Scott Tobias

Knightley is pure Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy, a vinyl-toting sparkplug who serves mostly to shake Carell from his dead-eyed stupor, but the relationship between the two becomes more touching as their wayward journey goes on.

Though Dick focuses heavily on just a few women, The Invisible War builds to a stunning montage of victim after victim telling their story to the camera without pseudonyms or silhouettes.

In spite of his considerable intelligence and cinematic gifts, Pawlikowski isn't Roman Polanski, so the delusions and psychosis of his put-upon lead character doesn't have the right intensity. Fifth feels like a literary bauble, chipped by imperfections.

Peel away the many layers of reference, and all that's left of Americano is the raw need of a lonely, confused young man who's distant from his family, awash in vague memories, and struggling to find himself. This is less a movie than a patient for pop psychologists.

There's an opportunity here for screenwriter Marek Posival and director Robert Lieberman to play up the squeamishness of upper-middle-class torturers who don't fit the profile, but they're too busy tending to horror-thriller clichés.

Take Lola Versus, a Greta Gerwig vehicle that feels like a pilot awaiting pick-up from a network that doesn't exist.

The scenes between Gelber and Blair are the strongest in Dark Horse, because they form a bond not out of shared interests or passion, but a weary kind of compromise.

It's a celebration of libertine sexuality - nothing more, nothing less - and almost remarkably untroubled by any of the dramatic issues it raises. Much of its 79 minutes is spent marveling over how skillfully the actors simulate the real thing.

The trouble with A Cat in Paris lies not in its orchestration, which is mostly impeccable, but with what little is being orchestrated. It's well plotted but a little rote, clever but a far cry from ingenious, attractive but not particularly evocative. When it ends, it leaves behind the faintest of paw prints.

It's a crude, angry battering ram of a film, much more concerned with counter-messaging than aesthetics, but it gets the job done.

Sonnenfeld's best movies function like elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions, with visual gags popping out on a precise calibration of gears and springs, and Cohen's script, however derivative, is a stable apparatus.

It's mostly boilerplate horror, plucking visual ideas from better sources and relying on the sick novelty of referencing an actual catastrophe.

Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson's most completely satisfying film since the one-two of "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums," in part because it's the perfect distillation of both.

Trier doesn't allow the bleakness of the material to swamp the film in a miserablist tone, but he doesn't hold back, either, in revealing every hairline crack in Lie's fragile psyche.

Connelly, Harris and Amy Madigan, as Tipton's devastated wife, all do their best to bring a measure of soul to Black's creations, but there's something fundamentally synthetic about Virginia, which lays bare its influences without doing much to reanimate them.

The best moments of Maïwenn's Polisse, about the dedicated members of a Child Protection Unit in northern Paris, have the same quality, a fly-on-the-wall docu-realism that feels eerily like the real thing.

It's an austere Russian drama with shades of Hitchcock.

Despite some promising early goofiness involving full-contact soccer and the quest for a chicken burrito, Battleship plays it regrettably straight most of the time, as if the fate of the world really might rest on how well the Navy can hurtle projectiles at alien warships. With eyes closed, the movie uncannily resembles a giant baby playing with pots and pans.

The film is mostly an excuse to do a pregnancy-themed "Love Actually," an overblown symphony of birthing stories that reaches its crescendo in the maternity ward.

The rigors of identifying and training companion dogs are fascinating, but they would fit more comfortably in a non-fiction format, where nobody has to play pretend. As it stands, the dog is the only creature who acts naturally.

The Dictator keeps the gags coming as fast as it can manage, sometimes in big gross-out setpieces like an impromptu baby delivery, but more often in the general fusillade of hit-or-miss jokes that hit at a better-than-average rate.

The key point about God Bless America is that it's extreme but not exaggerated, a dark comedy that indulges - and questions - a violent, misanthropic fantasy about laying waste to the cultural landscape while staying grounded in a recognizable reality.

The film has an earnest quality that asserts itself more and more as it sputters along, and the men reveal more personal reasons to insert themselves into the boy's life. It's a good lesson for other films of its ilk: Leaving the world of indie disaffection is an important first step on the road to greatness.

Any proper adaptation of Dark Shadows, even one that acknowledges and celebrates its camp silliness as much as Burton's does, has to immerse itself in soap opera, too, and it's here that the director's lack of conviction becomes apparent.

Glawogger studiously avoids explicitness until he gets to Mexico, where he finally goes past the bartering stage and behind closed doors as business is conducted. Pleasure isn't part of the transaction.

Though the lightness of Bernie can get disconcerting at times, even cartoonish, Linklater approaches the story with a bemused curiosity that seems about right under the circumstances.

There are times when the title is more a wish than an action - because just as cocaine addicts are forever chasing that first high, there's always the hunger to recapture a lost feeling again, even for those who have spent years in recovery. Pity those who fall off the wagon.

The dramatic stakes are high in Fightville, and Epperlein and Tucker shine a little light on the margins of this marginalized sport.