and sports metaphors the documentary rejects.

DeChristopher's primary concern is climate change, which is no small issue. But Bidder 70 would be more compelling if it had used the U.S. government's assault on the ad hoc activist to also discuss threats to the American political environment.

It's populated by characters who are just too good to be plausible.

A Good Old Fashioned Orgy deserves credit for not entirely wimping out.

It's a campy rampage that runs a few minutes shy of four hours, dooming what otherwise would likely be a bright future as a midnight movie.

The glib story and hectoring structure undermine the filmmakers' best intentions.

Directed by Neil Burger, whose "The Illusionist" also pulled an upbeat coda out of a hat, Limitless is entertaining for much of its running time. It's glib, and it's overly fond of hyperdrive pans, psychedelic montages and swift rack-focus shifts.

It's the sort of well-meaning fable that's ultimately more admirable than persuasive.

Cooper does slow the action and set it in the least glamorous of circumstances, which drains the pleasure from the thriller conventions. But just because Out of the Furnace isn't much fun doesn't make it profound.

Basically the anti-"Kill Bill." Both movies are quilted together from their auteurs' favorite Asian action flicks, but where Tarantino's was overheated, Reeves' is elegantly iced.

The film was shot entirely in South Africa, and revels in golden light on dry yellow grasslands. But it's still a very British movie, a respectful view from a suitable distance.

While Europa Report recalls such small-ensemble stuck-in-space flicks as "Moon" and "Sunshine," it's basically "The Blair Witch Project" relocated to the vicinity of Jupiter.

Orchestra of Exiles will interest anyone who's concerned with European Jewry or classical music in the first half of the 20th century. But it provides mostly the facts of Huberman's legacy and little of the flavor.

For those already somewhat familiar with the subject, the directors' distillation of these 40 hours of film will expand their knowledge - if not their consciousness. But other viewers may spend the whole movie wondering exactly when the merry magic is going to kick in.

Shot in New Mexico on a limited budget, Boys of Abu Ghraib is a credible depiction of the tedium, frustration and humiliation of wartime service. (Jack gets coated in human excrement not once but twice.) Naturalistic scenes of boxing, bantering and masturbation, set to a rap and hard-rock score, emphasize that these boys are young American everymen.

So the principal point of controversy involved here is not Jobs himself, but Ashton Kutcher, who plays him. The actor's approach is to ape Jobs' speech and movements, which he does quite well. Whether mimicry qualifies as characterization is a question for Jobs' viewers to answer for themselves.