Ugh! For a movie devoted to an alleged geek-rebel underdog, this coming-of-age flick couldn't be more conformist, from its familiar faux quirk to the interchangeable emo-pop songs peppering each sugary montage.

While the story is formula cornball, director Mark Waters sells it confidently, handling the unruly antarctic denizens as amiably as he handled Lindsay Lohan in his "Freaky Friday" remake and "Mean Girls."

Whenever this Lantern returns to terra firma (too often), its imaginative flights are ground down under the Warners overlords' demographic-pandering heels.

The first major motion picture to come out of Congo in decades happens to be one of the best neonoirs from anywhere in recent memory.

As with so many modern fantasy films, the sequences here seem designed to go viral on YouTube in a flash of coolness, not necessarily linger in the mind or heart.

Had the big boy himself, Steven Spielberg, made his directorial debut with this slam-bang sci-fi thriller set in suburban 1979 (and not merely produced what amounts to an homage), he would have been celebrated as a gifted bringer of mayhem: a Michael Bay before there was one.

Quietly, though, this amuse-bouche of a setup (culled from six episodes of BBC television) blooms into a meal of majestic agony. Coogan and Brydon's competitive bursts of celebrity impressions - Michael Caine comes in for special attention - take on a tone of clingy desperation, as does their jockeying for status in taunts of love, marriage and career.

Calling Road to Nowhere a noir is like referring to Hellman's cult classic "Two-Lane Blacktop" (1971) as a road movie: Technically correct genre assignations hardly do justice to either work's existential ennui and elliptical, Euro-jagged style.

While it never hits the gritty heights of you-are-there junky journalism à la Larry Clark's "Tulsa," you still feel as if you've personally toured the abyss.

Where have all the bees gone? That's the question Taggart Siegel's documentary attempts to answer by interviewing organic farmers about the phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder.

That One Lucky Elephant ultimately comes down on the side of anthropomorphizing Flora and her kind is extremely disappointing - a little clear-eyed ambivalence would have helped the film feel more focused and less like patchwork.

The result is not so much a documentary as an engaging, if didactic, travelogue with embedded yuks.

Trauma from WWII haunts each character, but even the historical foregrounding doesn't keep Ben Sombogaart's weepie from being more soapy than serious.

This fascinatingly knotty movie never becomes a facile screed against the powers that be. Instead, it plays as a more relaxed and leisurely requiem for a slowly vanishing way of life, with sounds and images-a time-lapse contemplation of the cosmos is in the running for scene of the year-that are as mesmerizing as they are subtly pointed.

The books' ingenious wunderkind is MIA here, replaced instead by a generic eye-rolling, motormouthed preteen bopping around rote set pieces.

It's just another franchise nonstarter to toss in the superstore superhero deal bin.

Cast largely with untrained actors and musician friends, including Shins singer James Mercer and Sleater-Kinney alumna Carrie Brownstein, Some Days unspools in a depressive deadpan that might be more effective were the characters' plights not so clearly of their own making.

Thankfully, Lynn Hershman-Leeson's loosely organized doc offers a long-overdue primer on what these radical groundbreakers accomplished.

A favorite at this year's SXSW, Kyle Smith's real-time look at curdled relationships is a modest take on indie psychodramatics - and little else.

This boppy biopic pushes a wealth of outrageous incidents while never making anything resembling a point.

As to the movie's three sections, the best comes first, as an eclectic "cast" of characters (among them philosopher Alain Badiou and musician Patti Smith) pontificate their way around a lavish Mediterranean cruise ship.

Submarine may not be epic cinema, but in a modest way, it's close to perfection.

No movie that includes Tharpe's blistering electric guitar and the soaring falsetto of the Swan Silvertones' Claude Jeter can be all bad, but it's astonishing how little this time capsule adds to its phenomenal source material. You might even call it a miracle.

Only old pros James Brolin and Jane Seymour, as Eva's colorfully squabbling parents, occasionally rouse the film beyond its fate as fodder for a Snuggie-wrapped slumber.

The director's righteous anger is less restrained than his conventional vérité aesthetics and less off-putting than his one-sided approach to the issues at hand - an advocacy for alternative wind-turbine energy is suspiciously sketchy - yet he smartly allows coal-exploiting bigwigs plenty of screen time to properly hang themselves.

A movie with an unflinchingly tough heart.

While the filmmaker may favor a classic Amerindie art-house style - shaky cameras, peekaboo framing, fill-in-the-gaps storytelling - he doesn't offer much in the way of corresponding insight regarding this social-issue case study, preferring to just construct a bare-bones stage on which his gifted performers can rage.

There's too much coyness about the implicit romance across the table; several other tensions concerning female independence go mostly unexplored. But the film's quiet focus on a woman's anxiety is not unwelcome.