Neil Genzlinger

A documentary that features forthright interviews with major players and gives a good sense of the infighting and pettiness without getting bogged down in it.

If the Boy Scouts offered a merit badge for inept filmmaking, Todd Rohal would certainly earn it with Nature Calls, an unwatchably bad movie about a camping trip gone haywire.

The film doesn't just serve up Mr. Balog's amazing and undeniably convincing imagery. It also records his personal struggles as knee problems threaten his ability to hike the difficult terrain to get the shots he wants.

It ends up being largely just another story about a rebellious American teenager.

Some viewers will be frustrated by the film's determination to be evenhanded, but with this same battle likely to be fought repeatedly in the coming years (the issue is again on the 2012 Maine ballot), Question One stands as a pretty good primer in how referendums are won and lost.

Sure, you've seen this story before, but this version has a freshness nonetheless.

A lumbering mess in which he has somehow trapped several recognizable actors.

If you can choke down the implausible notion that the doughy Kevin James would last more than five seconds in a mixed martial arts ring, Here Comes the Boom is a moderately enjoyable, nontaxing sort of comedy.

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, a film based on Peter Cameron's novel, is several kinds of excruciating.

What follows seems like a nonstop car and foot chase, with Albanian after Albanian falling victim to Bryan's remarkable aim and hand-fighting skills. Foreigners bad, Americans good, box office busy.

Only occasionally funny and not at all illuminating about the rich world of a cappella singing.

For the first half of the film, amusing monster humor keeps things interesting; some monsters, it turns out, are better at party games than others.

Mr. Miller makes a questionable choice in setting the film against the backdrop of the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, and he lingers too long on an offensive fringe group that hangs out near ground zero with signs saying the terrorist attacks were God's will. But for most of the way, his treatment is substantive and evenhanded.

Maybe that's romanticizing things, but baseball wouldn't be half as beautiful without its mythology.

The story, too, undercuts the actors.

Among the problems with the humorless comedy General Education is that the lead character's sister is more interesting than he is, and she spends much of her screen time as a mute mime.

It is also unabashedly one-sided and is short on solutions, other than the usual "Call your Congressional representatives." But its message, despite the hyperbole, certainly warrants examination and discussion.

The whole enterprise has a get-off-my-lawn feel; it tries to pass off whining and a rose-colored-glasses view of the past as insight.

Mr. Norris arrives just as the blood baths and leaden dialogue are beginning to grow tedious, and his deadpan self-parody is pretty darn funny. More important, it gives you permission to laugh at the rest of this mindless movie, which is the only way to choke it down.

Only a couple of times do the stunts have that extra ingredient - wit - that makes this kind of thing amusing to watch.

Delivered with sloppy, gleeful confidence, the movie is smarter than most gross-out comedies but isn't afraid to inspire an "Ewww."

The film is more a patched-together collection of anecdotes than a coherent story, and some of Greg's tribulations, like fear over a high dive and an amusement-park ride, don't seem age-appropriate for a boy who has just finished seventh grade.

The film, directed by Mikkel Norgaard, somehow manages the difficult trick of going into taboo territory without ever feeling dirty. And Mr. Hvam has a knack for misdirection. Just when you're wanting to give his character a hug and forgive all, off he goes into even more inappropriate behavior.

Alas, the dancers have to stop sometimes to allow the utterly unoriginal story to be told, and the romance at the center of it inspired Amanda Brody, the screenwriter, to produce dialogue so cheesy as to be laughable.

A riveting piece of work full of unpleasant characters whom you're glad you've met but never want to see again.

Leaves a lot of questions unanswered, which is frustrating, but it gets high marks for honesty.

Commendably, the film, narrated by John Leguizamo, sugarcoats nothing, and the people involved - the players, their trainers, their parents, the scouts - are remarkably forthright.

A comedy that's too late to the Ponzi-scheme party to be topical, and not outrageous enough to take advantage of its own setups.

The director, John Gulager, has no idea how to mix his ingredients to create a savvy self-parody.

Not much here is new, but condensing it all into one zippy documentary makes for an ugly portrait.

Serves up its material with an excess of treacly music and an overabundance of glowing reminiscences. This has the odd effect of making his story less powerful than it actually is.

Has a plot as unambitious as a macaroni dinner, familiar and easy to eat and not particularly nutritious.

Solitude is a character, so much so that, 25 minutes in, when the first human voice is heard, it feels like an intrusion. And when the weather warms enough for tourists to make the trek up to the observatory, they register not as a welcome relief from loneliness but as annoyances.

Aging Gen-Xers, it turns out, aren't all that witty, and Ms. Hillis and Mr. Grinnell don't have the kind of chemistry that might make this setup work.

The execution is a bit clumsy, but the documentary MIS: Human Secret Weapon shines a light on an interesting bit of World War II history.

Other Van Peebleses also populate the movie, and all are serviceable enough as actors; it would be nice to see them in less earnest, more original material.

The film, though, is so padded with cheerleading that it doesn't have time for a serious exploration of poker's place in the broader culture or the consequences of its rapid rise and global reach.

It's the kind of stuff an amateur screenwriter reaches for when he has nothing original to say, because he's seen it work in other movies. It sure doesn't work here.

It's a lightweight romance that occasionally shows a sense of humor but seems afraid to turn it loose.

The script, by Sally Phillips and Neil Jaworski, mocks celebrity culture but never turns too caustic. The movie, like an island vacation, passes pleasantly and all too quickly.

The film's most interesting aspects are its gimmicks rather than its frights.

The Oscars are swell, but once in a while a film comes along that is so courageous it deserves consideration for the Nobel Prize. An entire generation has been born and gone to college since the Beastie Boys defined that most basic of civil liberties: You've got to fight for your right to party.

Brian Malone's documentary Patriocracy feels as if it were made by someone who had been out of the country since the Clinton administration and upon re-entering was shocked at the polarized, dysfunctional state of the federal government.

The film, though, has some redeeming qualities, including the presence of Idris Elba as the obligatory good guy, who encourages Johnny to get Danny into the protective custody of a religious order.

You can feel just how jarring and stressful it must be for a soldier to go from the life-and-death adrenaline rush of war to the maddeningly slow world of rehabilitation and forced inactivity.

The film would be stronger if it told us a little more about what the survivors have been doing since the camp was liberated by the Soviets in 1944, but their reactions to revisiting the camp are wrenching to watch.

The most expensive home movie ever made, is one man's genial account of his trip into outer space.

This kind of movie is all about the special effects. They start out great - cool helicopter crash, very convincing giant lizard - but grow more amateurish as the film goes along, with a flight sequence on giant bees proving particularly clunky.

The lovebirds' dialogue has the sophistication of a junior high school romance, and Mr. Schaeffer appears to have pasted his story together from the button-pushing plotlines of other films.

The Viral Factor wants to be both an action movie and a soap opera. But the merging of the two genres by Dante Lam, a director based in Hong Kong, is clumsy, and so is the film.

Someone involved with Beneath the Darkness has either watched too many horror movies or not enough. There is not an original thought in this story, written by Bruce Wilkinson, or in the way it is directed by Martin Guigui.

It's a Christmas present for cat lovers. Miss Minoes, the tweaked title of a 2001 Dutch film by Vincent Bal, is being given an American theatrical run (dubbed into English), and it's a pleasantly quirky, family-friendly fable with lots of meowing.

This might be more entertaining if any of the three main characters were at all likable.

No swear words here; just harmless fun.

Characters this nicely etched deserve a more complete conclusion.

Some fine performances and an embrace of understatement make Matthew Leutwyler's oddly titled Answers to Nothing a respectable entry in the multiple-stories-that-interlock genre.

The plot may be a little too cluttered for the toddler crowd to follow, but the next age group up should be amused, and the script by Peter Baynham and Sarah Smith has plenty of sly jokes for grown-ups.

If the film doesn't measure up as a piece of historical scholarship, it does manage to be a rather touching exploration of the troupe's life cycle: achieving notoriety, then being torn apart by fame, then being destroyed by forces beyond its control.

The film, though generous with doses of Heifetz in performance, isn't entirely successful at illuminating the man.

Steve Guttenberg is probably supposed to be a lovable loser in A Novel Romance, a drab, clumsy film by Allie Dvorin, but he can manage to be merely annoying. Mr. Guttenberg, though, deserves only part of the blame for this unrewarding movie.

N.P.H, as he's often called in these films, does indeed return, singing and dancing. And talking dirty. He, that stoned baby and a stunning riff on the tongue-stuck-to-a-pole scene in "A Christmas Story" will, for fans of this franchise, make this a blissful holiday season indeed.

A drippy ending erases all the hopes you've built up and forces you to conclude that this wasn't such a well-thought-out film after all.

The script, by Mr. Marshall and R. A. White, doesn't contain enough that's genuinely funny, which leaves everybody trying too hard. Only Ann-Margret, as the fair's reigning queen, retains her dignity.

Sometimes a film feels a bit too pat and yet is impossible to resist. The Mighty Macs, based on the national championship run of the 1972 women's basketball team at Immaculata College near Philadelphia, is such a film: lots of button pushing, but in the end you're glad you saw it.

The film, by Constance Marks, is a little light on details of Mr. Clash's personal life once he broke through, but otherwise this is a winning tale of the persistence and creativity behind one of the most famous and fuzziest faces in the world.

Its scenes frequently feature Africans machine-gunning other Africans or hacking them to death with machetes. This is a disturbing sight indeed. Maybe it was intended as a metaphor, but this movie isn't nearly sophisticated enough to pull off that kind of commentary. It's not really even sophisticated enough to be an absorbing zombie movie

Ms. Mann (Michael's daughter) does stage a bracing car chase, and Mr. Morgan makes an impression despite a story that's sometimes hard to follow.

The beauty of the movie, in fact, is that Mr. Estevez does not make explicit what any of them find, beyond friendship. He lets these four fine actors convey that true personal transformations are not announced with fanfare, but happen internally.

American Teacher doesn't come close to doing what it sets out to do, but it does end up as a heartfelt, bittersweet portrait of several teachers.

The impalement is a nice touch. The death by wood chipper, pretty sweet. But the best bit of comedy in the ridiculously gory Tucker and Dale vs. Evil eviscerates the field of psychology with no bloodshed at all.

Somebody must think Joe Swanberg's mumblecore mush is worth the time it takes to watch it, because he keeps making it. But anyone who sees his insufferable Art History and doesn't wish for the 74 minutes back has an empty life indeed.

Pitched awfully young, without a shred of the satire or subtlety that is generally found in films aimed at tweeners and above. That's not a bad thing; it just means accompanying grown-ups or older siblings will have to choke down a sizable dose of schmaltz with their fish milkshakes.

Mr. Fuller is working on some kind of redemption theme, but he sabotages the story with underdeveloped plot threads: a bartender with cancer, an old car crash, sibling rivalry. Everything is annoyingly oblique; why?

A dandy little documentary whether you view the story it captures as a precursor to the flash fame of the Internet age or as one of the last genuine underground phenomena before the Internet made that whole concept obsolete.

The six actors in the central, edible roles seem as if they could have pulled off a "Scream"-like satire, but since they weren't asked to, there's nothing much for them to do but follow the clearly visible paths to their doom.

Those who care less about such stuff than about being entertained will find plenty to like in this ghoulish comedy, a droll take on one of the most notorious mass-murder cases of the 19th century.

Some of Kevin Hart's fans may be disappointed that Laugh at My Pain, a film version of his recent stand-up tour, offers less than an hour of Mr. Hart onstage. But a couple of adornments - one before the concert footage, one after - flesh out this funny, profanity-heavy movie nicely.

Stands as both a tribute and a study in healing.

Mr. Fisher-Cohen captures Mr. McMillan's transformation from a guy with a funny look and line into someone who believes his own hype and misconstrues his Warholian 15 minutes for widespread popularity and influence. It's a dismaying portrait and, here in the YouTube age, a direct hit.

Everyone spouts nicely turned baloney elevating golf to the level of a religious experience, which grows tedious fairly quickly. The film almost works, though, if you view the whole thing as a very, very dry comedy.

Sure, Smurfs are blue, but who knew that they actually work blue?

Christoph Baaden, the director, loses sight of the fact that, for people who don't run, the cult of running is kind of boring.

Yet the urban images he presents are missing the thing that makes any city come alive: human beings. You begin to suspect that Mr. Persons hates humanity. This makes General Orders No. 9, for all its sheen of sophistication, rather simplistic: people bad, nature good.

The real problem here, though, is that noting the it's-all-about-me nature of modern life already feels like a point that no longer needs making. Yeah, we're self-absorbed and shallow; so what else is new?

Despite these flaws, it's refreshing to see a documentary about a normal grown-up who is struggling with problems of life and love, just as so many invisible others do.

A documentary about the unending mess that is the Atlantic Yards project, is unabashedly slanted and as a result will probably be dismissed by those it portrays unflatteringly. That's unfortunate, because this film should be discouraging and dismaying for people on all sides of the project, for what it says about oversize expectations and missed opportunities.

The film does a pretty good job of conveying the bleakness and pointlessness Eva and her fellow mutants feel, but it's as if Ms. Trachinger were reluctant to take the premise any deeper for fear of being accused of imitating "Memento" or "Groundhog Day" or any number of other trapped-in-time films.

A quirky offering by Kyle Smith that does nothing more or less than show a touch-football game among friends. "It's sort of interesting," you might find yourself saying, "but is it a film?"

The efforts to document the teams' creative processes aren't particularly successful - no camera can capture something that elusive - but the filmmakers do a fine job with the back stories of the featured poets.

Eventually, though, Hey, Boo settles into a pleasant rhythm. It gives the fascinating history of how the book came to be.

The buildup to the actual competition is perfectly paced, with the film never tipping its hand as to the winner. And the championship has all the drama of a high-stakes sporting event: failure under pressure, unexpected triumph, gracious losers and winners both.

The film bounces around enjoyably, giving a history of the game, talking to people who love it and chronicling the 2009 Monopoly World Championships in Las Vegas.

There are new tweeners every year. To them, the characters and plot devices in this perfectly competent film might well seem fresh.

Comedy and poignancy weave together in Mr. Virzì's hands, but the maudlin meter only occasionally goes into the red zone. And Ms. Pandolfi gives such an exquisitely understated performance that you don't realize until the very end that the film was as much about her character as it was about Bruno and Anna.

Isn't quite savvy enough to compete with the slyest entries in that genre or madcap enough to run with the zaniest.

The women's efforts have already had a fair amount of publicity, so the attraction here is the cinematography, and it makes good use of Imax and 3-D technology, with lovely aerial views and startling close-ups.

The intent is perhaps some kind of dark tone poem, and the cinematography (by Jody Lee Lipes) is lovely. But oh, the tedium.