Ronnie Scheib

A strong cast, formal visual style and cynical voiceover that propels the action help elevate this Seattle-set gay romp from the ranks of the stereotypical.

For Semans’ conceit of an obsessively narrow world to really work, he needed to have established an initially more expansive milieu.

Luft grounds the film with an insistently believable performance, while other thesps float in and out of cliche.

In an act of "selfless service," a group of American women, backed by industry giants like Clairol and Vogue, open a beauty school in war-ravaged Afghanistan. The anomalies are manifold: Gun-toting soldiers patrolling the streets are visible through the windows as rookie beauticians busily snip, perm and tweeze.

An admirable if downbeat character study, Gabriel still sinks into a psychological quagmire.

Greif obviously ascribes to the Blake Edwardian school of comedy, laying out gags with commendable topographical precision. But, unlike Edwards' unique mixture of sophistication and slapstick, Funny Money falls squarely in the tradition of pure farce, itself an anomaly in this age of aggressively abrasive personality comedies.

Safer, more conventional and closer to broad TV sketch humor than Christopher Guest's comedies of manners, The Grand never quite recoups in laughs what it loses in spontaneity.

A Whisper to a Roar traces a too-familiar step-by-step political pattern: the transformation of a liberator into a despot, his subsequent reign of tyranny and the popular uprising against it.

Perhaps the least accessible of Tian's films, this serenely elliptical poser will elude all but the most devoted arthouse auds.

This offbeat charmer succumbs to the same airless artificiality that has claimed many recent efforts in the genre.

Though the picture meanders somewhat in the absence of a clear throughline, the focus on Scott's music and electronic experimentation remains strong throughout, thanks to an eclectic roster of musicians and scholars and a generous sampling of his compositions.

Uniquely Southern documentary has become surprisingly timely this election year.

Once Heifetz becomes a household name, Rosen struggles mightily to milk drama not from his musical genius, but from his relatively unremarkable personal life.

This inordinately likable and consistently funny boxing saga-cum-romantic comedy doesn't so much ridicule the "Rocky"-type inspirational sports fable as gently deflate its heroic overdrive.

Certain moments in the film resemble nothing so much as attending a school reunion, being buttonholed by an old acquaintance and shown snapshots of the grandkids. A complacently conservative acceptance sometimes seems to blanket all of 56 Up, as if maturity entails a serene blessing of the status quo.

Frank Langella's note-perfect, tour-de-force turn as a man elegantly shaping his own demise is nicely counterpointed by a shambling Elliott Gould as a bird-watching private eye.

Brand has assembled a cast of world class improvisers, yet doesn't take advantage of their own particularized, inflected rhythms, as each ritualistically experiences a jump-cut fragmentary flashback in front of the same bathroom mirror.

Though no "Love and Diane," this modest film nevertheless reveals the fragility of hope in survivalist mentalities pre-programmed to expect the worst.

Maxine Trump’s feature loses focus as it progresses, though its insights into guitar making, forestry harvesting and environmental shortages resonate strongly.

Likable but lightweight slacker comedy.

Evocatively fleshed out with surprisingly iconic homemovies, passionate love letters and well-chosen pop tunes, Kleine's homegrown Jewish "Madame Bovary" escapes the navel-gazing boundaries of the personal-diary docu by the sheer force of its evocation of bygone sensuality.

Moving, engagingly low-key curio.

The improvisational zeal with which Cusack approaches his role (absent from his miscast villainous turn in “The Paperboy”) is particularly fun to watch.

If Dalsgaard’s advocacy of Gehl’s utopian vision largely ignores the socioeconomic forces arrayed against it, the film should nevertheless enthuse pedestrians, bike riders and public-space proponents everywhere.

Its extremely narrow focus on the death throes of an art form, rather than the art itself, limits its appeal.

An ambitious, low-budget neo-noir, Stephen Purvis' El Cortez navigates the genre's tawdry twists and crosses and double-crosses with intermittent flair.

Despite a comic Yiddishe mama turn by Meryl Streep and a sensitively nuanced performance by Uma Thurman in a convincing changeup from her recent kickass action roles, Prime remains an oddly juiceless older woman-younger man romance, with a Freudian twist.

Gay Gotham farce written, directed and starring veteran actor Craig Chester ("Swoon," "Kiss Me Guido") delivers plenty of well-timed slapstick, a brace of oddball zanies and a couple of show-stopper musical numbers. Material is uneven, but rhythm and pacing keep action moving smartly.

Watching a consummate pro like Turner navigate an uneven script, veering from farcical determination, her cheeks puffed like those of a demented chipmunk, to utter devastation, can be immensely entertaining, particularly when she's backed by an able cast, as she is here.

Documentary seems best suited to cable: Lake's informal, Oprah-like concern invites the intimacy of home viewing. But the chick-chat approach in no way undermines the gravity of the problems the docu addresses.

Tracing a journey of self-discovery through six North Indian states without a formal script, Ali’s actors, like his characters, effectively improvise in a meandering present tense, stripped of any viable destination.

Above and Beyond reps an uneasy combo of two very different kinds of documentary, one of them personalizing the past and the other “objectifying” political advocacy.

If Caranfil’s mix of comedy and tragedy seems too scattershot to fully achieve catharsis, it does boast a rather Jewish sense of humor, itself a curious testimonial to the past.

Set in cramped apartments and hole-in-the-wall storefronts in the East Village, Michael M. Bilandic's nanobudget comedy Happy Life plays like a poor schlub's "High Fidelity."

Of particular interest to gay-rights activists and their adversaries, this "War Room"-like but extremely civil documentary seems best suited to community venues and the smallscreen.

Miller deftly navigates his picture's unusual tonal mix, balancing absurdity, melodrama, comedy of manners and an unblinking ethnographic stare. But the film's nearly three-hour length may consign it to cult status.

Scripter/helmer Sue Kramer's awkward freshman outing eventually coasts on the genuine charm of its leads. A strong vehicle for Heather Graham, who has never looked lovelier, "Gray" scores most convincingly in its reinvention of Carole Lombardian sexual screwiness as head-spinning gender confusion.

A bathetic TV-movie-type "learning experience" that provides about as much insight into teenagers as 40s westerns did into Indians--it's all in the costumes and customs.

Its straight-ahead rape, humiliation and ingenious revenge competently executed but not aestheticized, the essential grunginess never overly slicked up.

Teper buries his material in gimcrack mod trappings that trivialize rather than celebrate Sassoon's accomplishments.

With Swaziland providing this mother lode of material, helmer Michael Skolnik extracts only the most pedestrian of films.

This far-fetched, deliberately artificial game of musical chairs -- in which mismatched characters encircle, attract and repel each other -- feels forced, often losing itself in excess verbiage.

More entertaining than especially revelatory, this timely documentary adds a sprightly note to a somber subject.

Aggressively upbeat docu, helmed by two males ill-equipped to bring any distance to the camp's pervasive feel-good feminism, tends to relentlessly reiterate points better served by example.

The script’s autobiographical roots tend to substitute for a well-constructed dramatic throughline, giving the film an open-endedness that feels more dismissive than ambivalent.

The overly simplistic script by Zac Stanford (“The Chumscrubber”) hits nothing but high notes, making the whole dramatically less than the sum of its parts.

Live From New York! registers as simultaneously too outsider and too insider — a perfect definition of mainstream media itself.

In scope, depth, rhythm and gags, "Pizzas" seems best suited to the small screen.

Dave Boyle's picture is fueled by no overriding visual style, relying completely on its actors' chemistry for momentum. Unfortunately, the two strike no sparks.

Though it retains the narrative complexity of the Swedish bestseller on which it's based, WWII saga Simon and the Oaks never creates an emotional or intellectual throughline of its own.

In striving simultaneously to cover the transplanted rap scene, sample a wide range of groups, and give an unbiased picture of Cuban society, helmers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who have hitherto worked in short-form, blur the overall shape of their picture.

Amiable but uneven.

Racks up damning anecdotal evidence without substantially altering the discussion.

Revenge is a disappointment. Admittedly, the picture deploys the same kind of cinematic bells and whistles that made "Killed" so enjoyable. But without true tension, the documentary feels as slickly manufactured as its va-va-voom subject.

Since Thomas’ character is incapable of change or variation, and the film’s only engaging supporting players occupy a small fraction of the running time, it falls squarely upon Arquette to carry the film.

A convoluted bilingual thriller about a kidnapping in Colombia, Towards Darkness may be too clever for its own good. Frosh director Antonio Negret intertwines so many disparate characters, each with a flashback-studded backstory, that after a while the exhausted viewer, assaulted by sudden time-jumps, agitated handheld camerawork and tediously protracted suspense, ceases to care.

Stephen Vittoria's documentary about Mumia Abu-Jamal -- unrepentant commie cop-killer to some, political martyr to others -- makes no bones about its allegiance.

Inevitable comparisons to Quentin Tarentino's femme-centered carnage extravaganza "Kill Bill" are not unwarranted insofar as both films featurefeature an abstract, self-conscious, and decidedly post-modern approach to a moribund genre.

Ultimately, nothing can save this pic from the warm fuzzies.

A killer ending does not a movie make, and ultimately In the Bedroom may be more interesting to talk about than sit through.

In the central role, first-time feature helmer Alexander Poe may trigger sheepish identification among the neurotic with the protag's vaguely ridiculous reactions. While his character registers as white-bread bland, strong performances from the two "exes" save this indie from a surfeit of self-deprecating charm.

Part personal quest, part testimonial and part fund-raiser, A Journey in My Mother's Footsteps fulfills disparate agendas for helmer Dina Rosenmeier, a mildly resentful daughter wondering why her humanitarian mother prioritized orphaned Indian children over her own offspring.

Happily, "Upwards" picks up immeasurably when three legit luminaries (Andrea Martin, Julie White, Peter Friedman) enter the picture as the couple's parents.

The leads jell well but the film overcompensates to justify their union, surrounding them with broadly drawn secondary characters presented in an uncertain, inconsistent comic tone.

Though the actors don't flesh out or particularly fit their roles, they seem perfectly at ease with them and with each other.

Nothing here -- technologically, linguistically or visually -- would not be more at home decades ago, when director Stephen Herek helmed "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" and "The Mighty Ducks."

Loveless exerts a low-energy, dread-tinged fascination that intrigues rather than wows.

Picture narrowly avoids outright bathos, thanks largely to first-rate perfs by its child thesps and by Ray Liotta. But by self-righteously rejecting facile solutions, then employing them anyway in the tradition of "no ending left behind," the result conforms to parents' old-fashioned notions of kid movies rather than demonstrating true kid appeal.

Name cast, occasional deft touches and nifty contrast between the two locales cannot overcome script's terminal awkwardness.

The bros are built, and "Hand," with its gorgeous shots of mist-shrouded woods and sun-burnished hay, plus a brief but rapturous foray into gay sex, may attract queer auds.

With its striking Arctic scenery, “Ice” is a gorgeous if overexplained armchair adventure.

This mildly amusing, resolutely inoffensive outing lacks serious sexual tension -- which might just make it a viable compromise date pick in limited release.

Boasts dazzling hockey action, but its off-ice piousness makes for tough sledding for non-Canucks.

This low-budget curio feels remarkably authentic but lacks a core story structure.

Keeps grimly glued to its one-note premise, relieved by nary a glimmer of humor, surprise or personality.

Hearing the majestic iambic pentameter rendered in the sharply rising and falling cadences of colloquial Yiddish proves wackily charming, but the lack of correlation between the two plots makes the result feel unfocused.

Marquardt never buries her symbolic subtext very deep, what with a woman who freezes her eggs and a man who ensures that his patients feel nothing.

Never completely takes off, yet somewhat overestimates the surrounding zaniness. Still, any opportunity to witness the improvisatory skills of Sarah Silverman, Bonnie Hunt and Amy Sedaris should not be missed.

Thanked and vilified from coast to coast, Carter remains steadfast in his belief that Israel's policies in the Occupied Territories are unjust and counterproductive.

Beyond its cool, reflective surfaces and infinite plays with perspective lies nothing -- character, relationships, motives all seemingly irrelevant. Even Willem Dafoe as a haunted cop cannot ground these artfully grisly optical illusions, unconnected to any comprehensible storyline.

It is the presence of Duncan as a Mike Tyson-esque, malaprop-spouting ex-champion that, at least momentarily, lifts the pic out of its mediocrity.

Kagan's green-screen filmization, in its over-busy editing, ever-changing angles and constantly shifting backdrops, strips the play of its starkness, leaving disproportionate schmaltz and propaganda.

Exhibits stray instances of intrigue and wit, and makes nostalgic hay with its enshrinement of old-timers Pippa Scott and H.M. Wynant, but ultimately suggests a too-writerly, over-padded "Twilight Zone" episode.

Sarah Jessica Parker's myriad fans will doubtless appreciate her frazzled warmth in a part she energetically inhabits, but the picture at times feels out of step with contemporary reality and humorless in its adaptation of a comic bestseller.

Generates enough mild humor to keep the spoof rolling, but lacks the commitment and scope.

Shiota piles tons of symbolic baggage on his pint-size protagonists, who luckily rise to the challenge.

Proves a welcome addition to the growing body of films on Iraq, but ultimately promises more than it delivers.

Meandering mindlessly, Wizards comes off as yet another humdrum Pottery artifact.

Although Dyer's sophomore feature clearly intends to capture the magical otherness of a child's p.o.v., nothing in her strangely aloof mise-en-scene or her late sister Gretchen's script yields anything more than a group of well-thesped, believable suburban kids upset by their parents' behavior.

A startling wake-up call about appalling conditions prevailing in American schools, The War on Kids contradicts popular wisdom.

Suliman (“Paradise Now,” “The Attack”) dominates the screen as Khaled, utterly compelling in and out of jail, his magnificent perf tying up cinematic loose ends.

In its reliance on emotionally loaded voiceover and its disconcertingly direct appeals for support, Len Morris' old-fashioned docu seems more designed for fund-raising pitches than theatrical release.

Swell never really gathers momentum, remaining a collection of moments, some more privileged than others.

Israeli helmer Dror Sahavi's well-meaning but simplistic terrorist melodrama, gingerly counterbalancing religious fanatics on either side of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, utilizes a lyrical "Romeo and Juliet"-type encounter between a reluctant suicide bomber and a Jewish escapee from Orthodox closed-mindedness to plead mutual tolerance.

A venerable cast of Broadway vets interminably wanders through the clan's Connecticut mansion with no apparent goal, carrying the remains of never fully explained resentments.

Unfortunately, picture's concept doesn't stretch to 74 minutes.

The story of a ragtag Native American team rediscovering the tribal roots of the game to defeat preppie champions is rife with tired tropes, and lacking in three-dimensional characters or colorful plot-twists. Happily for this Onandaga-financed production and vet director Steve Rash, gifted Native American lacrosse players lend hard-hitting impact to the game scenes.

The filmmakers' metaphor of the housing market as a casino, with hard-working people's homes used as chips, although apt, may lack the visual and visceral excitement.

The tale of a pickpocket's redemption through love, plus a vengeance-seeking cop and assorted betrayals, Loosies weakly channels Sam Fuller's "Pickup on South Street" but without the explosive action, iconic thesping and stylistic punch.

May shock many viewers, especially political liberals.

Though stylistically incoherent at times, picture benefits from the percussionist's plainspokenness.

Though the picture is respectful of the heist-film template -- the gathering of the crew, the readying of props, the planned circumvention of all obstacles -- its main imperative consists of placing Kahn in impossible situations and watching him trick or strongarm his way out.

That Blitstein pulls off this tiredly self-reflexive conceit with relative panache is due in no small part to the scruffy grace of leads Justin Rice ("Mutual Appreciation") and indie fixture Brendon Sexton III.

Kalmbach’s laid-back approach proves more likable than revelatory.

Despite its infotainment look, Burzynski ultimately proves convincing.

More polished and better acted than many "inspirational" biopics.

Dancing Across Borders, Anne Bass' uneven docu debut, traces the fortunes of Cambodian ballet dancer Sokvannara "Sy" Sar from the time Bass first discovered him performing traditional temple dances at Angkor Wat to his conquests on the world stage.

Although it avoids overt moralizing or clunky lesson-learning, pic's careful balancing act between tragedy and comedy eventually becomes its sole raison d'etre.

Engages but underwhelms.

This simplistic story of bucolic redemption has few pretensions to depth, ambiguity or realism, relying on its name cast, sprightly lead and a helluva horse to attract family audiences.

A lackluster actioner.

Registers like a quaint display of local color.

Luckily, the music trumps the indifferently shot concert footage and lends shape to the evocatively lensed recording sessions in iconic locations. Nothing, unfortunately, mitigates Markus' sincere but trite and awkward narration.

"Night" trades politics for acrobatics, the film's kinetically edited action sequences filling the void left by sketchy character development.

Simultaneously insightful and idiotic.

Though conceptually intriguing, the mix of downward drug spiral with uphill struggle for good never really coalesces.

Turkel constantly undermines the feel-good with the ridiculous and vice versa, vacillating between infantile insults and professions of affection, a duality that ultimately wears thin.

Shady mood-piece profits greatly from enigmatic performance by Emmanuel Xeureb.

Directed by the pseudonymous Deagol Brothers, the film invests in spacey horror tropes one moment, plunges into absurdist adolescent angst the next and begs questions every step of the way, but just about holds together with its strong compositional sense, killer atmospheric lighting and wall-to-wall music track.

Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel's New World Order is less about an international cabal seeking world enslavement than about those who fervently believe such conspiracies exist and who crusade to defeat them.

Slicker, funnier and more professional than its predecessor, State Property 2, with Damon Dash at its helm tones down the original.

Brit helmer Malcolm Mowbray's film assumes the constrictions of a stagebound farce, taking place on a single set in real time, and swept along in magisterially broad strokes by Jeffrey Tambor's playfully theatrical perf.

Wide-ranging educational documentary attaches itself to the rise and fall of a 12-year-old fashion model, and indeed, its sincere, cautionary tone seems best suited to younger auds and small screen exposure.

Chalk suffers overall from a lack of subtlety, as problems abruptly get thrust into the foreground with little buildup or internal consistency.

Another in the procession of dead children movies that followed Atom Egoyan's magisterial "The Sweet Hereafter," helmer Gaby Dellal's sophomore effort unfolds in a similarly snow-blanketed small town filled with grieving adults, the community divided in apportioning blame. In contrast with Egoyan's labyrinthine structure and complex storylines, Crest cobbles together bits of plot and a motley assortment of half-formed characters.

Though initially fascinating, this two-hour travelogue soon becomes repetitive as it forsakes stark desert isolation for icon-festooned churches and overcrowded ceremonies.

The two still rely on their run-on, Woody Allen-ish interlocking rhythms to smartly propel the desultory plot forward, but after countless mumblecore and slacker indies, the sense of newness is gone.

Inoffensive but mostly undistinguished "Ancient Aliens"-type concoction.

This spectacular orchestration of visual elements seems wasted on a threadbare, inanely repetitive plotline.

The major draw of Blank City lies in its generous glimpses of rare, virtually lost Super-8 and 16mm films.

Beginning promisingly enough, "Handsome" soon turns monotonously angst-ridden, with all humor and personality falling by the wayside.

The idea of framing Holocaust atrocities in contemporary genre terms, although intriguing, is not without its perils, and the secret, when revealed, looms too large to fit within the plot’s parameters, creating strange disconnects between form and content.

Buday's astrology-themed romantic comedy boasts a promising premise, convincing chemistry between its attractive leads and fine thesping by a defensively edgy Jena Malone. But the uneven script, repetitive tropes and over-indulgence of actorly bits slow the pace, tipping youthful casualness into complacency.

Virtually dialogue-free, the film opts for an almost perverse minimalism; even the camera is limited to the topography within the kids' purview.

David H. Hickey's Lone Star comedy never really develops, stalling this culture-clash clambake at the merely likable stage.

Neither newly revelatory nor formally innovative.

Gentle, muted film of limited aesthetic ambition.

What starts as an impassioned exploration of the medical establishment's court-proven conspiracy to "contain and eliminate" the chiropractic profession soon turns into a scattershot expose of the entire health care field in Doctored.

The ease with which the perky, big-eyed heroine ingeniously succeeds in improving the lot of everyone around her and the painterly manner in which reality in every inch of the frame is "improved" constitute both the "quirky" charm and the pure fishiness of the film.

Though the Pangs prove culturally adaptive on a visual level, they seem completely clueless as to the tonal modalities of Mark Wheaton's admittedly undercooked, all-American script.

Colorless exposition and a lack of imagination or wit stall Father of Invention at the starting gate.

A lightly feminist, good-naturedly comic sketch of a Chinese-American family in crisis. But despite pic's earnestness and obvious good intentions, narrative elements, carefully set forth though they may be, fall back on overfamiliar, underdeveloped tropes.

Bubbles along with a jaunty but unoriginal blend of the sweet, tart, cute and weepy.

As fascinating as it is frustrating.

Far from encouraging "Survivor"-style competitiveness, the desert setting serves as a serene Club Med-type backdrop to the all-male bonding.

Mia and the Migoo boasts a handsome, folkloric look that is often undermined by a ham-handed script.

Even if Matteo Garrone's "Gomorrah" hadn't dramatically raised the bar for mafioso movies, The Sicilian Girl would have repped a mediocre entry in the Cosa Nostra canon and a waste of an extraordinary true story.

Picture touchingly conveys the everyday closeness of the Rashevskis, who are wont to tango their troubles away, but spiritual upheavals and tonal shifts feel artificial and strained.

Colburn's focus is so single-mindedly laudatory that the whole collaborative process is reduced to people either helping or hindering the visiting genius.

Filmmakers underline the immediate relevance of their conclusion: In matters of war and peace, who we elect president is crucial.

Undeniably topical but the lack of emotional investment in its characters renders it more intelligent than engaging.

Carefully crafted and impressively thesped, particularly by Margo Martindale, Zack Parker's ambitious, self-styled thriller channels a wide spectrum of high-concept classics, from "Rashomon" to "Memento." But the resolution of its conflicting truths proves so bizarre and idiotically off-the-wall that it mitigates all that precedes it.

Once Choose Connor ventures into the larger political arena, it begins to work against itself.

A radiant perf by Annie Parisse and a virtuoso turn by Eli Wallach are insufficient to lift this male intergenerational angst-fest out of the ghetto.

A vibrant catalogue of his outdoor pieces presented in context with an exhaustive portrait of Borba as a boundlessly energetic, iconoclastic creator, the documentary ties itself too tightly to its subject, mimicking forms and rhythms it never fully makes its own.

Few could dispute the obvious physical and mental benefits derived from the practice of this ancient discipline. One could, however, wish that this endless encomium played less like a PowerPoint sales pitch, illustrated with clip-art imagery, scored with generic music and narrated in mellifluous tones by Annette Bening.

Despite the fine thesping seen in this innocuous piece of fluff, the whole amounts to less than the sum of its parts.

Pic contains its share of viable gags and stars generate a certain degree of convincing chemistry. But eventually, the seams in personality design and artificially stitched-together script construction begin to show.

Lacks seismic guffaws but elicits many mild smiles.

Veering crazily in tone, Inside Out might fail to catapult its star into wider acceptability, but should delight fans of lightly absurd actioners.

Despite Almereyda's strong following in arthouse circles, William Eggleston in the Real World --which requires patient if not repeat viewing -- will probably not venture far into it.

Winters deserves better.

Tracks the race-to-the-deadline scramble of a personable young designer preparing an underfunded fashion show, but offers few threads that were not already more solidly and stylishly woven into "Unzipped," "Seamless" or "11 Hours."

The film is hamstrung by its fidelity to real-life inspirational models.

In its avoidance of all ambiguity, this giant-screen opus ultimately boils down to a rhapsodic endorsement of the tourism and shopping industries.

A humorless, relentlessly ethnocentric docu about Jews in basketball.

The result is a rough-edged, head-scratching mix of tones. Fortunately, musicvideo vet Rhein's competent helming skills counterbalance her off-putting dialogue and flat acting style so that the picture doesn't come off strictly amateur.

Icelandic helmer Baltasar Kormakur ("101 Reykjavik," "Jar City") injects notes of hysteria into the script's frenetic pileup of gratuitous cliches, as Dermot Mulroney pushes his square-jawed, desperate hero to near-masochistic extremes.

Comes off as lame and unfocused as its draggy dramatis personae.

Despite much verbal huffing and puffing, rifle waving and scimitar rattling, Cherkess proceeds with an astounding lack of action.

The Sweet Inspirations ranked as one of the most important backup singing groups in record-industry history, having performed with Aretha Franklin, Van Morrison, Dionne Warwick, Jimi Hendrix, Nina Simone, the Drifters, Wilson Pickett, Dusty Springfield and Elvis Presley. Yet, aside from an occasional still photograph, not a single frame of archival footage from their illustrious careers shows up in This Time.

Featuring a strong central perf by Bill Sage, a raincoated detective turn by Roy Scheider and the upscale autumnal serenity of the Hamptons, If I Didn't Care remains a stylistic exercise in elegant gratuitousness.

Offering a smorgasbord of violence with liberal sprinklings of sex, Russian import Alien Girl delivers wearisome brutality but little finesse.

An unremarkable documentary about Harper Lee and her single literary masterwork, Hey, Boo features what the French call a "structuring absence," that of Lee herself.

The film’s emotional center rings coldly hollow, its star-crossed lovers coming off more like projected figures than flesh-and-blood players.

Sentimental and a bit too cute in evoking a child's-eye view, the picture, nevertheless will please its target Jewish auds.

Timothy Hutton's fine, loose-limbed perf as a man adrift lifts Multiple Sarcasms, frosh scribe-helmer Brooks Branch's male menopause apologia, out of cliche-ridden territory -- at least temporarily.

Thesping is more engaging than accomplished, as Anderson's constant smile cracks around the edges and Northover's dourness is a bit overdone.

After a seductively moody intro, Michael Walker's domestic thriller devolves into a cartoonish attack on the filthy rich.

Clunky allegorical elements, however, remain unsatisfyingly ambiguous throughout the picture.

Kashyap relies completely on star Ranbir Kapoor to put over this relentless reiteration of cliches and, admittedly, the actor invests his aggressively tasteless, crotch-grabbing antics with enough energy and humor to make it palatable, but only just.

Without fully fleshed-out generic or social contexts, left-wing documentarian Philippe Diaz's preachy mix of graphic free love and polemical diatribe fails to mesh as fiction, though it does make for superior porn.

Though the low-budget picture is not without interest, its uneven thesping, sound quality and special effects might prove more welcome on the fest fringe.

Valerie Harper essays a Catholic twist on her yakkety yenta "Rhoda" persona, while Giancarlo Esposito, as the wise, hip priest heading the retreat, is called upon to bring believability to a film low in that commodity.

A model of cohesion and clarity as long as it's dealing with Brown's exemplary public achievements. However, pic quickly becomes mired in tedium and confusion when it turns to Brown's scandal-ridden private life.

A bland, perverse round-robin of teen angst.

Pic relies on nerdy world-weary irony to carry the day, but doesn't convincingly draw its characters.

Both subscribes to and somewhat departs from the bare-bones improvisational formula established by the mumblecore movement, sometimes sacrificing ambiguity for the sake of broader, telegraphed, one-note laughs.

The edge achieved by director-editor-producer-scribe Garth Donovan is jeopardized by overreaching for topical relevance.

Its provocative subject matter, though seriously treated, qualifies it as a dark-horse candidate for latenight cable.

This messy amalgam of mysticism, romance, satire, social criticism and cartoonish f/x seems destined for discount DVD bins.

Poorly conceived 60-minute picture might have fared better as a more straightforward documentary.

Scripter Lund, himself an ex-teacher, delivers a story that lacks nuance, and mixes badly with Kaye's impatient edits, Dutch angles and extreme close-ups.

The picture's assorted characters, though credible, feel wearisomely one-dimensional, while the pumped-up action, unfolding in a single day, basically consists of an extended game of hide-and-seek.

Lack of perspective and shaky comic tone plague Tollbooth -- sinking it in a morass of whiny cliches.

This ongoing improvisation, along with the completed passes and resulting chest-bumping celebrations or recriminations, serves to define these otherwise "ordinary" ciphers and lend shape and momentum to an otherwise plotless movie.

The storyline develops so erratically that it lacks any internal momentum, with some scenes unfolding in exhaustive detail and others seemingly missing, as if whole chunks had been shot and later edited out.

Comes off as a painfully old-fashioned, flatly directed exercise in passionless historical reenactment.

Standout perfs by Bernadette Peters as an aging diva and Rachel Brosnahan as her solicitous 15-year-old daughter are the only reasons to see Lisa Albright's Coming Up Roses, a tired '80s-set meller hobbled by lackluster helming and an unconvincing script.

The film continually resists coherence or synthesis, with puzzles left unresolved amid multiplying possibilities and highly repetitive flashbacks, yielding a mystery that wearies rather than intrigues.

Complex story twists unfold to confusing effect, while characters angrily toss cliches at one another and revelations multiply rather than resolve murky plot developments.

Jose Rivera and Tim Sullivan's script relentlessly piles on goopy conversation-stoppers like "Do you believe in destiny?" and "I didn't know that true love had an expiration date."

Though it follows the reductive paradigms of men-on-the-make laffers, the low-budget, flatly shot picture rarely turns nastily shrill or swaggeringly stupid in tone; redemption and/or sanity is usually waiting in the wings.

This black comedy on the making of a documentary about mail-order wives finally breaks down under the weight of its twists and turns, but mostly maintains a creepy fascination with its scuzzy characters.

This cinematic anomaly falls flat as a stand-alone.

Star Chiyaan Vikram delivers a knockout three-pronged performance, but this cinematic bravura is offset by underdeveloped scripting, flatly one-dimensional villains and overdone lone-hero-vs.-swarms-of-murderous-attackers setpieces.

Unfortunately, the unconvincing fictional storyline Rosenbaum weaves around this solid musical base hits every meller cliche in the "self-destructive rock star" playbook.

Uncomfortably confessional or wildly melodramatic plot twists work interestingly in the moment, but wobble in retrospect. Pic's overarching structure is further weakened by Schaeffer's half-hearted attempt to tie together loose ends.

Though conceived in whimsy, Minoes generally lacks imagination; once the premise is established, familiar plot conventions reign.

Once Mulholland has established that both men hark back to a bygone, Teddy Roosevelt-fostered image of laconic masculinity, his peculiar vantage point generates little insight into the psychology and accomplishments of either man, as “The True Gen” abandons biographical logic in favor of a catalogue of arbitrary differences and similarities.

The result is Sam (Mark Duplass, "The Puffy Chair" and "Humpday"), a 34-year-old unemployed rocker whose mediocre musicianship is matched only by his abysmal people skills; he's like Jack Black without any energy or confidence.

Partly produced by Lifetime, the pic attempts to elevate the disease-of-the-week movie into a moral dialectic between conformity and imagination.

Lacks focus, stumbling from one emotionally fraught stopping place to another but arousing less and less curiosity along the way.

The jazz-scored picture relies heavily on quirkiness to round out shaky characterizations and inject interest into otherwise forgettable pairings.

Some six or seven men (women conspicuously absent), including a mayor, an immigration lawyer, a congressman and a "coyote," offer views on immigration. Unfortunately, they all say the same thing -- and it's nothing new, affecting or articulate.

Unfortunately, the documentary's impact is mitigated the benefactor's constant presence and paternalistic, infomercial-like exposition.

Documentary's insistent inflation of buried gold jewelry and watches into symbols of heroic defiance and transcendental tragedy rings hollow in the wake of weightier Holocaust testimonials.

Even a magnificently inspired Maria Bello proves insufficiently daring to save Richard Alfieri and Arthur Allan Seidelman's Chekhov-based chamber piece Sisters from pretentious psychodrama.

Unable to establish a consistent tone, picture goes derivatively screwball one minute and stickily sentimental the next.

Even Sandler diehards may pass on this mostly derivative paean to compulsive computer geekdom and male sexual dysfunction.

While its questions of affirmative action and charter schools could theoretically resonate with American audiences, the picture's corny theatrics, talky, preachy approach and taxing 164-minute running time will not translate.

Competent but unimaginative horror entry.

More scenes of Richner’s admirable efforts in the hospital and fewer expressions of admiration by the doctors and nurses he trains would also have helped to anchor the film’s sincere but repetitive hosannas.

Shetty’s need to maintain his characters’ romantic heroism constantly grates against his depictions of their ridiculousness.

A behind-the-scenes comedy about the making of a reality TV show, My Uncle Rafael looks suspiciously like an outright sitcom itself, with the same careful dosage of sententiousness and one-liners.

But atmospherics notwithstanding, the narrative unfolds unconvincingly in jerky fits and starts.

This scattershot documentary — an undiluted advertisement for this temple of high-end consumerism — jumps skittishly from subject to subject, disjointed and repetitive for all but dyed-in-the-wool fashionistas.

Trite, sententious and generally unfunny.

It's all so overdetermined -- each encounter of the present-day lovers mirrors some moment from the long-ago day when they parted -- that it reduces their whole affair to a matter of last-minute revisionism.

Watching TV feels fundamentally old-fashioned in its storytelling. Thesping is solid, particularly by O'Nan, Nam and Jacobs. But the conversations feel artificial, overly concerned with re-creating period detail or interjecting relevant philosophical life concepts.

With Cross jump-starting others on a liquid road to health, this glorified infomercial could saturate latenight TV after its April 1 bow.

Lacks the delicate tonal control and subtle smarts required for such an intended half-surreal exercise.

The film replaces choreography with metronomic editing, while one-note overstatement drowns out character development.

Strictly for fans of free-form, DIY hit-or-miss humor (and those who prefer a miss to a hit), pic complacently parades its alienated amateurism in the mistaken belief that half a gag is better than none.

For every engrossing rank-and-file story, there are endless self-congratulatory explanations and podium highlights.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, big studio Hollywood hitmakers should consider themselves lauded to the max in Jason Friedberg and Aaron Selzer's Epic Movie, the latest (and epically unfunny) entry in the movie parody franchise.

Despite the presence of Glen Matlock, Steve Dior and a handful of other punk rockers, plus a slew of oblique eyewitness who lurked around before and after the fact, the documentary soon bogs down in tiresome minutiae.

Unfortunately, with its unconvincing action, preachy script and flat performances, the picture winds up less moving than most typical journeyman documentaries on the subject.

A comic routine that quickly grows stale as the film devolves into a soppy romance sustained solely by the actors' chemistry.

Garden of Eden sends sleek, half-nude bodies glumly cavorting through lush Riviera landscapes in a paradigm of unintentional camp.

In this shoestring outing, Susan Streitfeld ("Female Perversions") opts for an unsettling mix of low-tech cinematic tricks and temporal reshufflings to simulate the process of enlightenment to sometimes laudable, usually ludicrous effect.

Stellar thesps gamely strive to elevate the one-note material, but gravity ultimately defeats them in this relentless downer.

Hampered by pedestrian, underpopulated mise-en-scene, a sketchy script and uneven thesping, “Destiny” definitely underwhelms.

Grotesquely straining to ridicule and validate its hero simultaneously, A Novel Romance will disappoint even Guttenberg diehards.

Woefully amateurish psychological thriller.

In “The Greatest” (2009) and “Country Strong” (2010), Feste proved herself quite skilled, if not especially innovative, at limning her characters’ emotional travails. But subtlety, complexity and even the slightest modicum of realism elude her here.

Satirist and "Daily Show" ex-contributor Mo Rocca's faux-disingenuous tone and nonstop jocularity dominate the documentary to quickly grating effect, significantly diminishing its impact.

Dustin Guy Defa's Bad Fever takes mumblecore to its reductio ad absurdum, featuring a hero whose utterances border on the unintelligible.

This transparent piece of propaganda blatantly overplays its hand.

One long tease -- not in a voyeuristic sense, since its heroine, as nakedly incarnated by pouty Polish sexpot Natalia Avelon, hides none of her obvious talents under a bushel.

Amateurish, half-hearted romantic comedy-cum-heist film twists itself into unconvincing knots to pull off a guilt-free bank robbery.

A terminally lame puberty comedy.

Pappas' scattershot musings on the social, political and metaphysical implications of extended healthy seniority come off as positively crystalline compared with the random natterings of the director's friends and neighbors, who are invited to chime in.

Culturally falling somewhere between "Sideways" and "Dumb and Dumber," this low-rent road movie similarly rides on principles of audience identification, largely minus competent helming, thesping or scripting.

Rain strives for a "Magnolia"-type tapestry of quiet desperation. But after 90 unremitting minutes of badly acted, atrociously written histrionic misery, pic leaves one praying for frogs.

Moore and Hill's script plunges Spacek in a mawkish stew of banality and improbability composed of bits and pieces of earlier roles.

Tedious enough to serve as a cautionary example of the pitfalls of DIY filmmaking.

French actress-writer-director Josiane Balasko plunges in with all the finesse of a hopped-up Pollyanna, her simplistic interpretation of an impaired sexagenarian coming close to outright parody.

Reveling in its provocative absurdity, Impolex is a madly uncommercial head-scratcher that will strike a dream-logic chord in some viewers and leave others in a "My kid could do better than that" mood.

The problem is not the stretched improbability of the film’s premise, or even the political incorrectness of its caricatured stereotypes (this is slapstick, after all), but rather that the actors fail to come off as funny in any of their incarnations.

A muddled script, spatially confounding direction and four thesps seemingly acting in four different movies are only a few of the problems with the misbegotten political thriller As Good as Dead.

In the absence of actors with the tremendous presence of Rutger Hauer and Jennifer Jason Leigh, picture loses its raison d'etre. Yet, directed by video helmer Dave Meyers with a certain fastidious distance from its plentiful gore, picture is also insufficiently over-the-top or corny to incite gleeful audience feedback.

Incompetent on every level, from its haphazard staging to its amateurish sound mix.

A flabby, unfunny action-comedy produced, directed and written by former WWE exec VP Mike Pavone, The Reunion boasts one of the most poorly assembled scripts to emerge from the wrestling franchise.

The characters are wearisomely one-dimensional and their situations and motives almost indecipherable due to poor exposition, weirdly pretentious dialogue and amateurish thesping.

The connective tissue between its separate segments is so tenuous and unconvincing that "Cries" almost suggests a failed anthology.