Rob Nelson

Repellent not only in content but in visual style, writer-director Rob Zombie’s hatchet job on the series he revived so artfully two years ago plays like a violent act of euthanasia upon the huge, brain-dead body of work inspired by the 30-year-old “Halloween.”

Slight but winning and often funny, the scrappy Amerindie Wah Do Dem is a fish-out-of-water comedy driven by Sean "Bones" Sullivan's offbeat performance.

This fawning docu goes to lengths to portray the octogenarian Playboy magazine founder as among the greatest figures of 20th-century American popular culture, while only cursorily acknowledging his status as a pioneering softcore pornographer.

Debuting writer-director Anusha Rizvi manages to wrest a lively feature out of a gravely serious issue, capturing the desperation of India's village farmers, as well as the nation's shift from agriculture to industrialization, without losing sight of the entertainment principle.

Bullets fly and jokes land with a thud in Killers, a deadly dull hubby's-a-hit man farce that alternately resembles a knockoff of 2005's "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and a rehash of "Knight & Day" avant la lettre .

In purely cinematic terms, Buried, set in late 2006, is an ingenious exercise in sustained tension that would make Alfred Hitchcock turn over in his grave.