Mike Hale

While it could stand to lose 20 minutes and several plot twists, Mr. Na’s debut manages to be thought-provoking and adventurous while providing solid thrills.

Absorbing and amusing for as long as it looks back at those Hollywood westerns, recounting their sins against American Indians.

The overall mildness and inconsequence of Girlfriend is disrupted for a while by Amanda Plummer, who gives a vivid yet gentle performance in a small part as Evan's patient, protective mother.

Holding things together are Mr. Phillips's quiet charm and his songs, which really are funny.

One of the many pleasures of the Norwegian director André Ovredal's clever and engaging mock documentary Trollhunter is the way it plays with the idea of the supernatural rule book.

Mr. Refn, who can pull off stylish brutality (in the "Pusher" films and "Bronson" ), shows no knack for the kind of visionary, hallucinatory image making that would render Valhalla Rising memorable.

At several points the depiction of Ulla's isolation takes on slasher-movie overtones, which undercuts the general solemnity but doesn't really add anything to the experience.

Frank V. Ross wrote and directed this slice of Midwestern mumblecore in a style -- overlapping dialogue, off-center compositions, a jumpy, disconnected narrative -- that suggests Robert Altman without any of Altman's instincts for character and poetry.

The lack of information about the school, or about any aspect of the two dancers’ lives that doesn’t involve training for and competing in international competitions, can be startling. When another Centro de Dança student, a petite woman, is a winner at the prestigious Prix de Lausanne, we’re stunned. We didn’t even know she was there.

Over all, the film is a prime exhibit in the relentless and regrettable shift away from a natural, allusive, romantic Hong Kong style and toward a mainland studio aesthetic that is stagebound, literal, overstuffed and sentimental - like the big-budget Hollywood weepies of the '60s or the '80s.

It's a hard movie to engage with or even sit through, despite the fact that much of the material is interesting in its own right. Oddly, but perhaps predictably, the problem is the resolutely conventional and soft-headed way in which that material has been assembled.

"The Warriors” and the “Mad Max” films will come to mind as you watch Tokyo Tribe, and from scene to scene Mr. Sono’s visual inventiveness and sure hand with action stand up to the comparison. The cumulative effect, however, is numbing.

Their characters are instantly recognizable; how you respond to the film may depend largely on whether you find any of them in the least likable and whether you think that matters.

You can admire the craftsmanship and enjoy the retro soundtrack, supplied by a roster of Milwaukee musicians, but it seems likely that Modus Operandi was more amusing to make than it is to watch.

Surprisingly old-fashioned. It seems to be having an argument with itself: the dazzling but often antiseptic immersiveness of the viewing experience is countered by storytelling suffused with nostalgia for a simpler, messier, livelier period in Chinese film.

An immigrant-family comedy that hits all the sentimental clichés of the genre as if they were stops on the No. 7 train.

Mr. Romero is executive producer of the new film. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have his style or sense of humor.

What leaves a bad taste in the mouth is not the film itself, which is passable for a low-budget war picture, but the fact that neither the official Web site nor the press notes even suggest that it largely has been scavenged from an existing movie.

If you don't get the jokes, there isn't a whole lot else to get, and it's a safe assumption that non-Latino, non-Spanish-speaking viewers are going to miss a lot of them.

The Harvest, in its modest way, calls to mind "The Grapes of Wrath" but with no glimmer of a New Deal or a union, or even of better economic times ahead.

It has the structure and some of the pleasures of a well-made sitcom or docu-reality show, despite the nervous-looking, unhappy guy at its center; it could have been called "Nobody Understands Phil."

The Juche Idea is meant to be a comedy, one that cuts two ways: mocking the strictures placed on moviemakers in both Communist and capitalist systems. Viewers who don’t share the radical-nostalgist sensibility of Mr. Finn, who teaches at Emerson College in Boston, may find the humor both too rarefied and too obvious.

The final image - a freeze frame of a pas de deux staged to resemble a triumphal Communist poster - perfectly captures the film's overall effect: it's strenuously brainless.

Only for those with a truly bottomless appetite for gore and fan-boy humor.

Frenetic, paper-thin but entertaining documentary.

That things tend not to end, or bode, well doesn't detract from the overall Hallmark vibe.

As uplifting stories of tolerance and self-discovery go, Spork has a messy appeal, but it's no "Hairspray."

Between Mr. Ziman's music-video skills and his close approximation of the kinetic style of Michael Mann (a scene from Mr. Mann's "Heat" has a key role in the plot), it's easy to overlook the formulas and just enjoy the ride.