New Yorkers and those who've been following the neighborhood's plight know exactly how this ends; at the very least, Paravel and Sniadecki have preserved the memory of what was. Sometimes, that's the most you can do.

It's another episodic, shaggy-dog parade of L.A. denizens caught in moderately compromised positions.

As brought to life in the stentorian tones of Ben Kingsley, the curator comes off like a driven visionary, but his actual efforts aren't dramatized enough. The paintings speak more articulately: doomy, dank colors and oppressive shapes.

Her (Binoche) award-winning performance is reason alone to dive into such intellectual gamesmanship. (She can suggest an entire emotional arc with one facial tic.)

With unexpected supernatural restraint, the movie approaches a religious parable; am I being unfair in wishing it had a touch more apocalyptic hysteria to it?

After the novelty of these backgrounds and comin'-at-ya bits wears off, Mars Needs Moms has to rely on Fogler's obnoxious Jack Black Jr. shtick, a weak subplot involving a '60s-obsessed Martian graffiti artist (Harnois) and rote video-game-y action sequences to carry it along-and that simply won't cut it.

Ultimately, the returns of the film's premise can't justify a nearly two-and-a-half-hour squirm. The savagery is honest, raw and hardly entertainment.

It's undeniably humanistic; resourceful and well managed, however, are a different story.

Radnor tries to pin a tail of significance on this donkey, but he seems content with light comedy and mere proficiency. To which we can only reply: Nothankyounomoremilquetoast-please.

Several quick-witted touches-such as a hilarious nod to Depp's role in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"-can't make up for Gore Verbinski's leaden direction of this digitally animated feature.

The movie misses the Hughes sensitive-raunch sweet spot, though a game supporting cast hits bull's-eyes on lesser targets.

You outsmart the movie way too soon.

It's a quietly witty film, much like the dude himself.

What you see and hear always seems perfectly natural, even if you can't exactly say why. Who needs words when you have cinema?

We've seen Nicolas Cage when he's angry-and we like him when he's angry. So why does this painfully loud revenge movie skimp on the Cage rage?

Godly as the monks are, they are still human-which makes their ultimate sacrifice all the more devastating.

Though his results are sometimes raw, Dolan seems to be chronicling heartache as he discovers it. Indulge him.

A largely sexless sex romp, has such a winning sense of middle-aged exhaustion to it that you might want to add a star or two, especially if you're familiar with the banalities of matrimonial bliss.

By the end of this funny, insightful doc, you get a sense of an extraordinary mind that both fueled and fed the zeitgeist. Don't miss it.

Hilariously horrible when it isn't just plain awful.

Writer-director Tariq Tapa-who shot much of this vérité-style film by himself-does a beautiful job attuning us to Dilawar's drifting routine, but what's especially striking is how he gives equal weight to the supporting characters.

Every move is a misstep.

You can practically taste the grime in Jorge Michel Grau's art-house horror show-the film looks like it's been slathered with gooey discards from a backyard barbecue.

Hobbled by contrived situations and atonal acting, The Chaperone is a lazy payday sloppily directed by Hollywood veteran Stephen Herek.

Please. If you're going to ask audiences to submit to a dim theater themselves, at least greet them with the proper monster they paid for.

Porterfield has proved he can do grit and atmosphere. Should the young director ever decide to channel this talent into storytelling with purpose and a point, he might be someone to watch out for.

Even if you ignore the bad acting, dogmatic dirty-talk dialogue so wooden it'd put a Redwood forest to shame and director Phillippe Diaz's total lack of visual sense, you'd still have to digest a junior-collegiate lecture with less savvy than a horny 14-year-old.

Overflowing with super-slow motion, color filters and the clunkiest of flashbacks, The Last Lions frequently amplifies the melodrama to borderline-excessive proportions.

Unknown is probably the movie "The Tourist" wanted to be, if it had a pulse. Its sheer momentum makes Neeson and Kruger more attractive than even Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie.

Sandler's puppy-dog persona is just about ready to be put down. From its title on, this is entertainment for extremely lazy audiences.

What elevates The Sky Turns beyond a lovely little elegy and into the realm of greatness is Álvarez's refusal to shape the film as a tragedy.

Unpacks the man's story with a dramatic flair that might be mistaken for Zoolanderiffic, if it weren't so aptly accessible.

Yun is quite simply spectacular as a woman who holds steadfastly on to her dignity and empathy, even in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

Sometimes, the debunking is overshadowed by cringe-inducing graphics involving pills with little legs running toward a finish line.

It's a movie that doesn't inspire anything as passionate as love or hate.

This confounding, overwrought mockumentary abruptly devolves into sitcom silliness.

As a thriller, however, the film only comes alive in fits and starts.

Chu does his best to humanize his subject, showing him surrounded by devoted friends and family, and wringing much drama from an on-the-road vocal-cord strain.

The movie's overall lack of imagination is the real tragedy.

The movie just ping-pongs between empathetic chuckles at Helms's charming social awkwardness and putting him through a raunchfest ringer.

Do you like movies about gladiators? Well, lend me your ears: The Eagle will more than gratify your sword-and-sandal cravings.

This 3-D cave-diving adventure plays on a lot of fears, so avoid it if you have an aversion to claustrophobia, drowning or really bad acting.

The film's sure-to-be-brief theatrical release is a mere stopover on the way to basic-cable eternity.

Maybe it's this soapy saga's cocktail of the worst of both the Lifetime network and self-consciously quirky indie cinema, but the strong supporting cast (including Jenkins and Blythe Danner) looks downright queasy in every frame.

The problem, however, lies squarely with Portman herself, who (Oscar nod or no) seems unlikely to ever achieve a tone between histrionic and affectless.

Big on emotional highs but skimpy on details, Dressed rallies behind the orphan but fails to reveal the artist.

Just as soon as that rarest Lebowskian blend of casual pursuit and big-world conspiracy begins to emerge from the fog, Cold Weather appears to lose its nerve (or run out of money).

It's such a haphazard, absent-minded history lesson that you'd think the filmmakers had ingested some of the era's pharmaceuticals before concocting this tribute.

Into Eternity has the grandeur of ominous suggestion, but might have benefitted from a director more creatively unbound-an Errol Morris ready to play around at the end of the world.

The movie's first hour happens to be its most absorbing. Director Alexei Popogrebsky sets up the quiet tensions between his two generationally divided characters like a chess match pocked with occasional power grabs.

We certainly need all the ecological jeremiads we can get. But must they be so numbingly pedantic?

More than a few moments feel implausible or overwrought; yet the movie, about two people so desperate to be alive, is eerily haunting.

Once upon a time, raw talent was enough to get your name in lights; as this look at the underside of showbiz reminds us, you also need to know how to sell it.

The film has the look of unflinching truth, yet it too often feels like a calculated ploy to stoke viewers' liberal-guilty consciences.

While Araki has finally perfected a shoegazey visual aesthetic that's simultaneously sensual and too cool for school, it's hard not to feel that his reprise of yesterday's greatest snits borders on being stuck in a rut.

Yip's chop-socky sequel does manage to up the (admittedly modest) ante of the original.

Hollywood's hocus-pocus machine has turned out swill like this before, but even ultra-observant Catholics will find their interest waning. Hammy acting should make nonbelievers of the rest.

It's a pleasure to watch the granite-faced action star do his own stunts, particularly a death-defying leap from a bridge. Yet everything feels hurried.

Unfortunately, Mumbai Diaries addresses these weighty concerns with such delicacy that they barely make an impact, thus calling further undue attention to the creakiness of the warhorse plot.

Remember the "Seinfeld" episode in which Jerry and Elaine try to become friends with benefits, and set up unsustainable ground rules for their new arrangement? Imagine it rewritten by the Romantic Comeditron 2000 as a profanity-laced schmaltzfest, and you've got this tone-deaf dud.

If The Woodmans has something profound to say-and it does, unwittingly-it's that art can't raise a child solo.

An hour and half of comparable barbarity follows-all of it monotonous, none of it enlightening.

The major change is that the domestic, Eun-yi (the great Jeon, star of "Secret Sunshine"), is now more of a victim than an aggressor.

Her (Steen) emotional acrobatics are reason enough to sit through Applause's parade of pain, though it's a movie to admire rather than enjoy.

The Way Back then takes its time, creeping through gorgeous locations in Bulgaria, Morocco and Pakistan, and basically feeling like a two-hour-plus version of the desert scene from "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."

Never saccharine, My Dog Tulip does justice to the rare experience of heartfelt, mutual love in any form

How does one remain an unapologetic fan of Vaughn, abrasive though he is, even as his material fails him?

This tale of a rich brat (Jonet) is a banal, tone-deaf dud.

Every bit as unshakable as "An Inconvenient Truth," Werner Boote's documentary isolates the mysteries (and possible dangers) of that ubiquitous titular substance.

The question remains: Is Mugianis a shaman or sham?

Levine's dramedy not only gives Ned's middle-class crises a static, by-the-numbers treatment, it also feels compelled to adopt a ridiculously righteous moral tone.

Despite a few moments of surprising insight, Twelve Thirty comes off as more mechanistic than organic; it's composed rather than truly lived.

Injecting a devil-may-care attitude into a franchise-focused blockbuster only gets you so far. When all is said and done, this wasp's got no sting.

Feste's ode to showbiz clichés is closer to contemporary Nashville pop: twangy enough to qualify as Southern-fried, but too slick and disposable to be truly deep.

It's "Centurion Deux" without the second-coming-of-Carpenter pretense, though you still wish the trashiness were more distinctive.

Suleiman can be criticized for failing, ever so slightly, at crafting an overall structure-his latest, based on his dad's diary and other memories, is an autobiographical story of exile and return that skips like a stone over water, fleetly but not so deeply. Still, this is a welcome example of kitsch wedded to serious indictment.

Despite the faux-realist aesthetic (gritty handheld camerawork; all-natural sound), we never feel like much is at stake, though Pistereanu and Condeescu have an easygoing rapport that makes the quieter moments between them affecting.

It's a well-constructed and long-overdue tribute, yet Fortune refrains from delving into larger questions that surround Ochs's work. Did the singer's unwavering dedication to agitpop leave him stranded in the '60s? And does Ochs's diminished legacy among today's essentially apolitical neofolkies amount to a second tragedy?

A typically lax late-period Ferrara work, far from the glories of "King of New York."

Uniting Sacha Baron Cohen's daredevilry with Werner Herzog's bombast, Brügger aims to expose "the evilness of North Korea" with a gloriously incoherent, kazoo-and-whoopee-cushion–inflected stage show starring a self-proclaimed "spastic."

Summer Wars surprisingly celebrates togetherness and bravery as much as binary-mathematics expertise, all helped along by a kick-ass synthesis of traditional hand-drawn scenes and fluid, rainbow-explosive CG artistry.

Its stunningly composed images showing how Isaac is himself something of a ghost-given to staring off into the distance, being condescended to by those around him, a man perpetually outside the times. What he needs is to take that one extra step toward his spectral siren; the scene in which he does so might be one of the most exhilarating visions of death's sweet embrace ever filmed.

These characters are more than what we see on the surface, and it's thanks to Leigh's rigorous yet generous eye that we never just gawk at the drama.

We've come to expect diminishing returns from the once-promising Mexican director who then gave the world "Babel," but the combination of wallowing humanistic-cinema overkill and outright ridiculousness he lays out here represents a new low. Biutiful is not a tragedy. It's a straight-up travesty.

Blue Valentine has a quiet, resigned wisdom to it.

Chomet builds this beguiling symphony of sadness to a poignant finale that does ample justice to the many layers of Tati's tale, both in text and out.

There's a darker, fanatical side to blindness too-and this is the movie to show it. Leave all judgments behind.

There's really no focking place for the franchise to go anymore.

Like most primates, Nénette is both fascinatingly familiar and strange, capable of almost human expressions yet totally unknowable (as well as massive and hairy).

Those of us who dig the comedian's hyperactive persona may feel that the meter is now officially running on his amiable rocker-doofus act; everyone else will simply marvel that a Christmas season could produce such an unfunny, unentertaining lump of coal.

This routine animated feature is a perfectly fine thing to waste.

The film works to inform as well as to preserve an air of mystery around Bernstein, an apt approach that occasionally slips into the willfully opaque. By all accounts, this secretly important man was tough to live with, but not too hard to love or admire.

Phillips goes too far sometimes (border-jail breakout?), but his new direction is promising.

This is fertile material for a darkly comic indictment. Instead, we get recycled cynicism (politicians are hypocrites! more dirty money, more problems!) and Spacey's gallery of impersonations-W.C. Fields, Stallone, Reagan-in lieu of a flawed, flesh-and-blood human being.

Easily the most gracefully performed grief-porn you'll see this season.

The difference between a movie about emptiness and an empty movie becomes abundantly clear.

To make a Western now is in itself a subversive act. Improving, embellishing and reclaiming an old-fashioned oater from the vintage studio-cheese bin with such humor and vigor seems truly, truly ballsy.

The profusion of Dudes is - pardon the apt pun - game-changing. By turns a fierce megalomaniac and a Lebowskian monk, Bridges supplies more soul than any sci-fi sequel deserves.