Nick Pinkerton

Greene may intend Kati's story as a quiet tragedy, but the native feeling of that's-just-the-way-it-is lethargy ("Only in Alabama can you be a home-school drop-out") is rather convincing.

Danhier has made a lifestyle-nostalgia oral history after the popular "Please Kill Me" model, but gets none of the tall tales and internecine grudging that made that tome so entertaining.

Ceremony is a callow movie: Winkler exhibits no comprehension of the class anxieties he addresses, and extends precocity into adulthood. That callowness is Ceremony's subject scarcely makes it funnier.

Your Highness plays like a dirty-joke blooper reel made by the cast of a junky sword-and-sorcery epic.

"Afterschool Special" stuff, but the ensemble rings quite true in their coping processes, as director David Schwimmer proves adept at tracking rogue emotions that no closing "Ordinary People" clench can satisfactorily resolve.

We need visionaries-but also solid craftsmen who seem to enjoy their work. Insidious is the product of the latter. It doesn't build a better haunted house but, when on its game, reminds us of the genre's pleasures.

His (Snyder) mash-up set pieces ("Call of Duty" meets "Castlevania," etc.) blend into so-awesome-they're-awful slo-mo monotony, and the awful sisterhood stuff in between makes you anticipate the action as though waiting for the bus.

The subjects, plainspoken and insightful, attempt to extract the objective lessons of the political past from their subjective fortunes. This struggling to untie the personal-political knot makes for compelling oral history.

Miral is a very flat, fuddled movie, an at-odds-with-itself partisan work, its convictions diffused in a warm soak of style.

Bereavement-miraculously as dull as its title-is neither far gone enough to be funny nor well thought-out enough to be disturbing.

The most avid fans of merciless mugging will be the sole admirers of the bookending story of Liu Xiaoye's Butcher.

Though director Jonathan Hensleigh (The Punisher) perks up when filming violence, the atmosphere throughout is past-prime, stymieing any strut.

Mendelsohn's first film since 1999's "Judy Berlin" is devoted to finding descriptive correlatives to liminal emotional states through the cast's eloquent reaction shots and the camera's depiction of homely environments - with ornate, flowing visual vocabulary.

"Arrested Development's" Tony Hale nearly overcomes the gently worthless script, playing Annie's dork suitor, and convincingly transforming himself from toad to prince.

It's not a total wash. Faris's ample talents are squandered with a should-I-stay-or-should-I-go romantic dilemma, but there's just enough of Demetri Martin doing a prick act, and Fogler excels as a Rabelaisian dynamo.

Cage's avenger is named Milton; this reference to the author of Paradise Lost is the sole hint that Old World culture ever existed in Drive Angry's convoy of hyperbolized-unto-parody Americana: bad drawls, obese gawkers, roadhouse demonology, coochie-cutter shorts, and engines revving under guitar stomp.

The crazy-barista melodrama-slapstick collision seems not like a nimble twist, but tone-deaf blundering-what once came naturally now seems like trying too hard, as the Farrellys face their own mid-life crisis.

Too scattered in its arguments and piecemeal in its sources to weave together a convincing institutional condemnation.

It is draggily paced and lacks felicity of form; the 3-D is a rip-off and the songs are pap, save a snippet of Etta James singing "At Last" while Bieber's glossy fringe sways in slow-motion.

It's exactly what you thought it would be: A plagiarized, campus-set "Single White Female" pitched to teens.

Playing an ignoble protagonist, Dobrygin keeps his motives always quietly evident; later, lost in a fog painted red by an emergency flare, he's an abject vision of man in a hell of his own making.

Kekilli, more than an unofficial spokeswoman for rebellious Euro-Muslim youth, sells a simple and deterministic story through her sheer presence and precise reaction shots.

Michael's motivations remain arbitrary and inscrutable, right down to his entry into the seminary. This is brought up by a number of characters, who interpret his implausible career decision as A Sign. It is-of bad writing.

Sauvaire, hesitating between a protest picture and a glam-squalid imagist orgy, only succeeds in scattering human rubble across the screen.

The grungy setting and unflattering photography are only camouflage for callow, creeping sentimentality.

The makeup department's glommed-on plague pustules are fantastic, but the concession to modern technology in a badly rendered last-act CGI demon, cut and pasted from a Diablo II screen-grab, is so eminently lame as to cure all fear of hellfire.

de Oliveira's film is a musical of a sort, its quietude occasionally lifted by work songs or chorales.

Black, looking like an unwashed clothes pile and capering in familiar "Uncle Jack" style, is a good babysitter, his cross-dressing turn in a doll's house a highlight.