Robert Wieckiewicz is good as the conflicted protagonist, but the most valuable player here is cinematographer Jolanta Dylewska, who turns in handsome work even though most of the action transpires in inky blackness.

Harrelson returns in Moverman's second feature playing a similar character, a bullheaded LAPD officer whose long career with the force is unraveling amid a succession of brutality complaints, and although the role offers the same macho quotient as the earlier one, it's counterbalanced in this case by funny, observant scenes of his gyno-centric home life.

Pine, who expertly approximated William Shatner in the Star Trek reboot, seems to have picked up some of the actor's air of self-serious buffoonery, and it suits him well; as Witherspoon's best pal, late-night TV comedian Chelsea Handler holds down what might be called the Nora Ephron part, dispensing an endless stream of bawdy man jokes.

As pulp sci-fi this Fox release is pretty good, but it's also commendable for its sensitive depiction of adolescent behavior: even the bullying scenes avoid the caricature of most studio films.

The interviewees are good storytellers--particularly the eccentric research scientists who tested the effects of nicotine on rats in the early 80s--and the editing keeps their stories moving at a lively pace.

This has some currency as ethnography, showing how tribal and interpersonal matters mesh with sports mania, but it remains a formidably dull account of an inherently exciting pastime.

Like Walter Benjamin, Bonello associates this insularity with both innocence and the 19th century; and when, in the final sequence of House of Pleasures, he dispenses with the security exuded by these subjects, the effect is like being shaken violently out of a dream.

The auction makes for a pretty good hinge between the two narratives and, more importantly, allows Madonna to indulge her fetish for fine English things.

Espinosa never conveys any sort of perspective on the material, as Scott does through his obsessive attention to production detail; the stylization feels empty, distracting from whatever simple pleasures the routine plot (involving double agents and stolen microchips) might have delivered.

Most of the time it plays like the movie adaptation of a Land's End catalogue, making monogamy seem essential by associating it with high-end interior design.

The argument is so tilted against windmills (sorry) that this comes perilously close to an advocacy video. But Israel deserves credit for delivering the bad news that wind power, like natural gas and nuclear, comes with its own array of social and environmental headaches.

Visually and dramatically it works well - it's Shakespeare by way of "Black Hawk Down" - but as an allegory of modern-day geopolitics it doesn't really go anywhere.

Passably creepy chiller.

Director James Watkins (Eden Lake) treats the material with surprising reverence, generating good clean scares from atmosphere and character revelations rather than shock editing or gore.

Ramsay seems to be seriously intent on probing the outer limits of a mother's love and forgiveness, but the boy (played by a trio of child actors) is so unremittingly evil that the movie begins to feel like a grotesque remake of that old John Ritter comedy "Problem Child" (1990).

Writer-director Celine Sciamma breaks little ground here, but her story is nicely scaled to the gender-rigid world of childhood, where boys playing soccer together take as much pride in their spitting skills as any scored goal.

Leth moves lightly and briskly, streamlining the weird material into something elemental and true; he's also assembled a knockout supporting cast.

Though Istvan Szabo (Being Julia) was slated to direct at one point, the assignment ultimately went to Rodrigo Garcia, who's known for his female ensemble dramas (Nine Lives, Mother and Child) but demonstrates no particular affinity for this material.

Like Anthony Mann's "The Naked Spur" (1953) or "Man of the West" (1958), the movie draws on the terrifying beauty of the natural world and generates tension from the volatile dynamics of a carefully observed group.

The movie is hugely compelling on a moral and emotional level - I was completely hooked - yet it also revealed to me in numerous small and concrete ways what it's like to live in a contemporary theocracy.

This precious story line, adapted from a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, keeps shriveling up against the backdrop of a traumatized city; only gaunt Max von Sydow, as a mute old man who accompanies the young hero on his rounds, supplies the grave authority the premise demands.

In minimizing the novel's morbidity, Tran also denies its obsessive pull.

Bale admirably shoulders the burden of Western identification figure, but the heart of the story is the ongoing tension between the schoolgirls and the hookers, who see in each other aspects of womanhood that are out of their respective reach.

The movie he (Wenders) went on to make with her Tanztheater Wuppertal is more than an elegy; his meticulous use of 3D endows the performances with a corporeality and intimacy hitherto unseen in a dance film.

George Lucas served as executive producer for this effects-heavy action film about the Tuskegee Airmen, and it feels as synthetic and dull as "The Phantom Menace."

There's a good deal of pleasure to be had in the clockwork precision of her hand-to-hand combat, which Soderbergh often shoots in profile to showcase her wall-climbing backflips. The story surrounding it is comparably smooth, skilled, and mechanical, though a lot less memorable.

The dialogue is superior, though, and director Roman Polanski has cast the characters well; Foster is particularly impressive in a stridently unattractive role, as the pinched, angry liberal who's orchestrated the meeting but doesn't get quite the apology she wants.

This conceit works precisely because Thatcher's popular appeal was so deeply rooted in nostalgia for the days of empire, and Streep, no fan of Thatcher, nicely undercuts the poignancy of her current condition with flashbacks that reveal her brittle arrogance in office.