Michelle Orange

When the recessive style works with the characters and the kooky international-incident story, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen has an absorbing, old-fashioned sweetness.

Because of the movie's episodic structure and lack of expository detail, the visuals bear the greatest narrative burden.

The result is more fancy than funky, but the directors' aim is true and occasionally hits its mark.

There are no simple denials, nor anything simple at all in Last of the Unjust. Only stories, recovered and retold, of a reality beyond their reach.

Scene by scene The Hunter, adapted from a novel by Julia Leigh, holds your attention like a pair of big, inquisitive eyes, or perhaps the point-blank scope of an automatic rifle.

It wouldn't go so far as to say it feels like you went through Jeremy's ordeal for nothing, but I did wish I had come to know as much about Dorff's character as I did about the size and shape of his nostrils.

There is enough lurid, ludicrous subtext in the material to keep fans of such things happy. As trash, this is top of the line.

Most successful are the scenes involving Marcus and Iris, a 10-year-old girl who grew up fatherless and watchful of her tumultuous surroundings.

With its small cast and focus on performance, Union Square promises to be a welcome showcase for Sorvino, and the early rhymes with Miss Linda are intriguingly open-ended.

Prom has sweetness, nonthreatening conflict, and enough personality to distance it from the chilling anodyne of Disney's television vehicles.

The vehicle may get a little jacked up along the way, but its passenger arrives in style: The kid's a star.

If you're like me, and you find yourself retreating to a safe place in your mind whenever human beings are being graphically decapitated on screen, you'll spend the majority of Centurion, horror maestro (The Descent) Neil Marshall's Roman bloodbath, on psychological lockdown.

Well-paced, well-performed and full of visual wows, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader bobbles a hectic story by stopping just short of committing to its grounding themes. Its hardly sacrilege, but it does seem like a shame.

Bichir - who played Fidel Castro in "Che" - resists the pathetic impulse, bringing dignity and distinction to a man who wakes up every morning knowing it's not just his burden but his job to be invisible.

It's all rather casual - not unengaging, exactly, but lacking a narrative energy all its own.

The film's delighted affinity with Ungerer's well-turned perspective does lend an advertorial slickness to what might have been a more challenging study of a fascinating and famously elusive subject.

Despite this careful (and successful) depiction of a warm and decent person, Perry the pop star remains stubbornly two-dimensional.

As it is, The Devil's Double, a handsome and occasionally dazzling thriller with at least one dynamo performance from its star, is ultimately dominated by its style.

Though the movie is largely vanilla in its pleasures, film lovers will eat it up.

An earnest and occasionally poignant attempt to penetrate Rebney's potent man-on-fire image and explore the impact of becoming an Internet sideshow.

Watching True Legend, a wuxia film crossed with classic vaudeville, it's hard to figure out who's borrowing from whom anymore.

Inter-chimp and territorial fighting are facts of nature, but the extreme anthropomorphism of Chimpanzee makes what is natural feel bizarre.

Embedded in The Lie is a sharp look at the moral limbo of a complacent life, the self-defeat of committing by halves, the self-interest of false equivalencies - but only the shallowest attempts are made to chip its themes out.

You'll have to hang on to something to get through the hairpins in The Perfect Host, a chamber piece hostage thriller black comedy undone less by its twists than by the stretches of bad road between them.

Wilson's unflappable, deeply sympathetic affect and aging golden-boy visage have a very Jack-like smoothing effect on the story's rough patches.

It's still a kick to watch Kathleen Turner don a housedress and trade soothing pieties with Richard Chamberlain. The Perfect Family feels like it could have been more than that, but I suppose counting its blessings is the more Christian thing to do.

A pleasant dramatic caper that wears out its welcome, The Concert is the houseguest who sings a little too loudly and too long for his supper, tone deaf to the line between charm and imposition.

What ultimately makes the film compelling is the extent to which it uses the shared language of cinema to telegraph the caustic feelings of a people toward their own history.