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.

Yogi Bear on the big screen feels not just needless, but wasteful.

Listen to the rhythms of "Broadcast News" - from Holly Hunter's daily crying jags to William Hurt's cock-of-the walk patter - and you'll hear how romantic comedy can approach an art form, a roundelay that requires the ear of a conductor. How Do You Know, James L. Brooks's latest, has such tone-deaf passages that it feels made by a totally different man.