As a horror movie, Jennifer's Body doesn't fully deliver. But as a comic allegory of what it's like to be an adolescent girl who comes into sexual and social power that she doesn't know what the heck to do with, it is a minor classic.

For a film that strives so hard to show the sheer messiness of real people's lives, Burning Plain does have an impossibly neat ending.

35 Shots of Rum is visual poetry, but poetry that examines the human condition with insight and illumination.

Intimate as a whisper, immediate as a blush, and universal as first love, the PG-rated film positively palpitates with the sensual and spiritual.

Suffers from several goofily tacky animated reenactments and a music score that unnecessarily underlines the significance of key events, but for those who lived through the turmoil of Vietnam, and for the generations that have come since, the film is an important document in its own right.

At once noble and naive, earnest and a tad obnoxious.

A double shot of Saturday-night lowdown chased by a cheery chug of Sunday-morning uplift.

In 50 years, film lovers will look back on 9 as the debut feature of an original talent.

What's less clear, and more maddening, is how several generations of Ecuadorans have been left to live on toxic land, their health and livelihoods compromised, while lawyers file motions and counter-motions and blame is passed around.

A mix of coolheaded cultural satire and anxiety-inducing workplace and marital shenanigans, Extract is an odd project. It's smarter than most of the comedies out there right now, but that doesn't necessarily make it funnier.

Struggles mightily to find its loony essence. But Bullock's apple-cheeked larkishness is all flailing limbs and bug-eyed reaction shots - there's no there there. Cooper's character is woefully underwritten, Church's is yet another vain anchorman-wannabe cartoon.

Filmmaker Dabis based Amreeka on her own family's experiences in the rural Midwest during the first Gulf War. Although the drama heads on a predictable course, Faour brings intelligence and humor to her performance and Muallem, as the smart adolescent turned surly and scared, is likewise sharp.

It's a scary tale.

Siegel, in his debut as director, shot the low-budget Big Fan on a digital camera and achieves an appropriately grimy, gritty look. He has an eye for the telling detail and for the comedy in tragedy.

Compulsively entertaining documentary.

Alas, the conceit of a double-dating Grandson and Gramps does not produce a great many laughs in this cringeworthy film.

Lee distills the flavor of this transforming event and hints at how it transformed some who were there. His movie is a contact high.

Like "Jumanji," Shorts runs out of momentum before it's half over. That leaves it treading slapstick and killing time until its strained and preposterous big finish.

Ostensibly a comedy, and a feeble and innocuous one at that, Post Grad is one of those what-were-they-thinking?

Less a Holocaust retribution fantasy than a messy homage to war movies, and to movies, period.

If Edel's Oscar-nominated film drags in its final 40 minutes, it's a function of the director's fidelity to the facts - and the fact that the founding trio (and the film's stars) have become prisoners of the state, confined and confused.

Faced with the script's weak humor and feeble stabs at irony, Schwartzman and Stiller turn it way up, setting the dial at "hammy."

It is diverting but insubstantial.

For a comedy about autoerotic asphyxiation, epic deception, and shameless exploitation, World's Greatest Dad is a surprisingly sweet and tender affair.

Pitch-perfect and profoundly moving.

There is a lot of shield-your-eyes ickiness in District 9, a lot of violence and gore. What there is not a lot of, however, is humanity - even in the film's depiction of the inhumanity humans are capable of.

You watch a Miyazaki film with the pie-eyed, gape-mouthed awe of a child being read the most fantastic story and suddenly transported to places previously beyond the limits of imagination. It's quite a trip.

A syrupy and extraordinarily ridiculous adaptation.