October Country doesn't really have a point, or a story, but it's an almost unbearably vivid portrait of four generations in a single working-class family.

The Italian film industry must be in sad shape when its latest import to the US is a tired bit of trash from 1997, To Die for Tano.

Dear John is the sort of movie that gives tearjerkers a bad name.

The best Parisian action movie of the week is District 13: Ultimatum, a serviceable thriller with a lefty message.

John Travolta's From Paris With Love assassin/ superagent Charlie Wax is the master of whatever the opposite of wisecracking is. Fooljoshing? Lametalking? Flatlining?

Relies far too much on an overdose of gore and a pack of hungry wolves to deliver its chills.

The actors are charmingly low-key, and the lensing, by Jorgen Johansson, adds to the offbeat aura. Whatever you do, don't miss the booze-guzzling showdown.

Quiet, sober and tense, the movie makes some interesting points -- contrasting the frenzied hookups of the two men with the butcher's rote, dismal lovemaking with his wife as their bodies are carefully hidden under sheets -- but it lacks the emotional firepower of "Brokeback Mountain."

The complexity might require a second viewing, but there is compensation in the realistic acting by a cast of non-pros and the eye-grabbing, hand-held lensing by Boaz Yehonatan Yacov.

Perhaps the best compliment I can pay to his work in Edge of Darkness is that I wouldn't particularly want to see this movie with grumpy Harrison Ford starring instead. Welcome back, Mel.

Even by the extremely low standards of the genre, When in Rome gets failing marks for chemistry, credibility and even coherence.

At some two hours, the film is 30 minutes too long. Cutting out the melodrama and sticking with the daring-do is the answer.

The director-producer, Nicole Opper, has known Avery's Brooklyn family for years, which no doubt accounts for the film's intimacy.

Buscemi is appealing as always, but the movie, is only sporadically funny.

Cisneros is an appealing actor, but he and Falling Awake get buried under a welter of clichés.

The Israeli feature For My Father is a rarity indeed: A sweet, sentimental movie about a suicide bomber.

What the Charles Darwin biopic Creation mainly creates is a do-over for Paul Bettany: This time he gets to have a beautiful mind.

Basically “Lorenzo’s Oil” without the earlier film’s visual flair.

Belgian actress Émilie Dequenne gives a smoldering performance as Jeanne.

Medina has taken a series of vignettes and fashioned them into a feature film as aimless as Luciano’s life. There’s no buildup or payoff; still, Hendler’s laid-back performance makes Medina’s film worth seeking out.

The film is primarily interested in the music that accompanied this turmoil, which is a bit like covering the American Revolution with the focus on the wigs Washington and Jefferson wore.

Produced with the best of intentions by a California church and directed without distinction by first-timer Brian Baugh, To Save a Life would be bland and boring even as a half-hour after-school special.

Charmless and underdeveloped knockoff of "The Santa Clause."

The film’s cool-looking desaturated look (not unlike “The Road”), plentiful action and Washington’s charismatic gravitas as the taciturn hero make it relatively easy to overlook the pretensions and implausibilities in the script.

The makers of The Spy Next Door should give 50 percent of their profits to James Cameron for ripping off "True Lies." Let's see, what's 50 percent of nothing?

Even a great British cast and obscenity-laden gangland dialogue aren't enough to make what amounts to an extended acting exercise into much of a movie.

Fish Tank is grim, to be sure, but it leaves us with a feeling of hopefulness.

Possibly the least sexy vampire flick ever to crawl out of the crypt (it never occurs to anyone that biting someone's neck is kinda intimate; the act is strictly utilitarian), but it's unusually detailed in its imagining.