The overly familiar plot points also make the film feel a little dated.

An amusing if slight excursion into nature with a group of animals who turn the tables on their collective nemeses, the hunters.

This is a modest education-of-a-punching-bag entertainment with a kind of breezily rude compatibility -- a hallmark of sorts for both co-writer/director Todd Phillips ("Road Trip," "Starsky & Hutch") and the wonderful actor assigned to play the self-help instructor from hell, Billy Bob Thornton.

Facing the Giants, which despite its flaws is ultimately a sweet, sincere movie about Christian faith.

In "A Guide," passion and imagination go a long way in transforming seemingly conventional material and characters.

Broken Sky is that increasing rarity, a film that is fully realized visually. Keeping dialogue at a minimum, Hernández and inspired cinematographer Alejandro Cantú create a constant interplay between light and shadow, movement and stillness, dramatic spaces of architectural grandeur and intimate enclosures to evoke the ever-shifting emotions of an all-consuming first love.

Captures the energy and exuberance of a young nation in the throes of optimism and works it into a foreboding frenzy.

Zaillian (an Oscar winner for his "Schindler's List" screenplay) has given us an intricate, subtly rewarding narrative whose uncompromising nature and undeniable moral seriousness make it far from business as usual, even in the ever-decreasing world of quality Hollywood filmmaking.

A sad farewell to the promising Project Greenlight concept, this Feast leaves viewers with nothing satisfying to tuck into.

Whether you are a religious, churchgoing person or not, if you are the least bit liberal or tolerant in your world view, this has got to be one of the most unnerving films of the year.

The documentary is an enlightening journey to a dark corner of contemporary punk's dank little basement. It also will surprise some to hear how articulately some of the former performers explain the dark impulses that propelled them.

A provocative, witty -- and admittedly esoteric -- experimental comedy that is serious, amusing and satisfying, in Rosenbush's words: "a Zen riddle designed more to be experienced than understood rationally."

It's rare for young actors to exude as much charisma and charm as Gainsbourg and García Bernal.

A visually wondrous experience in high-contrast black and white, bogged down by a slow, underwrought story and uninvolving characters. It would be easy to dismiss it as another great-looking film with little else to offer, but that wouldn't be entirely true.

Sophisticated in its ease and spontaneity, it was directed with clarity and rigor by Auraeus Solito from Michiiko Yamamoto's acutely perceptive script.

Miniaturist in its level of detail and evocatively abstract, Old Joy captures the weary mood of a generation that's crested its peak along with an era, quietly making a case for how well suited film can be to capturing the finer points of human interaction while preserving their mystery.

A few scenes are worth the price of admission for their inspired camp alone; Shaw happens to be in two of them.

Subtle it is not. Well-intentioned it certainly is. No one but the youngest in the family will care very much about it, though. And they may well be filled with wonderment trying to figure out what this big Babe person is all about.

Feels terminally generic and tone-deaf.

Most successful in capturing the emotional elements of its story, the film relies on its excellent cast to balance out sketchily drawn characters and the unfortunate obviousness of its plot.

Under the insanity and unsexy nudity, Confetti has a sweet center. Comic timing, themes of tolerance and commitment and the marriage of farce and empathy lift the film above the mockumentary pack.

This thoughtful, sensitive film, perhaps the most emotionally wrenching of all the Iraq documentaries, could have been made after any war.

Haven is far from perfect, with some uncomfortable pacing, wayward accents and less-than-satisfying denouements. But it's a refreshing, character-driven antidote to the late-summer movie-house blahs, and Flowers looks like a talent worth watching.

There may not be a moral, but it's a fascinating human story, one that The U.S. vs. John Lennon only begins to tell.

Weirdly clueless.

Captures comedian and pundit Al Franken evolving from satirist to activist.

This overly derivative motion picture thinks it is doing and saying more than it is. Instead, it ends up as little more than a reasonable facsimile of the real thing, despite a subtle and effective performance by Ben Affleck, of all people.

Positioned as somewhere in between the eggheady activism of Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" and the anger of Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke," the new Imax film Hurricane on the Bayou examines the effect of Katrina on the famed bayou-country wetlands of Louisiana.