Vampirism is the new monstrosity du jour, and with Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, tweener boys get their own testosterone-infused variant of Twilight.

(Untitled)’s onslaught of self-indulgent bohos and art-vs.-commerce clichés are as ersatz as their objects of scorn.

The new movie is a joke, a toxic cocktail of banal psychobabble, laughably arty slo-mo flourishes and unmotivated sexual violence that only brain-in-jar types could take as a serious statement.

It’s a judgmental tale whose only payoff is carpe diem drivel.

The new film sometimes feels too snazzy in its jittery cinematography, but the stunts make it through the budget upgrade intact.

Albou’s film conjures an irresistibly evocative atmosphere of stifling limitations, as well as a frank view of the female body that vacillates between carnal, sacrificial and beatific. Its caustic beauty is hard to shake.

Filmmakers from Jacques Rivette to Hou Hsiao-hsien have treated the City of Light like Alice’s rabbit hole; writer-director Hong Sang-soo similarly embraces the fantasy, but goes one step further in this extraordinary character study by fully erasing the line that separates the actual from the fictional.

Part alt–art-history lesson and part pilot for CSI: The Louvre, Peter Greenaway’s deconstruction of Rembrandt’s 1642 painting The Night Watch contends that the work is--after the Mona Lisa, Da Vinci’s The Last Supper and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel--the fourth best-known artwork in the world.

The true soulfulness of Sendak’s parable never emerges.

Frightening statistics punctuate the film like death knells.

Numbingly simplistic in concept and execution.

Saavedra, in an incredibly vanity-free performance, never shies away from Raquel’s darkest edges and still forces us to empathize with the frustrations and stunted loneliness of a life lived in servants’ quarters.

Cutesy and generic, New York, I Love You is almost colossally inept at capturing five-boroughs flavor.

Adela’s troubles feel slight and underdeveloped in the face of the world around her; it’s all too appropriate, in the end, that nature swallows her whole.

It’s too easy to say that Peter Billingsley shot his eye out with this inept comic trifle, but…well, he shot his eye out.

Lone Scherfig directs it all as if it were a breezy lark, so a third-act tonal shift makes for an incongruous, excessively moralistic fit with everything that’s preceded. Most insulting, though, is the way in which the climactic passages miraculously tidy up every frayed edge of Jenny’s life.

Forgive the film its "Napoleon Dynamite" overquirk; a loving god is watching all, genuflected to on bedroom-wall posters and seen in the film's final five minutes--and if you're not a Rush fan, this is not your movie

Refn has somehow found his way to an authentic English hard-man drama, anchored in a dynamite performance, even as it celebrates thug life.

Hardly the heady stuff of "Frost/Nixon"--or then again, maybe exactly the same thing. This one’s more rude and fun.

A slipshod documentary about a fascinating subject: the loaded history and current complications of African-American hairstyling.

Peter and Vandy is crippled by DiPietro’s interest in repetition. Activities that were cute and fun at the beginning, we see, ultimately become tedious. The novelty of the film’s gimmick follows suit.

You sense the Demme-esque working-class comedy that might have been.

It’s an unnecessarily quirky affair, with collages, archival footage and interviews in extreme close-up, which--perhaps intentionally--make it seem like an experimental ’70s throwback.

Visual Acoustics goes out of its way to remain as kindly and pleasing as Shulman himself.

The movie’s b&w images of craggy landscapes and shirtless young men have never looked more vibrant.

God bless their antics, but the Yes Men’s jestful jousting feels more like tilting at windmills

Shallow snapshots don’t diminish the raw emotional potency of this inspiring tale, in which art provides in-need kids with both an escape from daily hardship and a vehicle for restoring confidence in themselves and the future.

The movie isn’t particularly scary--not a crime when your goal is laughs. More egregious is the niggling fact that this simply isn’t as witty as "Shaun of the Dead," forever the yuks-meet-yucks standard.