Sorry, but if your sensibility is pure trashy camp, don't expect anyone not to laugh when you try to be earnest.

Sick, disgusting and vile. It's also demonically funny, stylish and ingenious.

The Sons of Tennessee Williams, which offers touching interviews with many older gay men, somewhat awkwardly connects this history with the efforts of a gay Mardi Gras crew to keep going in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Has a few things going for it -- a winning performance by Luchini and a small role by Pedro Almodóvar favorite Carmen Maura. But these talented folks can't compensate for a plot that strains credulity and lacks badly needed social bite. Wait for the DVD.

There's nothing startlingly original about Estevez's screenplay, yet it has a modesty you seldom see when Hollywood tackles spiritual subjects.

Sweeping, if exhausting, historical epic set at the turn of the 20th century.

With Paul Newman gone, you couldn't ask for a better senior-citizen representation of Butch Cassidy than Shepard. In his best performance since "The Right Stuff'' turned him into a reluctant movie star, Shepard makes Blackthorn worth seeing.

Real Steel is to action what the Anthony Weiner habit was to sex: It's so virtual, so distant from the thrill, that you wonder what the point is. Do you really want to pay to watch an actor playing a kid who in turn plays what amounts to a video game?

It's not up to the high standard of the Clooney-Heslov script for "Good Night, and Good Luck,'' or what you'd imagine that, say, Aaron Sorkin could have done with this premise (for starters, sharper dialogue). Or what Elaine May did with the similarly themed "Primary Colors" 13 years ago.

This film is narratively inert (we spend a lot of time listening to the same questions being asked over and over) and, like virtually all docs in its genre, less than vigorous in its pursuit of truth.

Fast, furious and often funny. But no blood is truly shed (except literally in a playground fight during the opening credits).

This is essentially a student film offering nothing but absurdly contrived coincidence.

Extremely cool-looking in the manner of "Sin City,'' but clumsily staged, slackly acted and mind-numbingly dull, Israeli director Guy Moshe's English-language fantasy is set in a future when guns, and apparently coherent conversations, have been outlawed.

Recalling the lesson about bringing a knife to a gun fight, a British documentary filmmaker brings a spoon to a hatchet job in the film Sarah Palin: You Betcha!

It succeeds mostly thanks to stellar work by the wonderful Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who capably handles the dramatic heavy lifting, and Seth Rogen, who delivers big laughs as his raunchy bud.

No matter how charmingly loopy she is, Faris can't transcend the stale gender clichés and rehashed rom-com set pieces.

For a 90-minute movie, Margaret has a thin story. So it's unfortunate that it runs 2 1/2 hours.

It would be possible to appreciate Shannon's fabulous work in Take Shelter far better if the filmmaker lost a quarter of the two-hour running time -- there are many overlong scenes that make this a needlessly tough sit.

A protegé of Gus Van Sant, Archer -- who also makes short films and music videos -- has a wild imagination he has trouble harnessing. He doesn't know the meaning of "too much." But Barkin, in short, blond hair, is superb, as usual, and Aaron Platt's cinematography is stunning. Here's hoping Archer gets his s - - t together in feature No. 3.

Weekend is a gay riff on "Before Sunrise" (1995), in which a man (Ethan Hawke) and woman (Julie Delpy) meet and fall in love in one night, before going their separate ways in the morning for what could be forever.

Based on a memoir by Nigel Slater, a British celebrity chef who makes a cameo appearance, Toast also charts the budding chef's growing interest in hunky, scantily clad guys. Be warned: Some of the regional British accents would benefit from subtitles.

While the Kassen brothers do an impressive job for newcomers -- the film looks great and performances are uniformly solid -- there's some overly blunt dialogue and dead-end subplots that would have been pruned by more experienced filmmakers.

At its most entertaining when the parrot does the talking.

In Machine Gun Preacher, Gerard Butler says, "I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of that hurt a lot of people." But enough about "The Bounty Hunter," "The Ugly Truth" and "P.S. I Love You."

Even if Corben hadn't photographed Gatien with lighting that makes him look like a horror-movie villain, he'd hardly come off as innocent.

It's a shame that, after nearly 40 years of writing about rock, Cameron Crowe is receptive to the clichés of the genre.

A reasonably uplifting kids movie if you don't think about it too much. I get paid to think about things too much, and effective as the movie is, it nevertheless left me slightly put off.

A snarly Euro-thriller with crust under its fingernails and bad breath. It doesn't care if you like it, which is why I kind of do.