Scott Brown

East of Havana picks at these politico-philosophical threads rather than pulling them, and the sense of a larger movement is fleeting. There's a beat, but we never quite see who's dancing to it.

Ken Takakura, a great rain-creased oak of an actor, delivers a quietly massive performance.

Teetering on an abyss of meta-wackiness, The Last Shot -- a movie about movie fakery, based on a true story about a fake movie -- succeeds modestly where, by all rights, it should fail miserably.

Accepted's winning dumbness and breezy bons mots save it from the pit.

A deliriously, defiantly unfocused headrush, Stick It is primarily an exercise in exercise.

So Much So Fast (spanning five years) elegantly presents both a critique and a celebration of American optimism.

Danny Boyle's glittering, deadpan, nihilistic little thriller.

There are some genuinely clever moments of physical comedy, and the inevitable crudeness is offset by winning whimsy. Without has all the freshness of moldering Playboys stashed under a mattress, but it evokes what few boys-will-be-boys larks can: chumminess.

For the Western viewer, the cultural divide acts as a saccharine filter, and Kamikaze, a cult hit in Japan, becomes a mesmerizing lesson in otherness.

Refreshingly, it's actually about action, albeit arbitrary action, and how it defines us and keeps us alive.

Zathura is a rarity: a stellar fantasy that faces down childhood anxieties with feet-on-the-ground maturity.

12:08 East of Bucharest is a shrewdly built comedy, but the characters are broad-verging-on-cheap unholy hick fools.

For 20 years, Megumi's family doesn't know where she is; when they find out, the frustrations and uncertainties only mount. But as thickets of history and culture are (too) neatly avoided, the viewer is also left in the dark.

The music's sensational, but you keep waiting for the pledge number to flash up.

Feast isn't quite demented enough to reach Raimi-an heights, but Gulager uses parts of the monster-movie buffalo even the buffalo didn't know existed.

For anyone zombified by creaky thriller clichés, Skeleton is a fine little shot in the head.

The collection can be summed up in four words I never thought I'd see together: science-fiction chamber music.

Jaw set but never stiff, he (Fillion) gets both the Whedon wit and the Whedon grandiloquence between cheek and gum, and gives the whole enterprise the heft of a real saga.

Gibson stages the movie episodically, as a series of quiet actors' moments; his direction is scrupulous, tasteful, and, I'm afraid, rather sodden. By the end, he wrings a tear or two, but more from the story's sentimental outline than from anything he does to fill it in.

Blessed with excellent turns by Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne, this feel-gooder revels in its hip-to-be-square hyperliteracy, and neatly exceeds its own PSA-ness, practically amounting to a black, preteen "Good Will Hunting."

Step, under the sure hand of director-choreographer Anne Fletcher, quickly discovers its own virtuoso charms. Two of them are its leads.

As a documentary, Jesus Camp could lose its haunted-house score and contrapuntal Air America refrains and still deliver its message: that, here and elsewhere, fundamentalism is no longer content with a separate peace. It wants the meat.

The film is a furious full-court press, its subjects aflame with the kind of passion only youth can furnish.

Beerfest panders shamelessly to the 15-year-old in this 30-year-old... without assuming he is a 15-year-old. It's R-rated puerility for actual immature grown-ups.

The flick is best in its bittier moments (watch for the stellar cameos), and there's nothing to trouble the tots.

The characters are perfectly evolved screwups and the premise has potential. It lacks only the discipline of a 30-minute episode -- or a YouTube video.

Writer-director Alison Murray picks at a hard, true hurt in this zombie melodrama of defloration, but nothing beyond that hurt really comes into focus.

Coffey, a tart comic mind who should cast his net farther from the 405, pads his story with more and more familiar degradations, and Watts plays each one to the hilt.