It's smart, spare, elegant and understated.

The final twist does more to unravel what's come before than to tie it all together, making what's come before feel like a cosmopolitan goose chase.

Turns into a film that is too ostentatiously pleased with itself, so in love with its own cleverness it doesn't notice it's darn near worn you out.

What emerges from these stories is a picture of the fallibility of the system and the vulnerability of innocent citizens, whom even scientific evidence cannot protect from incompetence, ego and prejudice, and of the courage of the exonerated victims to make meaning of their tragedies.

A comedy so inane and tedious that it buries its premise and its various worthy points under too many arch and improbable shenanigans and endless dialogue, much of it seriously under-inspired.

Full of genuine scares and impressively disturbing effects.

The Optimists is filled with first-person testimony from Jews who were saved and non-Jews who saved them, people like Rubin Dimitrov, a baker who hid Jews in his ovens and says simply, "a true human being is obliged to help." As a rescued Jew says with emotion at the film's conclusion, "to be a Bulgarian is to be a mensch."

The beautifully crafted Naked in Ashes is the third of four documentaries made by Fouce, who for three decades has studied and embraced the religious teachings found in Nepal, India and Tibet. Her family name is familiar to longtime Angelenos; her grandfather Frank Fouce Sr. was a Hollywood film pioneer and a major exhibitor in downtown Los Angeles and elsewhere for decades.

A gently humorous fable about the power of faith and the possibility of change, Ushpizin not only takes place in Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, it was filmed with that media-shy group's cooperation and followed religious law at all times.

With Three of Hearts: A Postmodern Family, documentarian Susan Kaplan has achieved the enviable effect of eavesdropping on her subjects for a meaningful exploration of the possibilities and the limits within any relationship.

So over-plotted that it's borderline incomprehensible.

A mess of a movie -- but a warm, friendly mess that's hard not to like, even when it tests your patience.

The real reason to see it is its style, which sets an otherwise fairly unremarkable whodunit in a seedy, lite-Lynchian wonderland that's enjoyable to hang out in for a while.

To see this overly schematic movie, is to be made to feel -- inaccurately as it turns out -- that the whole thing is a hopelessly exaggerated fabrication. The taint of the melodramatic techniques used in key segments infects the entire movie and makes us question the truth of a significant historical reality.

Mandoki, who with this film returns to the Spanish-speaking cinema after a string of Hollywood films, has brought a sure sense of the visual and taut construction to Innocent Voices, based on a true story. It is filled with wrenching images.

For a film in a naturalistic mode, Loggerheads gets a shade too elliptical at its finish but still leaves a deep impression as to how irrevocable life's choices can be.

That rare episode film that actually accrues a cumulative power and doesn't merely proceed from one segment to the next.

Kreuzpaintner displays a natural gift with actors and a clarity in storytelling that result in a fresh take on what otherwise might have been a familiar coming-of-age story.

An outrageous, savagely comical account of the disastrous circumstances surrounding the assassination of dictatorial South Korean President Park Chung Hee in 1979.

Hampered by an ending that overreaches needlessly, the film is nevertheless worthy and unmistakably the effort of an enduringly distinctive and important filmmaker.

Couldn't be more unlikely, more unfashionable -- or more compelling.

Rousing, affirmative entertainment.

Ultimately, it's too self-conscious of its role in the marketplace and too hamstrung by its source material to risk being honest at the expense of being liked.

Pure, unself-conscious macho camp, but it's not like Pacino and McConaughey don't know it. They're pitching tents and romping around in the grass like Jerry Maguire on steroids.

The filmmaker captures a certain exaggerated verisimilitude, but the comedy is surprisingly flat. The cast sells the occasional one-liner, but a Reynolds smirk can take you only so far.

Commands attention from its very first frame and never lets up right through the fade-out. It is a splendid example of classic screen storytelling with no false steps, and Gansel's understated approach pays off with resounding emotional effect and meaning.

Wickedly funny and subversive.

Acutely observed, faultlessly acted, graced with piercing emotion and unsparing honesty, it will make you laugh because you can't bear to cry.