As billion-dollar Hollywood franchises go, this is one of the drawn-out dumbest. The stake through the heart comes not a moment too soon.

Remains a primo example that cinema actually traffics in truthiness 24 frames per second.

These women - performance artists, models, butch lesbians and transsexuals - expose their unique beauty under close scrutiny, and rather than simply chronicling a concert, Atlas incorporates candid interviews and playful banter to define his picturesque subjects.

The movie succeeds in generating only mild outrage, tempered by impeccable tastefulness and the safe distance of time.

This isn't a film, it's a recording of canned ham-tasty, certainly, but creaky nonetheless.

Justice is blind - but there are cases where fingers start weighing down the scales. That's the j'accuse that Ra'anan Alexandrowicz's documentary puts forth regarding Israel's rule of law in its post-'67 occupied territories.

Mea Maxima Culpa only gets messier the more it tries to iris out to a larger indictment. The central tragedy ends up diluted to a fault.

Ultimately, points may be scored on the balance sheet of workplace exploitation - usually we see it go the other way around, gender-wise - but these conference-room banalities have been better explored elsewhere, and the effort here feels like a rough draft.

Generation P is worth struggling through, even if it boggles you. In many ways, it's a keyhole into the future of the entire world.

The more the visual ephemera piles up, the more the emotional thrust of the story gets buried beneath all the monotonous pageantry. (Anna's many tête-à-têtes with her two lovers - especially a should-be-dizzying dance-seduction scene - are frigid pomp without any real heat.)

Yet it's impossible to shake the sense that what felt thrillingly, cohesively alive in the director's earlier movies plays here with more laurel-resting creakiness than go-for-broke verve. Russell's once-mercurial assets have become a formula.

Unlike a truly daring movie like Lars von Trier's "The Idiots" - about a gang of clever jerks who pretend to be mentally retarded - The Comedy never musters an articulate indictment, nor does it have much to say on the subject of free-floating fatigue.

Messina and Ireland thrive under that gaze, and dismaying affectations aside-the characters go needlessly unnamed - the movie articulates the enduring allure of a love defined, and heightened, by restrictions.

Wang has made a confidently intimate movie that is devastatingly larger-than-life.

Revenge may be a dish best served cold, as the novel suggested, but steamy adaptations simply can't be doled out lukewarm.

Despite committed and heartfelt performances - especially from the perennially charismatic Peters - director Lisa Albright's soapy semi-autobiographical tale fails to scale the low hurdle of believability.

Its historical import as a peripheral civil-rights document can't be understated.

Intrigue and eroticism abound, all of it watchable, none of it particularly exciting. And the misty widescreen photography lends the proceedings a funereal air of respectability that's like catnip to Oscar voters.

No exchanges flare into true weirdness; rather, the mood is lingering and tentative. Undoubtedly, this is the movie's intent, but it's a fairly banal comment on foreign estrangement (or love) that could have used some roughing up.

No amount of eccentric Americana (or slyly marginal inventiveness) can salvage this strangely lifeless - and largely laughless - gonzo comedy, which is doomed by a flimsy script, one-dimensional characterizations and distractingly inept child acting.

Dree Hemingway, daughter of Mariel, commits to some unnecessary nudity, but also impresses with her subtlety.

The more that fright-flick conventions take over, the more the movie's recognizable and resonant human fears are dulled.

Skyfall has the feel of both a ceremonial commemoration and a franchise-rebooting celebration, especially in the ways it attempts to too cutely sync up the '60s-era Bond mythos (casual misogyny and all) with the more complicatedly "Bourne"-inflected recent episodes.

Defiantly intellectual, complex and true to the shifting winds of real-world governance, Lincoln is not the movie that this election season has earned-but one that a more perfect union can aspire to.

Both the martial arts and the slightly dull narrative patchwork are too choppily edited to gain much of a foothold.

You just wish the moviemaking were as consistently graceful and momentum-fixated as the film's rail-grinding subjects.

There are a million coming-out stories in various naked cities, and filmmaker Bavo Defume's contribution to the genre initially differentiates itself with a vibrant, creatively campy color scheme. Once the visual touches fade away, however, there's nothing to stop the parade of clichés.

Neither totally impartial nor a puff piece, Varon Bonicos's documentary on fashion icon Ozwald Boateng nonetheless evinces a minimal amount of interest in digging into what makes its subject tick.

The story of a young woman (Juno Temple) discovering that she is both a lesbian and a werewolf, Bradley Rust Gray's oddball horror parable starts with an irresistibly trashy premise and proceeds to treat it with the po-faced pretentiousness of a film-school thesis.

Creepy doesn't begin to describe these masterworks of control freakery, nor does beautiful - they look as if they're glowing from the inside out, even as Crewdson's scenes of furtive common people make viewers feel like voyeurs.

A coda shifts to video footage of Cleese's irreverent eulogy; you wish the whole film could have been as slyly somber. It's what the colonel would have insisted upon.

The four leads more often than not transcend the material's calculated moroseness; Ivanir is especially good as a man whose perfectionist facade masks a soul in perpetual turmoil.

If only writer-director Jacob Aaron Estes had bothered to dig a little bit deeper than those damn raccoons did.

Postdivorce reconciliation tales - not to mention mother-whore disquisitions - don't get more elaborate than this.

The film's numerous idiosyncrasies - virtues at the outset - ultimately suffocate it.

Vamps is commendable, even moving, as a raw-nerve confession of anachronism - but it's also what keeps this strained satire from drawing any real blood.

The Bay, a real creepfest, joins the suggestive company of eco-terror entries like Hitchcock's "The Birds" and 1979's "Prophecy."

Even if you remove the questionable quasi-religious touches, Flight doesn't quite soar past its narrative limitations. There's plenty of virtuosity to go around here - just precious little transcendence.

The metaphor is clever, injecting real-life risk and reward into these beautifully artificial vistas, scored to composer Henry Jackman's Nintendo-worthy beeps and bloops.

The film wants to be inspiring, when it might have been cosmic-a far greater ambition. Tossing boats and dreamers, the huge waves perform beautifully.

This Nickelodeon production may be designed for short attention spans, but must the characters have them as well?

The Black Tulip is noteworthy for its existence alone - and not, unfortunately, for much else.

Long Shot confirms that achieving one's goals is rarely possible without the staunch support of others.

Such a feature-length bludgeoning, even in the service of basic social and scientific literacy, is truly discomfiting.

Watching the elder statesman spin ring-a-ding wisdom is one thing; witnessing his generosity to another artist who couldn't handle her own talent, however, speaks volumes about what actually lurks under his placid, seemingly imperturbable surface.

Coyle's got charisma to spare - imagine a hard-man version of Andy Serkis - but even his screen presence eventually gets smothered by the film's cartoonish version of ethnic gangsters, macho caricatures and bruised-heart-of-gold hookers. The phrase accept no substitutes has rarely seemed so applicable.

There's a Polanskian black comedy buried in here somewhere; a sassy neighbor girl who knows too much hints at the right direction, which is never fully explored.

For all of Cloud Atlas's pseudorevolutionary blather about upending the "natural order," the execution couldn't be squarer.

The cast's performances are so gut-wrenching (particularly from Emmanuelle Devos and Areen Omari as the boys' equally empathic mothers) that the film's hopeful message and abundance of heart prove impossible to resist.

Adjust to the deliberate rhythms of this hiking movie-set on the lush slopes of Georgia's Caucasus Mountains - and the psychological payoff stings like a blister.

In drag or out of it, the soft-spoken star has rarely been less convincing than when locking and loading from his home arsenal or dangling from a decaying Detroit edifice.

Apart from a hi-def night-vision gimmick, returning directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman don't take advantage of either upgrade.

It may be a stretch to call the filmmaker a forgotten genius, but if nothing else, Le Grand Amour makes a case that Étaix was a fertile clown, overdue for a bow in the spotlight.

This is little more than an episode of VH1's Classic Albums writ large. You'll learn everything you ever wanted to know about the making of this chart-topping behemoth - except for insights about the man in the mirror who created it.

If any film could convince people that ACID is the patron saint of tomorrow's Godards, it's this one.

If director Stephen Fung's frenetic visual style is the Red Bull in this cinematic cocktail, then the dozy plotting is the vodka - leaving you feeling momentarily excited but ultimately narcotized.

Huppert fans have long been tolerant of her hit-and-miss filmography, and while her double act with the rubber-faced Poelvoorde provides a few well-played scenes-two words: horsey rides-it's not enough to liven up a trite story of loosening up.

If the film occasionally bumps up against the limitations of its "Spellbound"-like template, its refusal to ignore the social issues outside of the classroom proves it's more than simply a novelty human-interest story with impressive knight moves.

This aesthetically undistinguished yet still engrossing documentary follows the emotionally charged lead-up to the vote on Question One, a 2009 Maine referendum that put the marriage rights of gay and lesbian couples on the state ballot.

Tediousness sets in eventually; there's only so much zoological abyss-gazing one can do.

A noble goal, but That's What She Said's overload of self-loathing is apt to break the audience's spirit first.

Let your mind wander during this painfully generic teen-sex dramedy (trust us, it will), and there might be emotions worse than frustration in store.

Getting old's a bitch. But the long-in-the-tooth quintet (Chaplin, Fonda, Guy Bedos, Claude Rich and Pierre Richard) at the center of Stéphane Robelin's featherweight French comedy has it all figured out.

The Flat details his efforts to understand this unusual situation, and although the film suggests that his relatives may have maintained this odd friendship as a denial of their homeland's betrayals, there's only so deep Goldfinger can dig.

Eventually, the self-regarding acting clan admits they're only human after all. By then, the audience may want to disown them.

For a film about sexual conquest, Nobody Walks is a frustratingly flaccid affair.

Knuckleheaded though this faculty-member-turned-MMA-fighter comedy is, there's no denying the plot's lefty credentials, snuck in like Raisinets among the popcorn.

Sinister has so much going for it - adult psychology, a great bitchfest of a marital meltdown - that you wince when it finally makes some rather dull choices involving the supernatural.

Holy Motors is aggressively "wild," a puzzle that tweaks the mind but doesn't nourish.

The real heat of The Sessions comes from its pitch-perfect sense of place, the free-spirited Berkeley of the 1980s.

If the documentary lacks anything, it's a firmer grasp of Springfield's own transformation, from "kind of a dick" (per ex–MTV jock Mark Goodman) during his heyday to a giving, appreciative showman. Call it humility, shaded with weird, two-way neediness. Jesse's girl may have dodged a bullet.

The film never finds the right mix of the epic and the intimate - the personal as seen through the 20th century's Euro-geopolitical turmoil - that it aims for.

You never lose the nagging sense that you're simply watching a high-school drama club's production of '40s fatalism chic.

A cross-pollinated mixture of Hollywood-blockbuster bombast, Asian cool and '60s Vegas ring-a-ding swing.

The Big Picture is really Duris's picture; the actor toggles effortlessly between arrogant, feral, remorseful and ruthless as the plot throws one curveball after the next.

The film develops into a sweet, surprisingly persuasive comedy about friends transitioning into family.

That War of the Buttons shows no insight into how a nation's will could be so easily subdued is disappointing; that it shows no curiosity on the subject is inexcusable.

Mileage will vary from viewer to viewer as to whether this singularly eccentric movie is ultimately illuminating or enervating.

McElwee's quietly reassuring voice dominates the film, but that doesn't mean he can't craft a magnificently eloquent image when he wants to, as in the moment when he frames Adrian, seated in a coffee shop, inside his own reflection in the shop's front window.

To be sure, the film as a whole feels like a creaky vehicle, belabored with plot strands and stereotypes that only serve to highlight Winstead's ragged commitment to something real.

Walken is particularly alive in a way he's rarely been since "Catch Me if You Can," adding untold shades to Hans's mystery-shrouded past - wait until you see what's under his cravat - while still giving his singularly eccentric line readings.

No performances stand out, which is a shame given Affleck's track record with actors. Ultimately, it comes down to a chase to the airport, with a scary Revolutionary Guardsman at the gate.

This is humanistic drama done right.

Lovers of the TV biker drama may find pleasure in the duo's surreal scenes together, but everyone else will likely view this story about a writer (Hunnam), his film-obsessed drug-addict brother (Chris O'Dowd) and a viral amateur-porn movie as one limp farce.

The documentary's technique of cutting between warm exchanges and the bellicose rhetoric of then-presidents Ahmadinejad and Bush wears thin with overuse, but the big-hearted Sheppard makes for an amiable tour guide.

A cynical film which has only been made, apparently, to squeeze the pockets of anyone who enjoyed the first movie. Why give them the satisfaction?

The novelty of their industry aside, there's little to differentiate this from any other relationship-centered Amerindie.

At one point, Borba speaks with keen perspicacity about embracing Bahian folklore even when it verges on stereotype. This documentary mirrors the enthusiasm of that embrace, but not its artistry.

Neither Janney nor Keener can rise above the rote hatefulness of their madwoman caricatures, whereas Laurie and Meester fare better at playing liberated dreamers who go against the dreaded grain. But shooting fish in a barrel tends to unintentionally conjure sympathy for the fish - or, in this case, for perfectly unhappy suburbanites.

If its juxtaposition of bad behavior and dairy products leaves you stone-faced or wearily sighing, you should exit the theater posthaste.

Whenever the film focuses more on Jarecki's hand-wringing than deconstructing the war itself, you wish someone would have looked the filmmaker in the eye and just said no.

It's too bad V/H/S starts off on such a high note. Mainly, the omnibus film feels undercooked, even on the grounds of its forced technological setup.

The problem is that the filmmaker brings D-grade craft to these B-movie exertions, making his florid maximalism more entertaining to talk about than endure - despite the best efforts of his ardently slumming A-list cast.

Though the tale demands a darker outcome, the director disappointingly goes the Mouse House happy-ending route with a reprise of the original short film's finale - one that somehow plays with even more cringeworthy sentimentality.

Meier is clearly carving out a path all her own; the next one should be a gem.

Arnold's vibrant, Malickian adaptation has another bold stroke worth mentioning: Heathcliff, a Gypsy in the original text, is now an Afro-Caribbean former slave, initially a bruised teen (Glave) and then an unusual, self-made man (Howson).

Push any guy long enough with alcohol and aggressive masculinity, the film suggests, and you'll find an XY-chromosomed predator lurking behind the mask.

The film slowly reveals its true colors, pointing a fanatically accusatory finger at teachers' unions while using twisted Obama-esque sloganeering about "order" and "hope" to further its simplistically anticollectivist agenda.