The injustice of the girl's thwarted career goes only so far, though Feret pushes it in some interesting directions.

This is affecting and thematically pointed but much more pat than the situation that precedes it, in which two different realities must coexist uneasily on the same screen.

This isn't at all scary, but the rough images can be weirdly compelling, the movie's conspiratorial jive enhanced by the fact that the lunar surface looks like someone's backyard.

Director Oliver Schmitz is particularly attentive to the superstition and ingrained sexism that make life miserable for these people, though he also seems to view women as the country's best hope.

This French kidnapping drama drags on for so long I'd have paid the ransom out of my own pocket just to wrap things up.

It almost goes without saying that Harlin is the wrong man to direct a docudrama about the Russia-Georgian conflict of 2008, which displaced tens of thousands of people and left hundreds of others dead. Lacking political insight or sympathy for real people (as opposed to action-movie types), Harlin can offer little more than tasteless spectacle.

The movie, to its credit, recognizes that the quest for spirituality sometimes leads to another pew.

By accident or design, the resolution here is morally ambiguous and vaguely distasteful, which may be the reason I liked it.

If the combination of Christian bromides and golf tips strikes you as a recipe for boredom, stay away.

A strong cast fails to rescue this ponderous Oscar bait.

Saldana makes this watchable, James supplies a fitful plausibility, and director Olivier Megaton (a former graffiti artist) keeps things racing along, preposterously.

This absorbing PBS-style documentary by Joseph Dorman follows Aleichem from his early years in the Russian shtetl of Voronko through the pogroms that would drive the Jewish diaspora of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Joffe, a British screenwriter (The American, 28 Weeks Later) debuting as director, hits some of these notes in his adaptation of Brighton Rock, but the movie's religious flourishes seem more rhetorical than heartfelt.

Like Nicole Holofcener's "Please Give" (2010), this turns on the friction between an unusually altruistic character and the self-centered people around him, though screenwriters David Schisgall and Evgenia Peretz never pursue their premise into the sort of moral comedy that so distinguished the other movie.

The remake plays like a shallower, more clichéd variation on his masterpiece, "Pan's Labyrinth," but its mix of gory effects and deliciously old-fashioned visuals make for a classy, scary horror show.

The visual effects are as gleefully shoddy as ever, and the playful ideas sometimes achieve a dreamlike suggestiveness.

Directed by Djo Tunda Wa Munga, who studied filmmaking in Belgium, this is raw, sardonic, and formally complex.

Michael Webber's documentary "The Elephant in the Living Room" (2010) makes such a powerful case against private ownership of exotic wild animals that this portrait of circus owner David Balding and his beloved elephant Flora seems sentimental by comparison.

Much of the film's impact comes from the nimble editing of Chris King (whose previous work includes Exit Through the Gift Shop) and Gregers Sall.

Watchable but not very gripping. Patricia Clarkson does her best with an underwritten part as the young man's terminally ill mother, and British actor Ken Stott is excellent as the grieving husband she leaves behind.

Rife with the oldest and simplest pleasures of 3-D movies: all sorts of objects fly at the camera, and the climactic battle takes place over a deep, dark chasm. At its best the movie suggests a funhouse at a state-of-the-art county fair; at its worst it's a fairly dumb celebration of brute violence.

This remake is good fun, aided in no small degree by Colin Farrell's strutting, dead-eyed performance as the bloodsucker.

A film that throbs with life while keenly noting its passing, this is an ode to the village that welcomed - and let thrive - the director's refugee parents.

Finely calibrated French neonoir.

Kondracki relies on sharp, quotidian detail to show how such atrocities become business as usual; she also makes a point of humanizing the victims of trafficking to emphasize the obscenity of the crimes.

When the interrupters do succeed, the results can be riveting.

As in many reductive period pieces, there are no real characters here, just archetypes, namely reactionary cretins and sensitive souls who anticipate modern attitudes.

The film contains a remarkable level of violence, yet never establishes a tone that would make it seem funny or truly shocking; the jokes flounder in an air of half-hearted spite.