It winningly pays homage to the apparently nationwide fraternity of Arab-American mini-mart owners, while letting the Motor City setting provide the economic commentary.

Writer-director Will Slocombe preaches the values of laying resentments on the table, but with no true wisdom or novelty to offer, he’s merely served an instantly forgettable slice of cinema de dysfunction.

If this remake of 2011’s French-Canadian hit "Starbuck" feels as if it’s just going through the motions, Vaughn himself radiates sincerity and good intention. The actor doesn’t get it right this time, but he’s earned himself another chance.

This recut version appends a new interview with Polanski and Stewart, returning to the same hotel room to wax nostalgic. Essentially, they liked going fast and big; this film feels slow and minor.

Even with the actors’ laudable work—especially Simm, who finally shakes off the notion that he’s a poor man’s Simon Pegg—there’s not enough going on past the temporal trick to make the humanistic elements pop. Gimmick aside, the title is regrettably apropos.

A Matrix Reloaded–like cliffhanger reminds that this is only the second installment out of four (good lord), but at least the flick leaves us with more than a tinge of interest in whom the odds will favor next.

A trip to America bears its share of exasperated hotel-room humor, but watch both actors lean into characters seeking redemption; their clash is invigorating, with a mature payoff that has two minds meeting and getting further along. It’s a tonic to all the Oscar-season showboating: Call it Best Duo.

Ping-ponging between grisly South of the Border carnage and Angeleno musician Edgar Quintero’s growing success as one of the subgenre’s stars, you start to see how this parasitic relationship works.

The point, of course, is to get lost. As the soft-spoken sage himself notes, “The world is a very puzzling place.” What a pleasure it is, the film suggests, to be perpetually befuddled.

It’s an engrossing, overstuffed disaster—sometimes captivating, sometimes too ingeniously terrible to turn away from; it’s like watching a car wreck in slow motion, if both cars were stuffed with confetti.

The one real takeaway here is not that things are tough all over, or that movie stars equate slumming with authenticity; it’s that no actor should be asked to do a sexy dance to Crazy Town’s “Butterfly.” Ever.

Kabakov’s life story reads like a Pasternak novel, from his hardscrabble upbringing in Stalinist Russia to his double life as a government-sanctioned “official” artist and an underground cultural revolutionary.

Still, if any modern strip is worthy of an extended, Hobbes-style tongue bath, it’s this one.

If the overall effect of Nebraska’s father-son bonding and attention-must-be-paid pathos doesn’t quite have the zing of the filmmaker’s best work, he’s certainly got an ace in the hole.

Often, Faust plays like a lost cousin to Andrei Tarkovsky’s haunted Stalker (1979), catnip for the slow-and-low crowd. Settle in, because this requires your charity, but you’ll dream it all back up the next night.

Even if the music leaves you cold, there’s plenty of captivating awkwardness here, like Paul McCartney listlessly watching the monitors in his dressing room, or producer Harvey Weinstein solving a tech issue by calling Google exec Eric Schmidt in the audience.

If Marcello Mastroianni’s character from "La Dolce Vita" hadn’t stepped off the sweet-life treadmill, this is exactly who he would have become.

The script’s sporadic silliness makes every plot turn questionable; how the talent deftly negotiates such goofiness makes the film near-impossible to resist.

Despite the ingredients for a rousing shoot-’em-up (two-timing hit men, a slo-mo shoot-out, chartreuse-filtered scenes in Mexico) it’s hard to buy the leads’ mastery of this world of fist-pumps and violence.

The leads’ chemistry and a wonderful pulp weariness that feels straight out of, say, George Pelecanos’s novels makes up for a lot, yet despite the class-conscious genre pleasures, independent cinema’s foremost Zinn master feels slightly off his game.

Wilson and Raphael have been a comedy team for years, and they riff off each other expertly; too often, however, that’s all they do.

Though it’s culled from 600 hours of footage, Medora feels thin in terms of memorable imagery, and bounces a little too hastily between scenes. But it’s utterly impossible not to pull for these boys, or for a film that sees them as complex individuals rather than sociological evidence.

At Berkeley works beautifully as a picture of compromised activism; viewers who summon the patience to commit to its indulgences won’t feel shortchanged, even if next year’s freshmen are.

How I Live Now goes to that nuclear nightmare, and Ronan, who can’t hide her smarts even when the role isn’t as good as the one she had in "Atonement," makes a feast of the journey.

Jiro’s genius is godlike, but his personality is nonexistent; time is too-briskly spanned, then ground into blow-by-blow melodrama.

Once Pip reaches the big city, Newell starts losing the dramatic focus, piling on incidents and revelations with a bombastic force that makes it seem as if we’re watching a cheap 19th-century telenovela.

Where the book had a kernel of intellectual irony to it — words betray a nation — this drama goes shamelessly for the heart.

Given Armstrong’s squirminess on the couch, you’ll wish this profile had traded a portion of its deep background for a little in-the-moment boldness.