Niccol gives audiences a very amusing puzzle about authenticity, fraud, and the uses and abuses of technology. That is a fine and funny feat. The very folks responsible for our obsession with celebrity will likely love it. And in loving it, they will no doubt let themselves off the hook.

The Roost advances a nifty man-vs.-nature scenario that harks back to Fessenden's own "Wendigo" and provides a nice chaser to a summer movie season populated by cuddly penguins and benevolent cheetahs.

The pleasure of La Moustache is that it doesn't feel the need to explain itself at every turn. Part absurdist comedy about the institution of marriage, part paranoid Kafkaesque fantasy, it's a minor-key reverie on the way our own lives can sometimes feel alien to us.

It's whiz-bang, techno fun, with a touch of Latino flavor.

Itself an observational relationship comedy, Cold Weather's underlying tension is reminiscent of an old-fashioned comedy of remarriage.

It's a finely tuned Motor City engine: The action, including a nighttime car chase through a blinding snowstorm, is fast, brutal and efficient; the Motown soundtrack never cuts out; and as a gangster called Sweet, the British-Nigerian actor Chiwetel Ejiofor gives an electrifying performance.

Under Mangold’s sure if uninspired hand, the new Yuma is reasonably exciting and terse, and, like its predecessor, built around a memorable villain of ambiguous villainy.

The film sniffs mightily at Milos Forman's "Amadeus," but even if you found that film over the top and off the wall, you might find yourself wishing for a little more "Volfie" and a little less Saint Wolfgang.

Slight but charming comedy.

May be scant on character and plot development, but it’s rich with affection for daydream believers

Free of the disclaiming jokey sneer that defaces so much of contemporary neo-noir.

In a boom time for movies about the scars of the battlefield, Half Moon reminds that the unending strife and religious fundamentalism of the Middle East kills not just people but culture too.

It requires nothing more of a viewer than quiet complaisance, which is rewarded in turn by pleasant scenery, a few mild laughs, and the dependably involving presence of Weaver and, especially, Neuwirth.

Although the dialogue initially flakes with awkward exposition, writer Ruth Epstein and director Harvey Kahn have fashioned a riveting thriller full of good scares and learned, muckraking insight into the global labyrinth of oil and politics.

Excellent performances.

Surprisingly enjoyable, even if you'd hesitate to call it a complete success. Indeed, Figgis expects you to sit back and roll with the pleasurable moments.

Niftily shot and edited, The Grace Lee Project isn't just a witty unpacking of stereotype. It's also a welcome freshening of the old documentary saw that there's no such thing as an ordinary person.

Stellan Skarsgård's deceptively low-key performance as the beleaguered musician -- furtive, indignant, drowning in self-pity blended with a kind of ruined nobility -- pushes the emotional temperature to a quiet fever pitch.

The results are charming if rarely thrilling, with outstanding performances from Joan Allen and William H. Macy.

It does pry much deeper into the band’s unexpectedly complex and contradictory personalities.

This is a small, funny movie drawn from the radical notion that a love born of late-night lust can survive the glaring light of day.

Immensely moving.

Smart, witty look at the human cost of free-market reforms and globalization.

Election is finally, necessarily, as much about sex as it is about politics -- wanting it, getting it, losing it.

A witty exploration of cultural mythology, while simultaneously contributing to that mythology.

Grotesquely violent, horribly funny.

This is the umpteenth movie I’ve seen this year about guys in their 30s who aren't quite sure what they want to do with their lives, and it's the only one that strikes a real chord, because it's neither an exaltation nor a condemnation of slackerdom, but rather just a sweet little fable about how sometimes the life that you think could be so much better is actually pretty damn good already.

The rueful ghost of François Truffaut hovers over writer-director Yann Samuell's wonderfully capricious tale of Gallic lovers with no idea of when to say finis.