In truth, the film fizzles as much as it fumes.

A strange, but strangely entertaining combo of drag racing machismo, slapstick silliness, raunchy riffs, politically incorrect rants and sweet nothings.

Why Stop Now? feels trapped in the limbo between comedy and drama where many indies gamely venture, but from which few emerge with any resonance.

Somehow all that testosterone-infused blow-'-em-up craziness turns out to be kind of a kick.

It is a disappointment coming from writer-director David Cronenberg, who has proved such a master at mind games. Cronenberg is perhaps too faithful to the book. The topic is provocative and certainly timely, but the film never achieves the incisive power of his best work, "A History of Violence" for one. Even an A-list ensemble that includes Juliette Binoche, Samantha Morton and Paul Giamatti can't save it.

It may be the most fun you'll have with ghosts and zombies all year.

The Awakening just meanders like an aimless ghost.

Not only is the story dreamed up by producer Ahmet Zappa even odder than the title indicates, its execution gets increasingly irritating as the film goes on.

It sounds like a throwback to an earlier, more traditional style of Israeli filmmaking but it instead provides a view of that country that's as satisfyingly eccentric and unexpected as anything we've seen.

It all remains remarkably free of memorable comic situations, dramatic tension or emotional insight. Adolescence may be bruising, crazy or normal, but it's rarely this staid.

Complex, unexpected and dazzling, alternating relentless tension with resonant emotional moments, this is an exemplary espionage thriller that has a strong sense of what it wants to accomplish and how best to get there.

The most compelling aspect of The Green Wave, however, is the extensive footage shot clandestinely by amateurs using cellphones. What they recorded shows us the reality of what went down in a way nothing else can match.

Like the relationship she has chosen to dissect, the film is promising, disappointing, touching or frustrating, depending on the moment.

Rude, rowdy and raunchy, The Campaign gleefully skewers the current sad state of American politics. With a target that tempting, it's not surprising that this cynical and funny film hits more often than it misses.

Strictly for fans only.

An unusually intelligent cut at the relationship game.

A movie with a location named Snake Island should deliver more fun than this.

The documentary Craigslist Joe fulfills its unique premise - without providing much in the way of stakes, obstacles, tension or, frankly, greater meaning.

The relentlessness of corporate might is disturbing but no surprise; "Big Boys" is, however, an eye-opening look at the way the U.S. media fell lockstep behind Dole's claims.

Comes off as formless and inane.

Watching Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is like experiencing a thrilling unfinished symphony: The story is enthralling, but it's not over, and there's no telling where it's going. Which makes what we see on screen all the more involving.

Starts out as an agreeable, playfully off-color comedy of contemporary domestic manners and loses course to become a slack, tacky slapstick.

Assassin's Bullet is strictly '90s-era pay-cable genre-rip-off nostalgia, ripe for ridicule.

This is a train wreck you think you see coming, but no matter how prepared you are the nature and extent of the damage will overwhelm you.

Hopkins' character is the most fully realized in the movie, complete with a monologue that the actor makes work, even if its carpe diem message-mongering is as unconvincing as most everything else in 360.

There are moments when the film is a little too precious, taking time to preen at just how clever it is.

By far the film's deadliest weapon is McConaughey. The way the actor leans into threats, dropping his voice, wrapping eloquence in sinister tones, is skin-crawling. The muscles in his neck literally seem to tense one by one. And if the eyes are the window to the soul, you really don't want to peer for long into his. It is not an easy performance to watch, but it is unforgettable.

Ends the series' winning streak, or at least slows it down to a panting, dog-day crawl.

Like a drug that starts with a rush and ends with a headache, Total Recall is too much of a good thing.

You don't need to be a fan of Wagner, or even opera, to find this a fascinating glimpse of a dauntingly complex human endeavor.

Crossing many lines, director Mikkel Norgaard's loony feature doesn't always rise above its high jinks. But at its best, it's a sly dismantling of a familiar comedy template built on male cluelessness and female responsibility.

Sacrifice is mostly a melodrama concerned with deception, betrayal and just what makes a family. It is handsomely done and well-acted, but it lacks real energy or purpose.

The truth-is-stranger-than-fiction saga has been a hit on the festival circuit, winning top documentary prizes at Sundance for Sweden's Bendjelloul. What sets Searching for Sugar Man apart, though, is the way in which the filmmaker preserves a sense of mystery in the telling.

Best of all "Daughter" marks a return to old-school French moviemaking, the kind of classically well-made endeavor that unrolls before us like a beloved tapestry. This is the kind of film they don't make anymore, only here it is.

One perhaps does not expect a fully formed and cogent political platform from a "Step Up" film, but when a movie puts "Revolution" in the title and engages community action and social justice directly there should be more at the end than simply selling out to the first bidder.

Some of the phallic jokes work, others are really lame. Fortunately there are many other funny bits that have nothing to do with body parts that keep the laughs coming.

Dark Horse is a comedy of bad manners that's imbued with uncertainty about the world and one man's place in it. Modest and mildly entertaining, it's a miniature portrait of a potentially jumbo-sized failure.

There is a great deal of playfulness between the couple that will touch the romantic in most.

Hara-Kiri builds and builds as well, but its revelations are more character-derived that action-oriented, so the film never reaches the cattle-on-fire craziness of its predecessor.

The only payoff to Lloyd's structure is that the young actress Condola Rashad, a recent Tony nominee, is allowed to appear in both the film's first scene and its final segment to bring the story full-circle, though her enigmatic, beguiling presence underlines just the sort of energy missing from the rest of the film.

With observant fluidity and that grounding point of Qi's desire to fight once again, Chang roots the film in personal, individual stories, keeping larger metaphors for the nation at the edges.

Bhargava's naturalistic approach to capturing the sights and sounds of a city in full revelry on rooftops and in the streets is colorfully vivid - reminiscent of Wong Kar-Wai's silky urban baths - but it threatens to keep the human drama at arm's length.

In Greenfield's canny and compassionate view, their post-collapse reality check is an emblem of consumerism as affliction, and surprisingly relatable.

Potent, persuasive and hypnotic, The Dark Knight Rises has us at its mercy. A disturbing experience we live through as much as a film we watch, this dazzling conclusion to director Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy is more than an exceptional superhero movie, it is masterful filmmaking by any standard.

Matching the strength of these actresses and their personal drama is the film's masterful sense of time and place - the way it makes us feel that this was how it was during four pivotal days in July 1789 as the wheels came off the French monarchy.

This jazzy crime melodrama is engrossing and exhilarating because of Espinosa's impressive command of a wide range of filmmaking skills.

In Continental Drift, the filmmakers have gone a little crazy too, but in a good way. Smack dab in the middle of things there's a big Broadway-style number involving pirates.

Director/co-writer Adam Sherman's Bukowski-lite character study is one of those exercises in masculine self-pity and glib misogyny that frustrates because of its shortsightedness.

Somehow it is the waiting - for the fall that you expect is coming, for the marriage you figure will fall apart - that makes Take This Waltz one to make room for on your dance card.

It has some heartfelt performances and a nice, nondescript vibe, but it's largely unmemorable.

Stone is also a director who has often felt that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, and his weakness for bloody excesses of all sorts undermines much of his good work. You might not think that a motion picture called Savages could be too violent, too savage, but you would be wrong.

The secret, which "Part of Me" captures quite nicely, was to just let her be.

The result is that "Spider-Man" goes in and out of focus. This is a film that is memorable in pieces but not as a whole.

A spectacularly slapdash and wearingly half-hearted effort from the prolific writer-director-actor, lacking energy, structure or common sense.

Young's almost mystical musicianship is what saves it.

The movie treats a girl's burgeoning sexuality as neither epic nor problematic, or mutually exclusive of feelings of love, but rather simply, refreshingly, as one part of maturing.

Dramatically thin, formally uninspired and thematically weak, The Last Ride really goes nowhere.

Téchiné is a restless director, a fastidious storyteller who is not interested in what less adventurous movies have to say about human relationships. He wants to dig deeper, even if the results aren't always clear.

The comic targets run the gamut - race, religion, relationships, reality, etc. While nothing is sacred, the sacrilege comes with just enough sweetness to offset the salt.

Life, however, cannot be lived entirely on stage, and once the characters have to take off their thongs and return to their real lives, the film goes nowhere that is either interesting, involving or surprising.

Director Benh Zeitlin and his co-writer Lucy Alibar, a playwright whose "Juicy and Delicious" was the inspiration, have created characters that are wondrously indelible, distinctive of voice and set them inside a story that will unleash a devastating hurricane, and a flood of emotions, before it is done.

Netanyahu's letters, read with sensitivity by actor Marton Csokas, help to fill in gaps with their vivid and thoughtful poetics, whether he's discussing the horrors of war, his nostalgia for Jerusalem in the '50s or his outsider's view of "empty, meaningless life" in the States.

The film is driven by a we-are-the-world connectedness, but remains a travelogue in search of a defining center. The overall impression is as fleeting as much of the imagery that flashes across the screen.

Brave simply doesn't feel as much like the Pixar movies we've come to expect.

Starts imploding long before the massive asteroid hurtling toward Earth is due to deliver annihilation.

Given the subject matter, an exercise in delicacy and restraint was unlikely, but it's too bad that the film's concept is way more entertaining than what has ended up on-screen.

Campbell Scott's strong narration (well-written by Allentuck) and fun vintage musical selections effectively round out this provocative portrait.

Much like the image of Wright presented by the movie itself, Wish Me Away is graceful, sincere and heartfelt.

It is the achievement of Gerhard Richter Painting to shine a light on that hidden, private act as few other films have done.

Even with a gripping subject like blues-singing convicts, the documentary Music from the Big House has a disconcerting emotional distance.

Early on, it's tempting to dismiss the noir pastiche The Girl From the Naked Eye as a warmed-over pulp wannabe, what with the overwrought camera work and clichéd dialogue. But in its moments of sometimes comically violent antagonism, the movie shows some flashes of genre pizazz.

"It is extremely difficult to be like a mountain, to create stillness in the middle of hell," is how Abramovic describes her task. The most resonant part of this surprisingly emotional film demonstrates how powerful this interaction is, how it expresses something that is no less moving for being, literally, beyond words.

Blessed with unstoppable energy, an undeniably bawdy sense of fun and Tom Cruise in backless leather pants, it takes songs you may never have loved and turns them into a musical that's easy to enjoy.

You might not "like" Perry's movie, but it's hard to deny the forensically assured sensibility at work.

Weaver's last ditch attempt to upend rom-com convention and rewrite the movie as a skeevy lout's comeuppance hardly makes up for the clichéd slog that comes before.

The film brings us vividly inside the life - and head - of its determined hero, Bud Clayman, as he depicts the process of what he calls "getting normal."

It's not "On Golden Pond" by any stretch, but it is nice to have Fonda back in the fractious family way.

Here that soul-baring, soul-searching is the centerpiece of the film. Unfortunately, not much else about Lola Versus matches that standard.

Thurman, Meaney and Scott Thomas acquit themselves well, while Ricci's Clotilde is sweet yet posed. Pattinson, who has delivered some strong performances in non-"Twilight" fare, might be exploring the flip side of the Team Edward swoon factor but, finally, his Georges is merely vampiric.

The animation artistry of Madagascar 3 is at its best under the big top, all cotton candy fluff and razzle dazzle. The character development of this edition is the best of the rest as well.

Prometheus, unlike its predecessors, does not wear its themes lightly. It pushes too hard for significance, which is dicey in and of itself for genre material and contrasts badly with the standard nature of some of the story's plotting.

Oslo is an example of strong, confident filmmaking in which nothing is miscalculated or out of place. Anchored by a devastating performance by Anders Danielsen Lie, this portrait of existential despair is beautifully made without being self-conscious about its art.

A near complete exercise in mirthlessness and atonal satire, Cellmates is a sentence, all right.

There's likely an audience for the cloying and dizzying hip-hop dance flick Battlefield America, but even the most forgiving viewers may feel like they've been underestimated - and underserved.

You can't cure what you don't understand is one of the film's sobering messages.

The result is far from evenhanded, but capable of raising important questions.

At first American Animal has a mysterious unreality to it, a strange diorama about easy leisure's emptiness. But when James admits he's taken a job - upending the roomies' slacker utopia - American Animal becomes a philosophically strident evening of speechifying local theater (topic: human evolution).

This quiet, atmospheric drama (originally titled "A Year in Mooring") feels padded even in its brief running time; it's a slight mood piece posing as a character study.

Lacking real kick, High School winds up as irksome as a bag of ditch weed and as lame as the pun of the film's title.

The result is a well-meaning checklist of a film that lacks sufficient charm or off-the-field vigor to fully score its intended goal.

It's not your typical animated fare, but since the filmmakers can't quite decide whether its tale should be serious or silly, "Cat" trips and stumbles unsteadily between a bit of both.

The film is ultimately a stodgy, overblown and repetitive slog.

It is an absolute wonder to watch and creates a warrior princess for the ages. But what this revisionist fairy tale does not give us is a passionate love - its kisses are as chaste as the snow is white.

The lack of suspense and surprise in this dispiritingly rote film becomes its own form of contamination.

It all makes for a family therapist's dream scenario, but an otherwise choppy and predictable memory piece.

The script, by Oleg Negin and Zvyagintsev, uses spare dialogue to quietly devastating effect. Performances are superb across the board, framed in elegant widescreen compositions that simmer with violence.

Good trippy fun.

In this sentimental feel-good saga of an ultra-wealthy quadriplegic and the petty criminal who becomes his caretaker, the chemistry between the two lead actors goes a considerable way toward elevating the broad-strokes culture clash. That's crucial to a film that is, in essence, a love story.