Costa-Gavras' film excels as a meticulously researched procedural that goes deep into the grime of greed, deception and cynical exploitation. But it is also a wickedly clever character analysis of a man more divided against himself than his preternatural calm suggests.

God Bless America ends with a couple of tale-twisting bullet orgies designed to take your preconceptions, as well as your nerve-endings, by surprise.

Director Salim Akil deserves credit for keeping the film from falling apart completely. He sets a the brisk pace, and uses the picturesque oceanside setting to give the movie an inviting gloss even as the overstuffed narrative threatens to push viewers away.

Director Michael Grandage hails from the stage. So does screenwriter John Logan, so where films about writers are often filled with raised eyebrows rather than raised voices, these guys actively encourage grand gestures. Like the characters, they are intoxicated — not just by jazz or bootleg liquor, but by words.

The incoherence is made all the more disappointing because Eisner displays a great deal of raw talent for the genre's tone and set pieces.

In The Details' finest moments, writer-director Jacob Aaron Estes exerts a precise control over tone using sound and performance; in its worst moments, the score and actors overcompensate for weak material. Those elements let Estes get away with often-indulgent writing, throwing up whole scenes that don't add texture or conflict.

The director recycles some of the better effects from his gladiator epic "300"...and he's being so faithful to the work of comics artist Dave Gibbons that he might as well have used the graphic novel's illustrations as a storyboard.

On the page, it's a funny little snapshot of the preteen mind, ruled by prevailing forces of fear and aggression, yet still given to silliness and lowbrow yuks. In a movie, however, Greg's thoughts are made painfully literal, so instead of being a reflection of his hyperactive imagination, they're grotesque cartoons standing in for real life.

It's Liam Neeson at his Neesoniest, and yet another entry in his expanding late-career bloom into gruff and commanding action hero.

As action movies go, Valkyrie is pretty short on action.

Douchebag has the intensity and taut circularity of a short story told with economy and style.

Eventually, too little is left to the imagination to do what it does best: fill in the gaps with visions far more frightening than anything a filmmaker could put onscreen.

Date Night isn't great; it's not really going for "great." But it's a well-executed comedy with a warm but not cloying center.

Somehow, without soft-pedaling the nastier angles of Wagner's life and legacy, Wagner & Me lands on the side of joy and defiance - broadly speaking, Fry decides not to let the terrorists win.

Though cinematographer Flavio Labiano turns the city into an alien maze of steel and glass, his chilling work is undercut by a script with more logical craters than Martin's.

The film is too frenetically paced and clean to quite recreate the magic of their source material, but it does often face these issues in the same admirably head-on fashion.

It's as if everyone involved in the film figured they could keep Hereafter from turning ghost-story hokey by making it grounded, beautiful and matter-of-fact. And it sort of works. There are no inadvertent giggles here; it just doesn't add up to enough, after.

After a while, you can see the setups happening -- and once you do, the careening gets predictable. Which gets old, really fast.

A surprisingly unsurprising film.

The cast is more than game. DeWitt's Abby is earnest and searching and a little bit nuts, but we're never encouraged to see her as dumb, credulous or pathetic.

Almodovar is in party mode here, and if you liked his 1990 comedy "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" you'll probably love I'm So Excited! for its candied pastels and its impishly clever design, which transforms the plane into a theater and its galley into a staging area for those three theatrical stewards.

This was an era when international travel was not yet common, and in 16mm home movies from the trip, you can see the excitement as 1940s cities burst into gaudy state welcomes for the creator of El Raton Mickey.

With his debut picture, Antiviral, Brandon Cronenberg, son of David, has made a movie that's decidedly, resolutely unjunky — and more's the pity. This is a sleek, willfully elegant exercise, high on style even if it's conspicuously low on ideas.

What it fails to supply much of — surprisingly, it must be said — is fun. This is serious business, Snyder seems always to be saying. This is badass. And given the sheer logistical size of the spectacle on display, it's a position that's hard to argue with.

Ultimately, this intriguing but scattershot movie turns on the incompatibility of two worldviews - the corporate-financial vs. the environmental-spiritual.

Gary Oldman pulls off his own hat trick, playing both noble Bob Cratchit and sickly Tiny Tim, as well as Scrooge's late partner, Marley, who haunts the miser in fluorescent green.

So long as Exporting Raymond sticks to the headaches of adapting Everybody Loves Raymond into Everybody Loves Kostya, it's a funny and revealing look at the immense chasm between the two cultures.

Taking Woodstock has a winning generosity of spirit, but even that serves chiefly to underline the film's curious inconsequentiality, as if it were a two-hour pilot for a show about a charmingly eccentric family and a rotating cast of colorful guest stars.

There's a quiet audaciousness about it. Schepisi still seems to believe that if you tell a good story in an artful, straightforward way, people will come to it. He may be wrong, but thank goodness he's still in there pitching.

The directors can make it fluid, comprehensible and gorgeous to look at, but they can't keep what struck many readers as profound on the page, from seeming profoundly obvious on screen, especially when every point gets reiterated six times.

The "casi" in Casi Divas translates to "almost," and it's an appropriate word for the film as a whole.

The film never coheres. Trying to carve out a space between black comedy and straight evocation of a difficult but rewarding marriage, the movie never settles on a tone.

This hugely entertaining movie is about the wisdom and - with trenchant wit and sympathy - the human flaws in one of America's most idealized heads of state.

If your sole image of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner is that of a lanky, silk-jammied sybarite strolling the grounds of his mansion with a jiggling blond on either arm, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel will knock your socks off.

It's stately with a smirk, crossing Bram Stoker with "The Addams Family" to arrive at what sometimes feels like a wildly overproduced "Saturday Night Live" sketch.

In this movie, real history, in the form of the people who actually knew George Gershwin and performed his music, makes a bigger and truer impression than the Hollywood fabrications.

The faux-naive point of view probably worked better in the novel; the literalness of film renders certain of the story's conceits overly precious.

The movie poignantly demonstrates that, 41 years after Stonewall, there are still places in this country where gay people cannot simply be themselves.

Hypermacho but tongue-in-cheek, the first 20 minutes of 2 Guns are enormous fun.

About Time is ... about time: It asks us to reflect on how we all use that resource, how the hours and minutes that make up a day or a life align with our intentions and values.

Likable as this full-hearted and uplifting movie is, though, I wish that Beresford had not fallen into the familiar trap of dividing Chinese characters into two roles: brutal, ideology-spouting apparatchiki; or parable-spouting, salt-of-the-earth proletarians, the better to show off by contrast the open society of the West.

Though the film eventually caves to sentiment and stereotype, its alert performances and muted rhythms offer much to enjoy in the interim.

As family viewing, it's pleasant enough: primitive, yes, but in a digitally sophisticated way that's boisterous, funny and will no doubt sell a lot of toys.

Perfect Sense shines best outside of the bedroom, in sequences that show the human race adjusting to tragedy after tragedy.

There's something pure about the crude pleasures of Hobo with a Shotgun, a pre-fab cult film that aspires to nothing more (or less) than the red-meat feeding of a feral midnight-movie audience.

Thanks to his major role in songwriting, Krieger is credited repeatedly, but the other two players recede as the band increasingly becomes The Jim Morrison Show.

Historical records being what they are, the filmmakers are forced to speculate about certain things, but where facts are known they generally adhere to them.

There's a great deal of promise and potential in the idea of a documentary study of Hicks. Unfortunately, American falls short of anything beyond the ordinary. Part of the problem is the difficulty in resisting the temptation to squeeze the comic's story into the familiar confines of a VH1 Behind the Music-style template.

A tight, anxious little film that plays like a call to arms for senior citizens, Harry Brown could be "Gran Torino" reimagined as a subdued episode of "Prime Suspect."

Jesse's nobility is one of the primary reasons Liberal Arts is so hard to take.

When Luhrmann finally reveals the title character, he does so as assorted partygoers work themselves into a frenzy, Rhapsody in Blue pounds on the soundtrack and fireworks explode in the sky...Unfortunately, the film is never again as successful; from here on, it has to dig into the bothersome business of telling Fitzgerald's story.

De Palma is such a dazzling stylist that for most of Passion, you'll find it perfectly acceptable to let the visuals wash over you, paying only passing attention to the plot.

Nair likes to have fun even when her material is somber, and for this movie she deploys a rich palette and a multi-culti but mostly kitsch-free score that fuses old and new with a lovely Sufi devotional piece, and is peppered with Pakistani pop.

All of this is at once predictable and implausible -- a two-hander of a story so overplotted and overpopulated that by the time it's winding up, the question isn't so much Is Anybody There? as it is, "Why on earth are so many bodies here?"

What's more annoying than the crassness, really, is the directorial sloppiness that results in a virtually mirthless first half-hour and a slow build to chuckles thereafter.

The lack of chemistry between Hemsworth and Portman, plain enough in the first Thor movie, is still a problem here, but at least they've largely ditched the starry-eyed schoolgirl routine.

The director does pull off a pretty magnificent cornfield car chase - two sleek vehicles cut through a thick, shaggy carpet of maize like souped-up harvesters, the movie's way of saying that the simple country life needn't be devoid of thrills. But Jee-woon takes too long to wrap things up, fumbling repeatedly on his way to an ending.

And yet: Thanks for Sharing is such a relaxed, good-humored movie that it's tough to complain about its tendency to ... well, overshare.

This is a special Jersey Boys universe crafted specifically for fans — among whom you can pretty clearly count Clint Eastwood.

Best of all is the half-surreal, half-touching scene of the couple ordering Chinese delivery - needless to say, the tip is sizable - and inviting the courier to Skype his family one last time and share in a moment of common humanity.

Save the Date has the vapid, beige feel of an off-the-peg product made to exploit a niche market rather than a film with something on its mind about what it means to make the jump from youth to adulthood today.

Illness, death, bad fathers and bad marriages, suppressed old loves — there's nothing new here, yet we are held by the way ordinary suffering has hardened into an emotional prison for three old friends.

Director Larry Charles has made Bruno a tighter, better-looking film than "Borat," which is not necessarily a good thing on those occasions when you suspect it of scripting rather than just observing.

The documentary is at its best when it eases up on the adoration a little and turns to a serious discussion of the state of comics these days, what with newspapers on the decline and digital media scattering an art form that was once centralized on pages delivered to everyone's door.

If Ken Loach and Roberto Benigni went into a bar, drank themselves into a stupor and emerged the next morning with a screenplay, it might look a lot like The Misfortunates.

The broad comedy clashes with the movie's final message: that 6,000 girls face genital mutilation every day.

Written and directed by David Riker, who built his 1998 drama "La Ciudad" around immigrants in New York City, The Girl is stingy with backstory but rich with visual clues.

Oblivion occupies an awkward no-man's-land between escapist space adventure and heady science fiction, but it's neither thrilling enough nor intellectually stimulating enough to satisfy devotees of either.

If body count is what you go to Westerns for, by all means drift into this one's corral. It's hardly magnificent, and apart from its casting it's not doing anything particularly original with its premise. But it's diverting in about the way you'd expect of a remake twice removed — call it a perfectly competent seven.

Enjoyable and forgettable in equal measure, the lovably cheesy Australian movie Bran Nue Dae is a must for children bitten by the musical-revival fever, for all who heart American Idol, and for anyone who came of age in the late 1960s - and is willing to hear the beloved pop standards of their youth massacred for a new age.

Like most of LaBute's work, Some Velvet Morning ends as it begins, more clever than wise.

By the end, Macy's presence is just one part of what makes A Single Shot recall the Coen brothers' "Fargo." That film's now-famous wood-chipper scene can seem strangely tame a decade and a half on, but it still has a lesson to teach: When you show violence in a story that's not really about violence, there'd better be more of a point than just making us squirm.

A preachy parable of suburban discontent, Shorts probably has enough kid-oriented slapstick to please the under-12 set. But it's not likely to rival writer-director Robert Rodriguez's "Spy Kids" series in long-term appeal.

A little slow for the very youngest kids -- though the messages it imparts are certainly ones you'll want them to hear.

Unlike the tale told in "Precious", however, The Blind Side's story is contrived, storybook sweet, credulity-straining and ... um, true.

It's a cold-blooded business — and all sentiment aside, it's clear that Pineda is as replaceable as anyone.

Delicacy is phony in ways that might seem drearily familiar to audiences weaned on American romantic comedies.

If this fabulously decked-out foursome is self-absorbed enough to be inadvertently cruel on occasion, they also suffer lots of guilt -- though their angst is rendered somewhat less angsty for viewers by the zingers, the designers, and the cheerfully objectified men on display.

The movie is less than incisive, but it's utterly well-meaning.

And then there's the simple fact of De Niro, playing a delusional taxi driver. It's easy to imagine Being Flynn's story turning precious in the wrong hands, but Weitz and his cast spin it just right - as a narrative that is both emotionally real, and just writerly enough to suit its leading men.

Unmade in China is nominally about filmmaking, but what Kofman and Barklow do well is to use their unusual position within the Chinese state machine to make a thinly veiled movie about politics.

Once the colorful anecdotes sprawl out into an actual narrative, the film gets convoluted and loud, amplifying the weirdness without doing much to clarify it.

Hysteria, a disappointingly limp ode to the invention of the vibrator, plays like a Merchant Ivory Production of "Portnoy's Complaint."

These fleeting moments never quite overcome the sense that Earthwork's narrative follows too-familiar templates, and that its characters lack the careful detail of Herd's own art.

The protagonists of Late Bloomers have a problem, but it's not that they're getting older. Their dilemma is that they're reacting so differently to aging.

A streamlined script might have helped. Curran and Winterbottom lose themselves in the soupy business of union shenanigans, an internal investigation and Lou's intervention in a troubled boy's life, but the added complications -- and the talk, talk, talk they require -- take away from the disquieting core of Thompson's story.

The characters in Bachelorette are most human when they're behaving badly. They break the spell when they turn into women we can merely relate to.

Theatrically inclined parents will also appreciate a passing reference to the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Moving Co.

Wain's brand of humor thrives on stepping over the line - and then sprinting a few hundred yards past it.

There's something centrally pat and predictable about the coincidence-laden story, and by the time they get to Vegas, The Lucky Ones has been all but done in by a surfeit of serendipity.

The filmmakers wanted to broaden the formula a little, make it more inclusive, do something a little adventurous. Kinda like Earth to Echo's tween heroes.

Kaplan keeps the story breezy and brisk, and provides his down-to-earthily modern fairy tale with an appropriately other-worldly visual style.

The Artist and the Model suffers from the opposite affliction: It has all the trappings of a serious work of art, and it hasn't been hurried but it remains, in the end, disappointingly hollow.

Basically the anti-"Kill Bill." Both movies are quilted together from their auteurs' favorite Asian action flicks, but where Tarantino's was overheated, Reeves' is elegantly iced.

So it's nice that, despite some cliched rhythms, the flawed-ex-con-makes-good drama LUV gets the details of childhood-cut-short heartbreakingly right.

By movie's end, director Marcos Carnevale has made it possible for you to see Elsa through Fred's eyes. Love has bloomed late -- but with sweet exuberance -- in this romantic charmer.

Reportedly, the movie's humor relies heavily on Cantonese slang and profanity, which will be lost on most American viewers. But Quin's rapid-fire bilingualism gives some sense of the movie's verbal dexterity.

The City of Your Final Destination does eventually prove intelligent enough about how we all become prisoners of dependency and obsession. Yet for a movie that argues for free agency and following your bliss rather than your career, it's awfully torpid.