I suspect it's that spirit as much as the injustice of her incarceration that drew so many people to her cause and inspired this labor-of-love documentary about her journey to hell and back.

Its sappy, melodramatic overtones – Bonnie Tyler not included – can be overlooked, as this is as much a political statement as it is a love story.

Which ultimately is what Applause is really about: applying the greasepaint of the daily mundane over the scar tissue of a damaged life, striving for a reality outside of a bottle (and off the stage) while still maintaining some semblance of what made this particular lion roar in the first place.

What does startle is how tiresome it all is.

I can't remember the last time I felt so seduced by a film.

Warrior resists many opportunities to seal an easy resolution, and for this you remain with it until the final punch.

Director Benny Chan has fashioned a visually sumptuous period wushu film with a strikingly contemplative and pacifist bent.

Most unforgivable, however, is the film's coda in which real Georgian victims pose for the camera with pictures of their loved ones lost in the five days of war. Using real people to impart the emotions that the entire film was unable to evince is simply cheap exploitation.

Contagion is certainly the most realistic portrayal of a global pandemic I've seen, but that doesn't make it the most entertaining, or even all that intellectually interesting.

The real tension of the piece lies in the sound design, with its layering of heavy breaths, inexplicably compromised frequencies, and invasive thwackings of no known origin to the ship hull.

About as humorless – and joyless – as they come.

Higher Ground may not be a true revelation, but it does show a viable path an actor might take to shape intelligent material on her own terms.

Echotone is scattered, for sure (the sound ordinance battle is poorly handled), but as an anecdotal account of Austin in the first decade of a new century, it's rarely anything less than compelling.

For one thing, Seven Days in Utopia feels an awful lot like Victor Salva's 2006 New Age uplifter "Peaceful Warrior." That film at least had the appeal of watching Nick Nolte play Yoda, whereas here Duvall simply seems to be playing Duvall.

"Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" meets a considerably tamed Van Wilder for a mediocre romp in the Hamptons.

Ultimately a shambling tale told with genial grace but little substance. It provides a pleasant buzz while it unfolds but vanishes quickly in a puff of smoke.

Colombiana is one long megayawn; I'd have garnered more titillating thrills rewatching freckle-faced Russkie sexbomb Natalya Rudakova strut her leggy, sassy stuff in Megaton and Besson's "Transporter 3."

Perhaps the discrete delegation of the thrills to the 1966 story and the moral quandaries to the 1997 story is what prevents The Debt from congealing as well as it might have. Life is rarely that neat.

Point Blank passes enjoyably, relentlessly, and determinedly to the moment of its final gasp.

The result is a somewhat functional blood feast for the exploitation crowd, but it's hardly a bead of sweat on the original's battered backside. Oh, and the score? Basil Poledouris' bombastic brass is still No. 1.

Undeniably gripping stuff.

As the film's central focal point, Simpson (who also co-wrote the script) is an awful zero – you could hardly imagine a more uncharismatic lead – and his embarrassing swings at big emotion in the climax prove the final blow to a film already hobbled by mawkishness.

The fact that Troy Nixey's debut feature is one creepyass frightmare is what matters, and boy, does he put the nail in that metaphorical coffin the first time out. It's not perfect, but it's awfully close.

An unpredictably bizarre and tonally askew Hong Kong freak show.

Far more coherent than its immediate predecessor, Spy Kids: All the Time in the World in 4D benefits greatly from its two likable young leads and some of the series' wittiest, pun-filled writing.

Sturgess, saddled with a caddish character, is less compelling, but he does provide the film's only spot of unloosed, raw emotion. Everything else feels too precisely and too compactly assembled for much impact.

Fans of the irritatingly limp and relatively toothless Twilight series may actually find their tormented inner selves fondled to exquisite, precoital perfection with this slick and gleeful adaptation of the classic Eighties vampire-next-door flick.

Gleeson is triumphant in this portrait of a complex man who is concurrently sensitive, boorish, brilliant, singular, and unforgettable.