Like the myriad dangers threatening the earth, the film is simply too unwieldy, a sprawling mass of ideas that are dutifully checked off and then given only superficial explanations in lieu of insightful explorations.

The movie spends almost as much time allowing the filmmaker, playing a progressive-minded teacher, to push his students to be better citizens by interviewing homeless people on skid row (!) as it does watching the younger generation trying to get some. It's an uneasy mixture of crude yukking and mixed-message uplift that satisfies on neither level.

Despite toggling among the three characters' story lines, the film is barely concerned with the who, what or where of the incidents, much less a deeper why. It simply wants to milk this real-life example of courage (and chaos) under fire for multiplex thrills, reducing everything to a cheap adrenaline rush set to a pulsing soundtrack.

You watch Dafoe's intelligent hands skillfully setting traps, building fires and squeezing triggers, and wonder if an entire movie might be made of such manly components. Probably not.

Nothing but 88 minutes of a gushy lovefest would have been grating, yet these episodic stories make the film feel like just another going-for-the-gold doc drumming up investment in a cultural curio. The Con's still the thing; a game-changer like this deserves deeper anthropology instead of being reduced to a gladiatorial arena for aspiring fringe dwellers.

The satire becomes more scattershot and strangely cuddlesome (didja know sequestered holy men enjoy socializing and playing sports, just like us?), while the usually great Piccoli-saddled with a ridiculously contrived failed-actor backstory-comes off like an unholy mix of Gérard Depardieu and Robin Williams at their sad-puppiest. That's some cinematic blasphemy, Moretti.

For all the undeniable imaginativeness and visual dazzle (this is Maddin's first entirely digital feature, and it positively glistens), Keyhole ultimately comes off like a feature-length private joke that revels a bit too gleefully in its overall inscrutability. Close, Guy. But no Double Yahtzee.

Call it a strange and unintended benefit, then, that many of these generic characters work better as awkward adults than as teens.

Shockingly modern and the most politically enlightened (and enlightening) comedy of the 1930s, Leo McCarey's winning quasi-Western is a model of Hollywood broad strokes coalescing into a sophisticated whole.

Too many movies come to us as preordained cult objects - this is the real deal.

All of them slog through countless boring sword-and-sandal skirmishes, none of which feel remotely suspenseful, until the hugeness of it all becomes a mildly passable joke.

Like all of Tarsem's films, story takes a backseat to visuals, and there's plenty to pop the eyes-love those life-size string-puppet assassins!-if not, ultimately, to stir the soul.

The fact that it's far more concerned with burnishing an overly fetishized lit movement than serving as an in-depth exploration of the hotel's inhabitants may make you want to check out early.

This impassioned documentary could have the same real-world impact as Errol Morris's "The Thin Blue Line," and help to free a wrongly convicted man. The filmmaking could be better, but it's hard to argue with that kind of potential.

Green was meant for quick-witted comedy. Unfortunately, she's becoming a mainstay of painfully sincere slogs.

Close to a parody of a French sex drama - complete with bored, bourgie bed-swappers and a dull sense of amoral sophistication - this autopiloted import does no favors to the legacies of Truffaut and Godard.

It's fascinating to be so close to a then-sitting head of state as he negotiates for his homeland's survival, and the news that Nasheed was recently deposed in a coup by Gayoom loyalists makes the hard-won victories he did secure all the more poignant.

Despite being as pathetically penile-obsessed as any postmillennial comedy, Goon prevails where other sports-film farces fail thanks to Scott's winning, unwinking performance; Liev Schreiber's spot-on turn as a wizened, clock-punching rink assassin; and a pucked-up love of a bloody game.

Fresnadillo, working with screenwriters Nicolás Casariego and Jaime Marques, might be angling for the same YA fantasy as "Pan's Labyrinth," but they've forgotten about that film's violent underpinnings, a mistake that leaches their movie of suspense.

There's plenty here to recommend; so what if its explicitness and femcentric sexuality turn off some prudish viewers, dammit!

This antibullying advocacy group could not be more well-intentioned or needed, but suddenly, the sneaking suspicion that you've merely been watching an extended PSA for the grassroots organization starts to take hold.

There's just enough uncut truth and soul in Fishbone's story to keep die-hard Boneheads skankin' to the beat, even if it's just for nostalgia's sake.

Hall's puppy-dog charisma holds up under the strain, but it isn't nearly enough to keep this messy midlife-crisis dramedy afloat. A little of this Bliss goes a long way.

There are moments when The Raid: Redemption doesn't feel like an action movie so much as pure action itself, delivered in strong, undiluted doses and with the sort of creative one-upmanship capable of rejuvenating a stale, seen-it-all genre.

In many ways, this effervescent drama from Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan) upends conventions, even when it sticks to a familiar narrative path.

Let's not make 4:44 Last Day on Earth sound cooler than it is. Compared with Lars von Trier's histrionically doomed "Melancholia," the film lacks any serious attempt to grapple with mortality.

It's the stuff of melodrama, heightened by Davies's pitch-perfect use of pop songs, like a sad "You Belong to Me," slurred by a misty crowd in a bar.

Primarily a TV director, Torres lacks the chops to delineate Dorff's claustrophobic quarters, and the actor spends most of the movie confusing tough-guy stoicism with simple inertness, despite the occasional Jack Bauer–style yell.