Even though all the supporting elements of a superior film are here, the actual plot that everything is at the service of is disappointing. The texture of reality and the sheen of fine craft disguise this for a while, but not forever.

As it happens, this recycled reclamation of underdogs saga is neither as bad as it sounds nor quite as good as it could be.

Courageous, proves a particularly clunky, tunnel-visioned vehicle whose overbearing, overlong script nearly smothers the movie's quibble-free message.

With its telegraphed twists and clunky pacing, the film would be unbearable were it not for the fine trio of Craig, Weisz and Naomi Watts, all more or less slumming.

Finding Joe is so centered on the self-realization of the individual that it provokes one to contemplate the millions of oppressed, imperiled people that haven't the luxury of pursuing such an inner quest.

Adrià's philosophy of food emerges through watching him work; the look on his face as he tries dish after dish, the level of concentration applied to getting an ice vinaigrette just so, explains it all.

No image or moment is grounded – every shot is augmented with restless animation, smart-ass narration or video game sounds. The artificiality of it all is smothering.

The directing debut for screenwriter Bryan Goluboff, Beware the Gonzo isn't bad, it's just that for a film aiming to celebrate media rebellion it feels timid and unadventurous.

Thoughtful and moving, if often heavy-handed, The Whale follows the remarkable story of Luna and will appeal to animal lovers of all ages.

A farce of misunderstanding first, body-count nightmare second and at nearly all times a refreshingly upending horror-comedy bromance.

The barbs feel stale at best, squandered at worst, and the ominous music that accompanies each sounds as if it has been lifted from the silent movie era.

Lonergan has created a forceful yet extremely fitful film that teases with moments of brilliance only to frustrate in the end. Margaret is an unrealized dream, one you wish he'd gotten as right as his 2000 debut, "You Can Count on Me."

A not very good romantic comedy made somewhat bearable by Faris.

As a comedy about a young man with cancer, it needs to be serious enough to be real as well as light enough to be funny. Though it falls off the wagon at times, it maintains its balance remarkably well.

From the first moments of the eerie storm that opens the story, dread is the prevailing mood of this pre-apocalyptic drama - a film very much about this moment in time.

Abduction is just the third movie John Singleton has directed in the past decade, and it contains neither the passion nor the competence of his two previous genre efforts - "2 Fast 2 Furious" and "Four Brothers."

Warrick finds subliminal messaging in political campaigns, military operations and even in the music played in big box stores. Warrick is also rightly concerned by the power of media conglomerates to manipulate the news.

Much in this wholly absorbing and poignant documentary is familiar from numerous previous Holocaust accounts, but Mago and her quiet sense of moral obligation provides a fresh perspective.

The performances have heart, and a sorrowful tenderness courses through the self-described "fairy tale," even at its kitschiest.

Whatever the facts of the case, Berlin 36 doesn't clear the bar for dramatic impact.

This expertly constructed film follows the curious and tragic life of the troubled chess icon as he went from child prodigy to global legend to paranoid recluse.

Black Power Mixtape's contemporary audio, though it tries hard to involve us, can't hold a candle to this kind of footage. But if having these current voices on board helped get the luminous glimpses of the past back on the screen, we owe them a vote of thanks.

The picture benefits from its performances, notably Evans' roguish appeal as a guy simultaneously driven and destructive.

If anything, watching the film is like attending an old-style Southern tent revival - you want to believe in the fight against all that fire and brimstone. Heck, you want to join the righteous brigade. But when the lights go up and the fever dies down, it feels more like you've witnessed a show than a real showdown with the devil.

Starring Brad Pitt in top movie star form, it's a film that's impressive and surprising.

The insistently quirky details don't disguise the fact that the drama grows ever more predictable and precious, complete with falling-in-love montage. Screenwriter Jason Lew's character insights take the form of the obvious.

Special Treatment is a serious film, but Labrune allows a touch of dark comedy in her depictions of Alice's clients and Xavier's patients.

Summer Pasture has an earthy intimacy and compassion for its subjects that will have you thinking about their plight long after they've packed up and moved on for winter.

In making Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure, a documentary that tells the story of not just the tapes but their strange and increasingly sad afterlife, Australian filmmaker Matthew Bate faces the challenge not only of visualizing the audio artifacts but also of finding a way to position their makers and explain all that has transpired since the tapes were initially recorded.

The film is a reminder of the pleasure to be found in simple things - reading a book, sitting on a park bench with a friend, spending an afternoon with Margueritte.

A sensuous intellectual romp whose strong casting makes it involving, even when sentimentality creeps into the story or ideas present themselves in boldface.

An extraordinarily moving examination of how the AIDS epidemic both devastated and transformed San Francisco's gay community, this clear-eyed and soulful documentary brings us inside the contagion in a way that is so intimate, so personal, you feel like you're hearing about these catastrophic events for the first time.

Drive is a Los Angeles neo-noir, a neon-lit crime story made with lots of visual style. It's a film in love with both traditional noir mythology and ultra-modern violence, a combination that is not ideal.

At times, Happy, Happy is cutting comedy at its brutal best; at times, it slips on the black ice. Still, the love of life is exuberant, the pain exquisite.

Despite its grander ambitions, the film ultimately feels minor and superficial.

The scenario makes for an inept, lazy R-rated movie whose sole purpose is as a glossary of euphemisms for genitalia and sexual acts.

Though it doesn't exactly have pretensions toward the rhythms of real life, the film does nail the breezy movie feeling of a buffed-and-polished romantic comedy.

A pair of detectives lingering on the periphery of the story help provide a twist at the end that is well-handled and carries an unexpected irony, but it is really too, too little coming far, far too late.

With dependably creepy character actor Sid Haig to goose things along as leader of the locals, Creature is delightfully dopey.

It shows promise but finally hits things so hard, both literally and metaphorically, that it's hard not to feel pummeled yourself by the time it's over.

The better moments are fleeting. More often, the film feels flat-footed, and the story plays out as you'd expect. Long before Tanner Hall ends, you may well find yourself wishing for the final bell.

This may not fit any conventional definition of entertainment, but it certainly keeps your eyes on the screen.

Sure, this frequently improvised spoof isn't intended to be taken seriously, but it's also not funny or incisive enough to counter the unappealing persona the actor-comedian has concocted here: an impulsive, clueless narcissist on a journey to reinvent himself as an action star.

Even if Apollo 18 is not exactly as it presents itself to be, it is less of a stunt than a low-key and unassuming film of rising tension rather than big scares or wild shocks.

It has opulent, stylized settings of elegance, grandeur and scope, flawless special effects, and awesome martial arts combat staged by the master, Sammo Hung. Yet bravura spectacle never overwhelms either the plot or the key characters. Chang Chia-lu's intricate script bristles with wit and suspense; the film from start to finish is a terrific entertainment.

A rousing example of Bollywood-style pure escapist entertainment.

Stay past the credits, though, and you'll find a tongue-in-cheek rap video recap with the cast - and directed by star Dustin Milligan - that carries the kind of spoofy insouciance missing from the main attraction.

Though the drama has its heartfelt moments, it unrolls as flat as the Texas terrain, cast in an idyllic summer glow.

McLaughlin, who has a good eye for the minimal, manages to bring out the haunting beauty of empty places littered with the discards of forgotten lives.

Unconventional, imaginative, nothing if not audacious, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life is a portrait of creativity from the inside, a serious yet playful attempt to find an artistic way to tell an emotional truth.

At best, the jokey bits are occasionally funny.

Bristling with dangers both corporeal and cerebral, The Debt is a superbly crafted espionage thriller packed with Israeli-Nazi score settling.

A unique glimpse into the recovery mechanism of damaged hearts and bewildered minds, how a visage of hollowed-out sorrow after one year becomes a look of more peaceful acceptance down the road.

Kazemy and Boosheri are excellent, and Soheil Parsa and Nasrin Pakkho are also fine as Atefeh's doting, liberal parents. And if Keshavarz is less successful managing the film's sometimes choppy narrative, she is clearly willing to take risks on all fronts. More power to her.

The unintended take-away is that you can grasp why the Securities and Exchange Commission - terribly negligent though it was in investigating Madoff - might dismiss the claims of someone so theatrically odd.

Director Vivi Friedman's inability to successfully reconcile the film's duality undercuts an eclectic cast gamely committed to Mark Lisson's thematically ambitious, if scattered, script.

No concept in the critical lexicon has been more devalued and debased than "inspirational." The term has been so misused, it's just about lost all meaning. A film that makes that word real and vital has to be special. The Interrupters is such a film.

All of that combines to make Colombiana into a scandalous blend of action, sex and violence. My apologies in advance for having so much fun.

Really, truly, very scary … At least until about 30 minutes in, when you start to be distracted by the lack of logic in the storytelling and the fact that the nasty little gremlins responsible for all the bumps in the night can be offed pretty easily.

The comedy isn't always as crisp as it should be, but Peretz has the perfect partner in crime in Rudd.

The same intelligence, wit and mature spirit that actress Vera Farmiga brings to her performances is richly apparent in her directorial debut as well, the inquisitive spiritual drama Higher Ground.

Weakly developed characters, a lack of substantive tension and an ending that's more startling than sound round out the minuses of this earnestly motivated but undercooked morality tale.

This fourth "Spy Kids" picture isn't so much bad as it is just boring, lacking the buzz and brio of even some of the earlier entries in the series. It feels like someone is now just marking time.

For all its sophomoric humor and prim prurience, in the end 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy finds it is love, not sex, that rules the human heart, a sweet and conventional idea regardless of the technology of the film's projection.

Although not exactly even-handed, the movie proves a deft look at a reluctant crusader and how financial sway and political override can so effectively trump the power of the average citizen.

The darkly funny Australian charmer Griff the Invisible introduces its titular hero to us as nighttime caped crusader first, mild-mannered daytime office drone second.

An exquisite, intimate film of restraint and delicacy.

The object isn't to stir you into what-if feminist outrage so much as to let a culturally magnificent era's societal inequalities act as a dissonant countermelody to a famous artist's biography.

The history lesson is often framed in stagy exchanges of dialogue, diluting the strong sense of place.

As so often happens with love, what you hope for is not even close to what you get, and in this case we are left with a heartbreaking disappointment of a film.

Brutal, bloody beyond belief, and has no socially redeeming value. So it is with a certain amount of guilt that I say it's kind of a wicked blast to watch, especially if you're in the mood for some righteous revenge.

Gibney and Ellwood struggle to create context for or make much sense of the vibrant hodge-podge of material that they excavated from the archives of Kesey, who died in 2001.

Rapt fuses strands of dramatic tension in a shrewd enough way that it even saves its sharpest cuts for the kidnapping's aftermath, when a well-heeled life laid bare must reconcile with a much different form of enforced solitude.

The quietly commanding turn by newcomer Santana - whose outward embrace of an already well-internalized transformation leaps off the screen with equal parts joy, melancholia and bravery - is a standout.

For the show's rabid viewership, these testimonials are probably integral to a celebratory experience like the "Glee" live show. To everyone else, it's all gonna be Gleek to you.

A documentary with the pace of a thriller, a story of motors and machines that is beyond compelling because of the intensely human story it tells.

The storytelling is straightforward, with a classical sheen, even as mischief and hallucination puncture the serene surface.

FD 5 did not raise even a single goose bump - which for a movie that bills itself as horror is not a good thing. The camp factor, however, is high and makes the 95 minutes pretty much fly by.

With Snow Flower, the filmmaker is forever torn between two childhoods, two adulthoods, two distinct political and social eras, and two complex relationships, unable to make both equally relevant.

Laughter, which is ladled on thick as gravy, proves to be the secret ingredient - turning what should be a feel-bad movie about those troubled times into a heart-warming surprise.

A straightforward, intimate and heartbreaking chronicle of the 2009-10 farm seasons for three teens, smart and sensitive, who have been following the crops with their parents for as long as they can remember.

With American independent filmmaking all too often a ready punching bag in today's cinéaste culture, this frequently dazzling, eccentric portrait of mutually assured destruction is that most delirious of combos: charmingly funny and emotionally terrifying.

Some grace notes and riffs ring true, but mainly it plays like a familiar tune on a broken record.

Though more brutish than elegant, The Whistleblower does have a certain charged, unvarnished power in its examination of how people can harm those they are enlisted to protect.

Smart, fun and thoroughly enjoyable, it's a model summer diversion that entertains without insulting your intelligence.

Quirky, creepy and increasingly involving, the Montreal-set thriller Good Neighbors throws a trio of offbeat apartment dwellers together under one shaky roof as a serial killer wreaks havoc around town.

One could argue that, in varying degrees, all of the iconoclastic French director's films have dismantled femme-centric fairy tales. But in this, the second of a planned trilogy, she's confronting burnished old folk tales head-on. Sly and playful, it's a beauty.

First-time writer-director David Robert Mitchell tells a coming-of-age tale with such freshness and such bemused insight it's as if it has never been told before.

Despite numerous pluses - Lee Tamahori's vigorous direction, handsome cinematography, outstanding production design, an impressive dual performance by Dominic Cooper as Uday and Latif - the film is more wearying than entertaining.

A leaden mash-up of western and science-fiction elements that ends up noisy, grotesque and unappealing.

Life in a Day has an earthy and at times euphoric appeal. Helping on that front is the editing artistry of Walker (and an expansive team), the man in charge of all that splicing and dicing keeps things moving at an entertaining clip.

A taut, roller-coaster ride clocking in at under 90 minutes about another everyman caught in an extraordinary situation.

Pulsing with a rowdy energy, the film works as both a sci-fi horror flick and a teen adventure film.

This animated-live action hybrid is really more 3-D disaster than family comedy. Even Neil Patrick Harris, who has proved he can save just about any sinking ship, cannot make this boat float.

Between the writing, acting, directing and the rest, it works. Not crazy, not stupid, and filled with love. Period.

Singham is as boldly overwrought as an early silent melodrama, and its comic relief is extremely broad.

With her Modigliani mystery, Charlotte Gainsbourg brings aching melancholy to the role of Dawn. As compelling as she is to watch, though, the character's passivity saps the film of energy, especially in its first half, which is all but devoid of tension.

A beautifully structured and photographed film, John Turturro's rapturous Passione offers a vibrant exploration and celebration of Neapolitan music in all its grit and glory, presenting 23 musical numbers that encompass a millennium's worth of influences.