The Tillman Story isn't designed to be a shockeroo exposé; it's more a slow, steady rumble of anger and dismay at what the U.S. military, and the government, can get away with in the name of public relations, as if PR - and not human lives - were the most important consideration during wartime.

This picture belongs to Jason Bateman, who, after years of playing the second or third banana (and plenty of times being the best thing in a given film), finally gets to show off his considerable gifts as the co-lead in a mainstream comedy.

There's a degree of gruff integrity at work for at least two-thirds of Alexandre Aja's grindhouse piranhapalooza Piranha 3D, in which a megaschool of man-eating fish thought to be extinct burst through an underwater fissure to terrorize a normally placid lake in Arizona.

The imperatives of history are manifold, and this film is among the most urgent of them. You cannot look, and you must look: This happened. They were human beings. All of them.

With Scott Pilgrim, Wright leaps over the line from chattery cleverness to all-out self-consciousness.

Peepli Live opens out slowly to encompass several factions of Indian society, including the press, local, state, and federal politicians, and the shady elements binding them all together. It's a meticulously engineered design that a show like The Wire took several years to execute; here the strain shows within the first half hour.

The whole exercise has the trying-too-hard vibe of a bad toupee.

Because Animal Kingdom is so richly suffused with atmosphere and style, you could almost float right past the deficiencies in its story in an admiring trance.

Eat Pray Love works quite serviceably as a light comedy and a pleasing travelogue.

A film loaded with interest that somehow fails to be interesting, La Soga is inspired by true events and not much else.

Because of the movie's episodic structure and lack of expository detail, the visuals bear the greatest narrative burden.

Over-narrated by Kiefer Sutherland in full "this is extremely important and also very, very cool" mode, from its first self-important minutes Twelve seems as if it can't possibly be serious. Would that it were not.

The Other Guys isn't easy to peg. It's not a comedy that loosens you up and mellows you out; it works by needling you progressively into a state of anxiety.

Like so many movie love stories before it - from Murnau's "Sunrise" to Linklater's "Before Sunrise," and beyond - Cairo Time is about two wandering lovers, people spending time together without realizing how precious that time will come to be.

Wilson's unflappable, deeply sympathetic affect and aging golden-boy visage have a very Jack-like smoothing effect on the story's rough patches.

Based on a true story which director Marco Amenta explored 12 years ago in documentary form, The Sicilian Girl feels powered by unfocused preoccupation, rather than by a more compelling creative ambition.

Fittingly, there is something both thrilling and deeply unpleasant about looking at Galella's body of work -- there is casual genius in some of the captured moments, a combination of access, timing, and luck, with the subject almost always carrying most of the image's weight.

A pleasant dramatic caper that wears out its welcome, The Concert is the houseguest who sings a little too loudly and too long for his supper, tone deaf to the line between charm and imposition.

The pleasures Get Low offers lie in the process of simply getting there, in watching performers take material that has some limitations (the script, inspired by a true story, is by Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell) and turn it into something that has the rough-hewn, no-nonsense veracity of folk music.

At 84 he describes himself as being kept alive by young women's laughter and infernal baby-talk, marking off perhaps his final, groaning aspirational standard. Almost makes me feel sorry for those men still trying to keep up.

The vehicle may get a little jacked up along the way, but its passenger arrives in style: The kid's a star.

The problem isn't just that the gags feel airless and pointless; it's that the performers - many of whom have done wonderful work in other settings - seem more bent on pleasing each other than on entertaining us.

The Extra Man is something of a love letter to the marvelous weirdos of New York.

Straining for a timeless, family-friendly tone, Allen winds up with something closer to an unironically -- i.e. absurdly -- wholesome rehash of "Leave it to Beaver."

Like its star, Salt is a spare and lean piece of work; it's everything a modern action movie should be, a picture made with confidence but not arrogance, one that believes so wholeheartedly in its outlandish plot twists that they come to make perfect alt-universe sense.

Farewell, a cold war drama by the French director Christian Carion, isn't just a movie set in 1981; in many ways it feels like a movie made in 1981.

Dark to a specific point of dullness or even opacity, Solondz requires patience, as always, but indulgence as well. He relies on your remembrance of his other films and characters but also on your willingness to overlook his redeployment of tactics that range from puerile to mildly -- and somehow always self-skeptically -- profound.

Has just enough genuine warmth to compensate for the coolness you might feel toward its generic trappings.