Robert Koehler

Doubly disappointing considering that it marks the first feature by Rwandan filmmakers to address the country's 1994 Hutu-on-Tutsi genocide, Kinyarwanda awkwardly and fitfully patches together a half-dozen story strands meant to provide a panoramic view of war and reconciliation.

Balances intelligent humor, slapstick, Blighty reserve and Yank spunk along with environmentalism.

Captures the excitement of lightning in a bottle.

The latest and most calculated re-do on the formulaic fantasy of an innocent conquering Gotham.

Although guided by considerable empathy toward its small circle of kinfolk eking out a living in southern Texas, Eska's tale of a woman's unconditional support of her father-in-law is told with a faux-poetic sensibility that never really connects with his characters' lives.

A sign that the Sandler comedy empire is expanding and reaching new depths of pure gross-out stupidity.

Proves that few can maneuver one of Cohen's dusky, lovelorn songs like Cohen himself.

A woefully under-realized story of small-time boxers enjoying perhaps their last moment in the spotlight.

Couldn't be less involving and more sentimentalized.

Fascinating assemblage combines strike footage first shot in 1979 by Perry when he was working for the Texas Farm Workers Union with film and video lensed over the ensuing 20-plus years.

A refreshingly honest film about the life and times of Hollywood uber-power player Lew Wasserman.

Picture sets the gold standard for political documentaries.

Smartly and seamlessly blending a cast of talented Argentine and Spanish thesps, Pineyro seems to be testing how much cinema he can derive from a restricted space.

The forthcoming line of high-octane summer entertainments will be hard-pressed to top this one for both thrills and wit.

The elusive, quicksilver nature of young love is often reduced to crude simplicities by the movies, but director Sebastien Lifshitz and writing partner Stephane Bouquet have observed it with a superb balance of aesthetics and insight in Come Undone.

Though quite routine on the logistics of deep-sea exploring, pic develops a visual style as it replays the events of the sinking that some viewers may find more visually exciting and satisfying than what Cameron staged in his original mega-blockbuster.

Closer to pics like “The Hit” and “Miller’s Crossing” than to McDonagh’s bristling, funny plays, this half-comic, half-serious account of two Irish hitmen who are sent to the titular Belgian burg to cool their heels after a job is moderately fair as a nutty character study, but overly far-fetched once the action kicks in.

Lacking the outrage and wit of Michael Moore's "Sicko," which dealt with the different matter of health insurance, this documentary is stronger on finding viable solutions.

The final days of a band of 1930s Christian rebels in the central Mexican wilderness are depicted with majestic stoicism in Matias Meyer’s elegant ode to independence.

Writer-director Montiel creates a movie of many parts that don't always congeal. Mix this with the many meaty scenes and a roster of often exceptional actors and the effect is one of a fabulous acting showcase more than a wholly finished work.

Close encounters of the charming kind infuse The History of Future Folk, which will likely be remembered as the first neo-hipster Brooklyn sci-fi movie.

A powerful and creative film.

Irresistibly entertaining and full of unique character portraits.

Viewers unaware of the music --hugely popular among Mexicans -- and the often intensely nationalist sentiments behind it, may blanch at the open chauvinism and celebration of outlaw lifestyles. But part of the pic's strength is its presenting the cultural strain as it is, without comment.

A sweetly raucous adventure. Widely quoted comparisons to "Billy Elliot" and Tim Burton overstate the case for what is really a modestly eccentric entertainment.

Though it never disguises its sympathies for Kasparov and contempt for a powerful corporation's machinations, documentary is finally a speculation on the limits of the human mind and how truth can never be fully known.

The textured, thoughtful results may prove too cerebral and abstract for audiences beyond Smith's hardcore followers,

In its overwhelmingly artificial depiction of the street gangs that ruled Brooklyn's mean streets in the 1950s, Deuces Wild draws from a phony deck.

The 10-year run of the “Fast and Furious” roadshow isn’t slowing down a bit in Fast Five, by most measures the best of the bunch, combining fresh casting choices, interesting Rio locales and literally smashing bookended action sequences.

Disney's tradition of intelligent, live-action family period cinema is magnificently revived in Tuck Everlasting.

Deeply influential, even to his enemies, Atwater's career is viewed here with fascination and some sympathy.

A satire for its time. What Judge is less sure of here than in his previous, perfectly pitched live-action comedy "Office Space," is how to build a complete movie around his key ideas.

With Iraqis pointing cameras at each other, the result is cheerier than might be expected.

Burdened with a complex flashback structure and an unemotional core, this multi-decade saga of an imprisoned Iranian poet and his family has surprisingly little resonance.

Simultaneously teasing and loving a subject doesn't make for easy comedy, but writer-star Will Ferrell and director/co-writer Adam McKay pull it off with good-ol'-boy good nature in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

May leave itself open to charges of being little more than a promo feature posing as a documentary, but pic nevertheless is a warts-and-all look at a group of musicians -- and the music biz -- likely to make most record label flacks flinch.

Stylish and substantial enough to prompt even a couch potato to action, Kelly Duane's Monumental: David Brower's Fight for Wild America delivers a stirring and visually dense account of the life and times of Brower.

The moments of inspired originality are all too infrequent. There's enough eye candy and marvels on screen, however.

Mexican-born helmer Alejandro Monteverde's debut will be remembered as a curious case of a mediocre film that wows crowds.

A history of verse is laid alongside that of warfare, and the ways in which they are braided together proves fascinating.

Genetically-modified (or GM) fruits and vegetables are a topic of raging debate in scientific and ecological circles, so it's a shame writer-director Deborah Koons Garcia opts to show only one side of the argument.

The former Beatle, a longtime Maysles friend, could have found no better documentarian.

Campbell's performance is attuned to the extremes of unnerving calm and intensely erotic; unlike the pic, she pulls it off.

Too self-serious to work as a straight-ahead whodunit and too lacking in imagination to realize its art-film aspirations.

Well-turned adult comedy.

Never obtains the full impact of its potentially powerful inner core.

Alternately seduced and repelled by its subject, the garish and power-hungry Harlem gangster and '70s cocaine kingpin Nicky Barnes, Mr. Untouchable is one seriously confused documentary.

More ambitious than her 2002 debut, "Blue Car," Moncrieff's new film maintains her focus on women, expanding to include a range of ages, circumstances and psychologies. Picture's drama, however, is deliberately fractured into a quintet of stories that vary considerably in their overall impact.

A stunning indictment of Belgium's brutal colonization of the Congo in the late 19th century, Brit documaker Peter Bate's White King, Red Rubber, Black Death illustrates how European exploitation in Africa caused irreparable damage to the continent.

Bruce's efforts to retrace and recover his life after his memory loss contain all the drama and uncertainty of a fine psychological drama.

A vital if less than objective slice of film journalism on the U.S.'s troubled history in the Third World.

By turns gentle, deadpan, droll and sarcastic, Jimenez's film reflects on Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" to track a sweet but doomed love affair between literary -- and pleasurably randy -- college students.

For a guerrilla-style, no-budget Yank indie to even tackle issues of jihad terror and naive Western thinking is noteworthy in itself, but Gamazon and Dela Llana inflame the issues with a gutsy, athletic filmmaking package that shows what can be done with a minimum of tools.

Continually tickles the mind while leaving a heavy lump in the chest, establishing and sustaining a unique low-key tone of mystery and dread.

A resoundingly old-fashioned and well crafted study of evil infecting an American family, Frailty moves from strength to strength on its deceptive narrative course.

Patiently told and lovingly made.

The picture has a first-rate team of actors who visibly enjoy their roles and the sharp dialogue by Baruchel and Goldberg.

Gleefully upends expectations and delivers an energetic comedy tracing two guys'all-night search for the perfect White Castle burger.

A golden opportunity to analyze the most vital and probably most creative contempo American playwright is missed in Freida Lee Mock's docu, Wrestling With Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner. Kushner's art demands a filmmaker of equally challenging artistry, able to plumb an opus based in polemics, politics and Brecht, instead of psychodrama.

While it creaks along at times, director Csaba Kael's new film version of a Hungarian opera masterpiece, Ferenc Erkel's Bank Ban, is ultimately an invaluable entry in the opera-on-film library.

Not that it ever rises to the level of Sidney Lumet's Gotham police pics ("Serpico," "Prince of the City"), but 16 Blocks does raise the banner for the tradition of the textured urban cop drama, spurred by action but made substantial by characters at crossroads.

Jacobson produces a remarkably creepy piece of cinema that disturbs by suggestion, nuance and ambiguity.

Seldom boring but also rarely electrifying.

Borrowing heavily from the current trend in zombie comedy and apocalyptic horror but shifting it away from the usual undead norms, pic carves out a fresh angle in the crowded indie horror universe while blatantly stealing ideas from Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Pulse."

Handling both directing and cinematography duties, Core invests both with a clearly impassioned sense of place, period and perspective regarding this fanfare for common men.

Renee Zellweger, in another Blighty role, struggles to make Beatrix credible.

Surely one of the most frantic, virulent and foul-natured Christmas season pic ever delivered by a Hollywood studio.

Picture's leaps into the fantastic and rampantly farcical tend to be overextended, but finally don't detract from what is a well-judged, light entertainment.

Akomfrah's steady, patient pace makes it fairly easy and ultimately fascinating to absorb his many heady references.

Takes a notorious true story about a loyal soldier-turned-bank robber, and pumps it up into charged if uneven entertainment.

A former rock 'n' roller withers on the vine in California Solo, Marshall Lewy's forgettable sophomore effort (after a promising beginning with "Blue State").

Despite a reliable cast led by Scott, Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard, the human impact is ultimately lost in a too calculated scenario.

Though animated sequels of popular kids' fare tend to perform lower than their progenitors, this one should buck the trend.

Debuting helmer Ti West taps into the realist-horror spirit of mentor and exec producer Larry Fessenden, and makes a scarier pic than any by his master.

Gains much greater texture from the intercutting between the two performers than had it remained simply a Seinfeld promotional project.

Though it isn't the entirely original creation "Metropolis" was, Bebop is more satisfying.

Without Smith's graceful presence, which more than once resembles Zach Braff's slightly older but observant New Jerseyite in "Garden State," Nearing Grace would be pure video fodder.

The effect is often soporific.

Extraordinary perfs by a mostly young cast likely will be cancelled out by the grim subject.

With verve, style and a fine sense of the human side of surf culture, Jeremy Gosch makes a terrific splash with his debut doc, Bustin' Down the Door.

Monica Ali's elegant and critically trumpeted debut novel, Brick Lane, about the travails, conflicting emotions and quiet liberation of a Muslim woman in London, is a far lesser thing in its bigscreen transformation.

Preaches purely to the converted.

Never rising above routine episodic storytelling, White Oleander nonetheless retains something of its source novel's ravaged emotional surface and cool, observant manner.

This is son-of-John-Waters with most of the grossness but none of the essential anarchism -- silly pop trash set for vid-classic status in gay households.

Leo Heiblum's pulsating music and Samuel Larson's dense, fascinating sound editing rewardingly compliment Rulfo's electrifying visuals.

As a struggling rocker making a last-ditch attempt to gain shared custody of his daughter, Paul Dano delivers a beautifully wrought performance in a different key from any of his previous roles.

Superior family entertainment.

An honorable but failed attempt to dramatize the dynamics that propel a basically good man to become a suicide bomber, The War Within contains provocative points inside a dull package.

If all that Ian Inaba's latest Guerilla News Network missive, American Blackout, wants to do is get left Democrats worked up into a lather of righteous anger at crafty Republicans, it does so at the expense of speaking to any other group of Americans. As such, docu is extremely limited and almost without purpose except as an organizing tool for party foot soldiers.

Sincere but fairly soft piece of ennobling journalism that gives a positive spin to some of Africa's seemingly intractable problems.

A comedy in the last century and a drama in the new one. At least, that's the dumbfounding impression left by writer-director Oliver Parker's utterly miscalculated film adaptation of Wilde's play.

The cool hand of Canadian writer-director Jeremy Podeswa proves a disappointing match for Fugitive Pieces, a generally dull and unmemorable adaptation of Anne Michaels' extraordinary prose-poetry novel.

Largely undone by a script that self-destructs in the third act of an otherwise well-made thriller.

A work that continually seems on the verge of genuine excitement but sabotages itself at every turn...results will intrigue only those interested in the nooks and crannies of Mamet's career.

Because plot is the sum total here, the alarming holes, inconsistencies and impossibilities in Chris Morgan's script corrode this drama of distress.

While the picture's reporting on government repression of alternative cultural ideas and lifestyles is noteworthy more than anything, it's a blatant promo for Chong's career.

A movie at war with itself -- tuned into its characters' vicissitudes one moment, stumbling with awkward stabs at goofiness the next.

Sweet if slight Israeli comedy.