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.

Each of the three intercut stories in Hello Lonesome - all dealing with characters trying to overcome solitude - begins promisingly enough. Eventually, though, they all run aground on questionable decisions.

The film's commitment to representing the harsh truths of an unfortunate historical moment is admirable, but it tends to grate rather than illuminate.

Director Radu Muntean has pulled off the near-impossible, turning each scene (captured in capacious long takes) into arias of generosity for his actors.

The Tree of Life enthralls right from the start.

For an animation studio that too often specializes in the frivolous and glib (begone, Shrek series!), the move to the dark side is refreshing.

The unexpectedly wonderful thing about this sequel is that it actually improves on the jokes.

What Lost Bohemia lacks in aesthetic presentation - first-time filmmaker Astor seems to have gathered footage without much forethought - is made up for by an intimacy familiar from home movies, revealing eccentric neighbors at their most frank and endearing.

Whistle-blowing works best without gratuitous pop-doc debris, but there are only so many dry, fact-heavy testimonies from engineers you can take before a certain dullness uneasily settles in.

This is prime Woody Allen - insightful, philosophical and very funny.

Performances barely meet a junior-collegiate theater-troupe level, the narration hits maxi-fromage heights, and just when you think it can't get any more derivative, out comes a glowing suitcase à la "Pulp Fiction." Rock bottom has now been firmly established.

The kids pick up the filmmakers' lyrical slack more often than not, but this ode to the power of verse could really use a redraft.

The new movie is simpler plotwise (a race to the Fountain of Youth), while at the same time being somehow more deadening.

First-time director J. Clay Tweel oversells the importance of both the Vegas event and of magic in general-you'd think he were filming a spiritual movement rather than hidden-ball tricks. His wide-eyed subjects do make magic happen-but that has less to do with illusion than innocence.

Director Leanne Pooley's documentary on the sisters and their "anarchist variety act" is definitely a formulaic bit of portraiture, but given its engaging, pioneering subjects, gimmickry is hardly needed to spice things up.

Whereas Yuen's speciality has always been gonzo, gravity-defying spectacles, now he's spiced his set pieces with plasticine computer-generated flourishes-effectively puncturing the inventive, handmade charm and fluid flurries of artistry that made his classic fight scenes so thrilling.