Stripped to a minimum of editorializing (but, like "The Hurt Locker," flush with sympathy), this Afghanistan-shot war documentary takes its cues from the unblinking style of cinema verité.

How perfectly perverse: In a summer crammed with sequels, remakes, '80s nostalgia and the frustrated sense of "What else y'got?" comes the most original nightmare in years.

The aural and visual overload that marks most of the director's work is here in spades--few documentaries look and sound so distinctive.

Alain Resnais's mind-bending new feature.

Watching the first hour of I Was Born, But… (unspooling with a bright, new piano score by Donald Sosin) might remind you of a subdued “Our Gang” skit, and not unpleasantly.

The Law is everything that this season’s lackluster blockbusters are not: a damn good time.

This smug and callous action-comedy is about nothing but teeth.

Clearly, Pixar’s genius for adventurous storytelling continues unabated.

All three of you clamoring for a sequel to "Wild Wild West" have got your wish: Jonah Hex--an adaptation of the DC Comics series about a Western antihero with otherworldly abilities--gives that Fresh Prince–starring disaster from 1999 a run for its wasted money.

Neither Reilly nor Tomei have ever seemed so effortlessly funny, and whoever thought to cast one of Judd Apatow's regulars as a dysfunctional, disturbed manchild should be dubbed a genius.

There’s little of the Church’s perspective in this doc, but you can’t really fault the filmmakers--Mormon leaders refused several overtures to participate. Read more: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/film/86550/the-mormon-proposition-film-review#ixzz0r2j38wUF

Director Luca Guadagnino is having so much fun setting up the Kubrickian chill (even Barry Lyndon's Marisa Berenson is on hand) that when Emma and the much younger Antonio finally come together in warming Sanremo, their tryst almost sneaks up on you.

While her focus has drifted away from the upper middle class, Jaoui’s sensibility remains rather middlebrow; there’s the distinct feeling that she’s preaching solely, albeit with impressive subtlety, to the same bourgie choir as before.

Wah Do Dem simply mopes along before aimlessly stumbling to a halt.

Nygard’s mildly insipid, occasionally condescending tone makes you long for the bombast of early Michael Moore.

It’s a trial run that puts many of his peers’ masterpieces to shame.

The filmmakers do a good job of laying out the whos, whys and wheres through diagrams, reenactments and testimonials from veterans on both sides of the skirmish.

Alternating between stunning fixed takes and quick you-are-there camera movements, Bill and Turner Ross's portrait of their tiny Ohio hmetown (the title is its zip code) weaves a hypnotic tapestry out of everyday banalities.

Given the dreck we’ve seen this summer, it’s nice to be reminded of the virtues of clean storytelling and cultural curiosity.

Diced into hash, the action sequences are unusually painful: poundingly loud and punctuated by Liam Neeson's bark, Bradley Cooper's manic heehawing and a total lack of clarity.

The opening riot at The Rite of Spring concert sets the scene for an anticlimactic biopic, which could have been sumptuously potent had this dual portrait of artists in love been trimmed…or at least hemmed.

It's easy to think of comics, especially time-tested ones like Rivers, as mechanical laugh-generators. Stern and Sundberg allow her to reveal the deep-rooted humanity of those ever-present quips, and the effect is humbling.

Again, Granik has foregrounded a bold woman, expertly balanced between fearlessness and Ree's own private nervousness.

Focus, instead, on the perks that Nightfall does offer: You still get the criminally underrated Aldo Ray trading hardboiled barbs with Anne Bancroft (“I’m a painter.” “Soup cans or sunsets?”); Brian Keith and Rudy Bond’s giggly good-thug-bad-thug double act; and the joy of watching beefy guys in boxy suits dangle cigarettes off sweaty lips and talk tough.

The first-person sections, however, couldn’t be more clumsy or grating, and every time Diamond’s tone-deaf narration starts repeating the obvious, you can feel an eye-opening history lesson turning into a quirky, orbs-glazing travelogue.

Director Madeleine Sackler favors an agenda of advocacy over complexity, making The Lottery an effective, if unapologetically one-sided, piece of agitprop.

The intention outweighs the execution, though there are still pleasures to be had.

If you’ve seen "Species," you know where this don’t-mess-with-Mother-Nature horror show is going, though director-cowriter Vincenzo Natali has a few interesting twists up his sleeve.