All are subjects worthy of discussion, but tackling them in one film disrupts the movie's momentum and shortchanges viewers. Baichwal could have devoted a single film to just BP's disgraceful behavior.

Szumowska provides lurid scenes of perverted sex, but she offers no new insight into the sordid world of prostitution and the dangers sex workers face. Nor does she flesh out Charlotte and Alicja. The result is a superficial and voyeuristic film.

The sex, nudity and violence are nonstop, but that's what makes Headhunters exciting entertainment. See it before the Hollywood remake, possibly starring Mark Wahlberg, gets it all wrong.

The biggest thrill for this mild-mannered crew isn't plundering or plank-walking, but Ham Night.

There are zero surprises, but it looks good, moves well through a trim running time and wields its clichés with defiant aplomb.

Jack Black gives the performance of his career in the title role of Bernie, under the pitch-perfect direction of his "School of Rock'' director, Richard Linklater, who expertly crafts a black comedy with a deceptively sunny surface. It's the best movie I've seen all spring.

It might not have as many gut-busting laughs as "Bridesmaids,'' but there are still plenty - and for once in Apatow's phallocentric universe, most of them don't come at the expense of female characters.

In the skilled hands of Cusack - who recites quite a bit of Poe's poetry - and director John McTeigue ("V for Vendetta''), it's good pulpy fun.

The Avengers is neither overwhelming nor underwhelming. What it expertly is, is whelming.

The movie has enormous force - because it's about a genius, yes, but even more so because of the intelligence, passion and wit of the people who knew Marley.

Fightville, you had me at "gladiator school."

My Way is not, as the title might suggest, a Frank Sinatra biopic. No, it's an eye-popping, empty-headed World War II epic made in South Korea.

Goodbye First Love showcases two young women with bright futures.

There was no need to edit it in overly slick ways that often make the story line seem contrived, accompanied by gag-laden narration that frequently made me want to gag.

Yes, there's some spectacular footage. But there's also an awful lot of filler for a 40-minute movie.

While it's not a disaster like Kasdan's last film, "Dreamcatcher'' (2003), Darling Companion doesn't amount to much more than a fairly painless way for the AARP set to spend an hour and a half watching a movie with stars their own age.

Shove people into categories, then into a film like Think Like a Man, and it's a recipe for tedium.

I'm beginning to think writer Nicholas Sparks isn't one person at all, but a roomful of ladies doing Harlequin-romance Mad Libs. Occasionally they'll hit a winning combination, as in the Sparks novel "The Notebook." More often, you get eye-rollers like "The Lucky One."

Steve Taylor's direction is unexciting but solid, relying on the beauty of Portland and his spirited young cast for most of the visual interest.

Detention does have imaginative editing and a stylish, candy-colored look - that is, so long as no one's vomiting, an activity that takes up an ungodly portion of the running time.

It's perhaps unsurprising that Love - and her late husband, Kurt Cobain - even manage to steal the show in a documentary about Schemel's life.

There isn't a surprising moment, and it's an affirmation for hard-core fans and pretty much everyone else of William Shatner's immortal exhortation to Trekkies: "Get a life!"

An appropriately respectful and dignified biopic.

Features some good acting, but most of it doesn't ring true.

Pablo Larraín and Alfredo Castro - the director and star, respectively, of the acclaimed Chilean black comedy "Tony Manero" (2008) - reunite in the chilling Post Mortem.

The slow, methodical pace of Here will undoubtedly drive a few viewers crazy. But for those in tune with its quiet rhythms, it's worth the journey.

Moves at a poky pace even by American indie standards. But it's worth checking out for the fine cast, which also includes Joanna Lumley as Rossellini's earthy pal, and scene-stealing Doreen Mantle as her tart-tongued but wise mother.

Like a dedicated teacher, this is a film that stays with you.

The only really believable character ends up being Bilson's chaste Laura, who snags herself a slot on the reality-show competition "America's Last Virgin."

Besson co-wrote and produced this cheesy mash-up of elements from James Bond and "Battlestar Galactica."

I've seen a lot of rip-offs of "The Truman Show" and a lot of rip-offs of "Scream." I guess I have to give credit to The Cabin in the Woods for ripping off both at once.

For starters, it wasn't a great idea to basically borrow the premise of "The Blues Brothers'' and turn these quintessential Jewish characters (something that's not even hinted at) into the bumbling would-be saviors of the Catholic orphanage where they were raised.

Overall We Have a Pope should prove a crowd-pleaser. Sacred music by the great Estonian composer is a plus.

Maybe DVDs of "Buried" and ATM will be sold in the same package someday. You could call it a trapped-in-a-box set.

I have to confess that this surreal departure by the iconoclastic filmmaker tried my patience more than a bit.

The script suffers from blandness and aimlessness.

So gripping and focused that it easily bests Hollywood movies with 50 times its budget.

Damsels contains much that's familiar to fans of previous Stillman films such as 1990's "Metropolitan": looping jokes that build on one another, allusions to art and literature, characters who are proudly out of step with the times.

It's a sobering slice of life that puts actual faces to local violent crime statistics.

Dafoe proves to have the right blend of ruggedness and sensitivity for this conflicted hero. The actor's habit of maintaining a lavishly styled coiffure in all situations, even when his character is meant to be sleeping in the rain for days on end, is becoming distracting, though.

Harmless if not exactly inspired, and rarely hilarious.

Despite the title, there is no nudity in the Chinese rom-com Love in the Buff, although there is a lot of risqué language.

Antony Cordier's Four Lovers offers only dull characters playing for extremely low stakes.

So deftly does Turn Me On, Dammit! approximate the experience of small-town teenagerhood that occasionally its slowness can frustrate.

You are unlikely to see a movie about incest made as sensitively and tastefully as Womb. And although the characters speak English, the film is firmly anchored in European sensibilities, thanks to its Hungarian director, Benedek Fliegauf.

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Intruders looks great and has a promising opening, but this atmospheric Spanish psychological thriller is otherwise pretty underwhelming.

The dialogue, while filthy, is wickedly funny, and sounds perfect coming out of the mouths of these beaten-down characters in their low-rent surroundings.

Wrath of the Titans suggests a franchise that isn't trying very hard, and I don't really expect a sequel. But if it does happen, I fear it'll be even less of an event: "Tiff of the Titans."

There is one big winner in this mess, though. Congratulations, 1961's "Snow White and the Three Stooges": You're now the second-worst movie on the subject.

It's powerful stuff, and probably a more effective approach than a series of talking heads decrying bullying, which is estimated to affect 18 million American children.

The image that sticks with you here is a smoky pub where the patrons are singing "You Belong to Me.''

The action is brutal, bloody and virtually nonstop in this adrenaline-packed riff on "Assault on Precinct 13.''

If the end of the world was just hours away, would New Yorkers still be able to get takeout? Yes, if Abel Ferrara's mind-bending 4:44 Last Day on Earth is any indication.

Fails to draw much humor from farcical situations.

Amusing and informative (and hyperbolic) as it is, All In: The Poker Movie is a documentary whose intended audience is unclear.

The story never quite gets into the groove.

May be well-intentioned, but it's as obvious and inert as a spoonful of mashed potatoes.

Director Gabe Torres lobs a twist you'll likely see coming, and another you may not - neither satisfying enough to justify an hour and a half of Dorff-in-a-box.

The Hunger Games may be derivative, but it is engrossing and at times exciting. Implicitly, it argues that "The Truman Show" might have been improved by Ed Harris lobbing fireballs at Jim Carrey, and it's now clear what "American Idol" was missing all those years: a crossbow for Simon Cowell.

The movie is a pleasant way to spend time in the dark, especially for Francophiles, but it won't leave any lasting impression.

As a French Resistance thriller, Free Men is so-so, but it is driven by a mischievously interesting idea: that Muslims and Jews have more in common than they normally allow.

In The Kid With a Bike, Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne offer a sly but finally banal update of the Italian neorealist classic "The Bicycle Thief."

Completed four years ago, Seeking Justice is dutifully directed, with an absolute minimum of thrills, by Roger Donaldson, whose credits include the terrific "No Way Out" (1987)...That film's title is a pretty good description of where Cage's career seems to be headed.

[Director Kaye's] dedication to the material is admirable, but his tactic of following one dismal development with an even more depressing one comes to seem monotonous and pointless.

As a full-length feature, Casa is simply a funny concept that starts to go stale around the 10-minute mark.

A bit too shaggy to totally live up to the potential of its fine cast. But there are moments of comedy gold - especially as Segel, who went full-frontal for "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" endures endless humiliations as the title character.

The funniest movie I've seen in more than a year.

The real star of the movie is the delectable sushi itself. Viewers will be tempted to hop the next flight to Tokyo, but probably will have to settle for a Japanese eatery closer to home.

Stage performance is good training for life, claims this documentary about a high school Shakespeare competition.

Once it calms down and stops trying to be funny, it turns into a thoughtful and intriguing drama.

When they came in to pitch A Thousand Words, no doubt by calling it "Jerry Maguire" meets "Groundhog Day," a studio exec should have raised the palm of rejection and said, "When you stop being sadly derivative and write an original idea that's as good as those two, come back."

These are characters with whom it's a pleasure to spend a couple of hours.

Demonstrating the limits of being too clever in a genre movie, the art-house chiller Silent House lets the tenseness of its first act trickle away.

Credit Westfeldt, who is also the writer and director, with a classic setup for farce, brightly executed.

Interminably long, dull and incomprehensible, John Carter evokes pretty much every sci-fi classic from the past 50 years without having any real personality of its own.

So there is courage and cheekiness here. What there is not is a story, or much insight or even anger; anyone expecting an indictment of Iran will be sorely disappointed.

Overlong and grim to the point where some scenes are virtually unwatchable.

The script is cliché-ridden and ends on an overly sentimental note.

Riddled with sores, his lips locked on a crack pipe, the "sub-basement"-dwelling subject of this cult-rock doc initially seems plucked from an episode of "Intervention," or maybe "Hoarders."

This charming kid's-eye movie, full of comical and vivid detail about the lives of these cheerful children, has the loose, lanky feel of a memoir and of French New Wave films.

The real coup de grace for this would-be serious-minded drama is the sledgehammer-subtle direction of Paul Weitz (who is also the screenwriter), who enabled his star's paycheck mugging in the execrable "Little Fockers."

Tim & Eric seem driven by a hatred of the audience and a wish to punish the same. Every episode of every sitcom I've ever seen is funnier than this movie, and I used to watch "Just Shoot Me."

At 132 minutes, the film is at least half an hour too long. Nobody asked me, but the best solution would be to keep the action sequences (such as the robbery of a horse-drawn steam train, an homage to Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West''), and scrap the allegedly "witty'' dialogue and difficult-to-follow plot twists.

The Lorax is awful, like chronic disease.

There is no way you could make this movie stupider or more pointlessly noisy than it already is.

This is the third feature by the three gifted stars, who deftly pull off hilarious, nearly wordless slapstick routines reminiscent of Jacques Tati, Buster Keaton and Jerry Lewis.

A suspenseful work using nonprofessional actors and co-written with an Albanian filmmaker, shows Marston is no one-hit wonder.

When it comes time for a Hollywood remake, Depp would make a great Mels.

A raunchy, often hilarious satire from the Judd Apatow stable that lacks any real bite.

Refreshing as it is to see the military portrayed as something other than a band of neurotics and creeps, there's a reason this brand of rah-rah and bang-bang didn't outlast the age of Whitesnake and Marty McFly.

The only part of this movie anyone's ever going to remember is the pair of scenes in which Ghost Rider pees flame.

Barrow's frozen vistas are a perfect match for the noir tone of On the Ice. Unfortunately, the emotional landscape of MacLean's stoic main character, Qalli, is often as blank as the tundra.

More than just the portrait of a naive young woman. It's a frightening look at Putin's warped version of democracy.

A family getting evicted from its home is no laughing matter, except if you're watching Cirkus Columbia, a satiric comedy from, of all places, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This indie documentary is egregiously Hollywood in spirit. That a take-charge white football coach can buck up a place like Manassas HS with some gridiron grit is a lie we want to believe.

A feast for the eyes that will engage the entire family.

The cheesehead noir Thin Ice presents Greg Kinnear in a role that's almost too easy for him: He's a morally flexible Wisconsin insurance salesman for whom honesty is the least-likely policy.

Nearly totally laugh-, chemistry- and coherence-free, this fiasco from the director of "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle'' has a script whose sensible parts would fit on a napkin with enough room left over for the Gettysburg Address.