Defiantly intellectual, complex and true to the shifting winds of real-world governance, Lincoln is not the movie that this election season has earned-but one that a more perfect union can aspire to.

Both the martial arts and the slightly dull narrative patchwork are too choppily edited to gain much of a foothold.

You just wish the moviemaking were as consistently graceful and momentum-fixated as the film's rail-grinding subjects.

There are a million coming-out stories in various naked cities, and filmmaker Bavo Defume's contribution to the genre initially differentiates itself with a vibrant, creatively campy color scheme. Once the visual touches fade away, however, there's nothing to stop the parade of clichés.

Neither totally impartial nor a puff piece, Varon Bonicos's documentary on fashion icon Ozwald Boateng nonetheless evinces a minimal amount of interest in digging into what makes its subject tick.

The story of a young woman (Juno Temple) discovering that she is both a lesbian and a werewolf, Bradley Rust Gray's oddball horror parable starts with an irresistibly trashy premise and proceeds to treat it with the po-faced pretentiousness of a film-school thesis.

Creepy doesn't begin to describe these masterworks of control freakery, nor does beautiful - they look as if they're glowing from the inside out, even as Crewdson's scenes of furtive common people make viewers feel like voyeurs.

A coda shifts to video footage of Cleese's irreverent eulogy; you wish the whole film could have been as slyly somber. It's what the colonel would have insisted upon.

The four leads more often than not transcend the material's calculated moroseness; Ivanir is especially good as a man whose perfectionist facade masks a soul in perpetual turmoil.

If only writer-director Jacob Aaron Estes had bothered to dig a little bit deeper than those damn raccoons did.

Postdivorce reconciliation tales - not to mention mother-whore disquisitions - don't get more elaborate than this.

The film's numerous idiosyncrasies - virtues at the outset - ultimately suffocate it.

Vamps is commendable, even moving, as a raw-nerve confession of anachronism - but it's also what keeps this strained satire from drawing any real blood.

The Bay, a real creepfest, joins the suggestive company of eco-terror entries like Hitchcock's "The Birds" and 1979's "Prophecy."

Even if you remove the questionable quasi-religious touches, Flight doesn't quite soar past its narrative limitations. There's plenty of virtuosity to go around here - just precious little transcendence.

The metaphor is clever, injecting real-life risk and reward into these beautifully artificial vistas, scored to composer Henry Jackman's Nintendo-worthy beeps and bloops.

The film wants to be inspiring, when it might have been cosmic-a far greater ambition. Tossing boats and dreamers, the huge waves perform beautifully.

This Nickelodeon production may be designed for short attention spans, but must the characters have them as well?

The Black Tulip is noteworthy for its existence alone - and not, unfortunately, for much else.

Long Shot confirms that achieving one's goals is rarely possible without the staunch support of others.

Such a feature-length bludgeoning, even in the service of basic social and scientific literacy, is truly discomfiting.

Watching the elder statesman spin ring-a-ding wisdom is one thing; witnessing his generosity to another artist who couldn't handle her own talent, however, speaks volumes about what actually lurks under his placid, seemingly imperturbable surface.

Coyle's got charisma to spare - imagine a hard-man version of Andy Serkis - but even his screen presence eventually gets smothered by the film's cartoonish version of ethnic gangsters, macho caricatures and bruised-heart-of-gold hookers. The phrase accept no substitutes has rarely seemed so applicable.

There's a Polanskian black comedy buried in here somewhere; a sassy neighbor girl who knows too much hints at the right direction, which is never fully explored.

For all of Cloud Atlas's pseudorevolutionary blather about upending the "natural order," the execution couldn't be squarer.

The cast's performances are so gut-wrenching (particularly from Emmanuelle Devos and Areen Omari as the boys' equally empathic mothers) that the film's hopeful message and abundance of heart prove impossible to resist.

Adjust to the deliberate rhythms of this hiking movie-set on the lush slopes of Georgia's Caucasus Mountains - and the psychological payoff stings like a blister.

In drag or out of it, the soft-spoken star has rarely been less convincing than when locking and loading from his home arsenal or dangling from a decaying Detroit edifice.