Yet worst of all is the way the film ultimately reveals its humanistic setup as a lazy pretext to redeem Damon's big-business apologist through the healing power of nature. He's not the only one who should be put out to pasture.

The whole second half suggests a new way of storytelling-like one of those Wes Anderson montages done by an obsessive fan of Hatari! To judge from Tabu's first hour, pacing is not Gomes's strong suit, yet the filmmaker who emerges might win you over.

Whether blithely comparing American prisons to retirement homes or gleefully recalling the time he chewed off his own fingers in Siberia, the moonlighting German New Wave auteur injects some much-needed black humor into what is otherwise a soporific star vehicle.

Berlinger and Sinofksy merely suggested Hobbs might be responsible for the crime; Berg goes in for the kill, inconclusive evidence and docu-ethics be damned. The queasy certainty with which the filmmaker jumps to her conclusions, however, is all too reminiscent of the original prosecutors' zeal. It's hard to imagine how someone could study this case for so long and yet miss its most critical lesson.

Best is Viggo Mortensen's William S. Burroughs proxy Old Bull Lee, holed up in a perspiration-saturated Louisiana mansion with a shell-shocked Amy Adams and a gas-huffing chamber at the ready.

When it comes to human emotions, however, the filmmaker is all thumbs, crassly fumbling for audience response via clichéd uses of dropped-out sound and the occasional twinkling piano.

Despite being the subject of nearly every shot in the film, Hoss maintains an air of mystery, simultaneously projecting severity, sensitivity and sensuousness throughout.

It isn't until the story reaches its fancifully abstract final passages, where cinema displaces music as Douglas's weapon of choice, that Chase's reverie reveals itself as a particularly exceptional exploration of how art ceases being an idle hobby and becomes an obsessive vocation.

What's surprising is that Rogen and Streisand have a genuinely complementary chemistry, feeding off each other in a way that suggests that, given a halfway decent script, the two would make a better-than-decent screen duo.

Vibrating with the geekery of a filmmaker off the chain, the movie plays like no other this year. Tarantino, steeped in even the smallest Leonean gesture (what's with the weird terrain shifts?), knows how to satisfy fans of scuzzy Italian horse operas and badass superviolence in equal measure.

A genuine labor of love and fictional self-loathing, Sullivan's animation style is undeniably compelling, whether he's channeling Grant Wood's paintings or Robert Crumb's monochromatic sketches. But the interweaving stories of commercialized religion, rancid Americana and alcoholic wretches start wearing thin around the movie's midpoint; by the end, the whole morose endeavor risks becoming downright threadbare.

Whether it's Caplan and Webber trading goofy dance moves or Brie being perkily OCD-ridden, Date works best as a collection of winsome, unconnected vignettes; its ideal distribution model would be piece by piece on YouTube.

More of a massive back-patting for bleeding hearts than a comprehensive-or even semi-comprehensive-survey of DIY protest art, the film unintentionally makes the perfect valentine for the OWS version of radicalism: It's righteous, full of rage and cripplingly unfocused.

It's one thing to call a film about homophobia and human rights Any Day Now; it's another to actually have your character sing "I Shall Be Released" in full at the end. The intent is righteous. The dramatic overkill is deadly.

This moronically unfunny gangster comedy fluctuates wildly between the lowest-of-low humor and pity-the-aged-man pathos, and offers further evidence that the best days are behind its iconic cast members.

It all comes down to the Big Birthday Party and a furious bike ride, which he's clearly done before, in "The 40 Year Old Virgin."

Inspiring heartbreaker of a documentary.

It's not an easy sit; we're never let off the hook with golden-hued memories or belated bits of wisdom. Maybe this is love after all.

A mesmerizing study in excess, Peter Jackson and company's long-awaited prequel to the Lord of the Rings saga is bursting with surplus characters, wall-to-wall special effects, unapologetically drawn-out story tangents and double the frame rate (48 over 24) of the average movie.

The details are gripping, presented with respect for an audience's intelligence.

Russell Crowe's pained vocal stylings (they sound more like barks) as relentless Inspector Javert can be forgiven after hearing Hugh Jackman's old-pro fluidity in the central role of Jean Valjean, hiding a criminal past.

Husbands and fathers, do not try this sh-- at home. Such "lovable" misbehavior is best left to the professional cads.

While the documentary offers some insights into the pervertion of art for ideological purposes, too much of it simply finds Fry standing in dumbfounded awe of the holy sites that populate his journey.

Director Maya Kenig's film never decides whether it wants to be a social satire, a familial drama or a parable about Israeli life during perpetual wartime; that it neither picks a route nor cohesively combines any of those strands doesn't make a fairly generic father-daughter story any more colorful.

From its flash-forward framing sequence to its glossy black and white images, the film emulates "Raging Bull" in nearly every particular, while failing to capture even a sliver of that tortured-soul sports-movie's insight or visceral power.

Rice's style is pitched somewhere between Merchant Ivory and Wes Anderson, favoring shots of sad, pretty people looking bereft in elaborately elegant rooms. But it's Jones and Treadaway, both seething volcanoes trapped behind artfully pallid faces, who turn what could've been a candy-coated comedy of manners into a complex, melancholic farce.

Director Jacob Rosenberg's approach is heavy with archival footage and interviews, yet oddly features almost nothing from Way himself; his puzzling absence for most of the film turns the project into less of a biography than a one-note hagiography.

Ruzowitzky (The Counterfeiters) may be an occasionally interesting visual stylist, but storytelling-wise, his second English-language effort couldn't be more stillborn.