Scott Tobias

At a time when movies, even from Hollywood, are finally turning their eyes to conflicts abroad, Annapolis seems conspicuously myopic and reactionary in its denial of the world outside campus, though a movie this formulaic wouldn't pass muster during peacetime, either.

Lawrence clamors for the spotlight. If he ever found a way to make desperation look like charisma, he'd be the funniest man in America.

A brainteaser of the first order, Primer ranks among the best of recent thrillers such as "Memento" or "The Matrix," which rupture the fabric of reality and radically destabilize the narrative in kind.

Like so many late-period Allens, it leaves behind the feeling that he's made this movie before, but better.

Could not be more ordinary.

At its best, Serbis is a vibrant slice of life that establishes this theater as a living organism, nurturing a society of outcasts; it's like "Ship Of Fools" with blowjobs and boil-lancings.

Since women are usually such foreign creatures in Scorsese's work, he seemed an unlikely choice to direct Burstyn's feminist vehicle, but his aggressive style suits her uncompromising character.

Inside Deep Throat starts small and keeps expanding outward until there's seemingly no facet of American life the phenomenon hasn't touched.

Unlike "Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind," which holds the memories of a doomed affair as precious, there's nothing bittersweet about Ozon's failed romance, but its problems are equally true.

In spite of the title, there's nothing particularly "real" about Lars And The Real Girl, just a couple layers of quirk several stops removed from the world as we know it.

The major problem with Pattinson’s ascendancy to the Dean throne: His soulfulness is a pose, an effect achieved more by hair and makeup (and yes, genetics) than the scenes where he’s required to emote at high volume.

Chadha doesn't seem at home with either Austen or Bollywood, and her ambitions far exceed her competence in the song-and-dance numbers, which are a clutter of stiff choreography and silly original lyrics.

Tsai's latest, What Time Is It There?, runs his usual themes and obsessions through a whimsical premise worthy of Wong Kar-Wai, striking such an exquisite balance between humor and despair that the moods comfortably coexist, just as they do in real life.

Adored stands at the crossroads where Telemundo and beefcake magazines collide, but for strangers to that intersection, the film's camp value is exceeded only by its tedium.

Caught in a pretentious no-man’s land between horror and melodrama.

Plays like an old-fashioned romantic comedy with updated hardware.

Glory Road treats history as if it were a 7th-grade social-studies text laid out in a 16-point font, getting the basics right without trying to evoke any of the details that would make it memorable. In other words, it gets the Bruckheimer treatment.

More than anything, From Justin To Kelly needs Simon Cowell, the fork-tongued Idol judge who gives the show its only sliver of tension.

It's a measure of the film's lack of imagination that Morris Chestnut, as an aspiring songwriter logging time as a mall Santa, can't even think of a good fake occupation.

Takes the form of a wounded behemoth, battling to negotiate a compromise between a strong artistic vision and franchise expectations. It doesn't fully succeed on either count, but its integrity and substance stand out like an oasis in a field of cotton candy.

Stripped down to the barest genre essentials, Saw is a spring-loaded killing machine, packed with sadistic little deathtraps and ludicrous macabre twists, and its quickie sequel offers more of the same, which should again appease viewers who enjoy being jerked around.

There's a surprising intelligence and gravity working beneath its bubbly surface, informed by an unusual degree of empathy for its adolescent audience and a rare willingness to confront the darker regions of youth experience.

The entries aren't equally strong, of course, but each comes from a sharp outsider's perspective, approaching Tokyo as a strange, mysterious organism that infects the populace.

Using simplicity as another form of deception, Mamet lays out a hand of three-card monte for the audience to see, then tricks it into guessing falsely. In this case, it's worth getting fooled out of a little cash.

Assembles the most motley group of incompetents this side of a "Police Academy" movie, yet somehow misses the laughs. But humorlessness is probably the least of the film's problems, lagging behind amateur-night performances from the no-name cast, a homogenous visual palette (and from a music-video director, no less!), and lots of pointless sadism.

Though the laughs in Songs From The Second Floor tend to stick in the throat, they're also cathartic and oddly comforting, because the world outside the movie theater is bound to look cheerier than the one on the screen.

So why, given its moment-to-moment surplus of visual imagination, does the film feel so hollow and unsatisfying?

It's a tame, hypocritical fantasy.

Humpday carefully raises the stakes until it hits a finale loaded with humor, tenderness, and delicious ambiguity. It’s like "Old Joy" by way of Judd Apatow.

For the first time in Greengrass' career, the politics too often get ahead of the action, so points that might have been subtly embedded in the story are instead laid out like a left-wing editorial.

Pleasing low-key comedy.

Shot with such grit that the lenses seem coated with grease, Fratricide offers a myopic impression of an unnamed German city, and that's probably the point, since so much of its territory and opportunities are sealed off from these immigrant characters.

The documentary dashes any lingering hope that Pixies would ever record a new album, even though it makes no definitive statement to that effect.

An abysmal screwball comedy that relies heavily on idiocy from both sides of the screen.

4 Months unfolds like one of those street-level Dardenne brothers movies (Rosetta, L'Enfant).

Intimate, moving documentary.

By the time the film escalates into a suitably ridiculous Grand Guignol finale, all connection to reality has been severed.

The lesson here is that dogs don't need "attitude." They're loveable enough on their own.

A refreshingly old-fashioned splatter movie.

A deeply off-putting independent comedy.

Mostly, Nothing But The Truth operates a lot like Billy Ray's "Shattered Glass" and "Breach," offering up the sort of no-nonsense, meat-and-potatoes docudrama that's in short supply these days.

American Swing could use the flair of similar portraits of disco-era debauchery like "Boogie Nights" or "Inside Deep Throat," but it’s even-handed in capturing the operation’s ambition and hubris. Just don’t bring an appetite.

At least Douglas has a good time bringing the smarminess that McConaughey so studiously avoids.

Kudlácek rounds up a who's-who of experimental filmmakers, Haitian artists, dance choreographers, archivists, and programmers, all of whom reflect intelligently (though dryly) on Deren's importance in underground cinema.

Camp offers plenty of reasons to bristle at its cheery shamelessness, but it's too high-spirited and charming to resist.

Not surprisingly, the remake gussies up the grindhouse roughness of the first film, which makes it relatively more palatable-yet still vapid and repulsive-while also, in a perverse way, selling it out.

Right up to the ludicrous finale and an even more improbable denouement, everything rings Hollywood-false. More galling still, the filmmakers' inventions take the zing out of the facts.