Ultimately, points may be scored on the balance sheet of workplace exploitation - usually we see it go the other way around, gender-wise - but these conference-room banalities have been better explored elsewhere, and the effort here feels like a rough draft.

Generation P is worth struggling through, even if it boggles you. In many ways, it's a keyhole into the future of the entire world.

The more the visual ephemera piles up, the more the emotional thrust of the story gets buried beneath all the monotonous pageantry. (Anna's many tête-à-têtes with her two lovers - especially a should-be-dizzying dance-seduction scene - are frigid pomp without any real heat.)

Yet it's impossible to shake the sense that what felt thrillingly, cohesively alive in the director's earlier movies plays here with more laurel-resting creakiness than go-for-broke verve. Russell's once-mercurial assets have become a formula.

Unlike a truly daring movie like Lars von Trier's "The Idiots" - about a gang of clever jerks who pretend to be mentally retarded - The Comedy never musters an articulate indictment, nor does it have much to say on the subject of free-floating fatigue.

Messina and Ireland thrive under that gaze, and dismaying affectations aside-the characters go needlessly unnamed - the movie articulates the enduring allure of a love defined, and heightened, by restrictions.

Wang has made a confidently intimate movie that is devastatingly larger-than-life.

Revenge may be a dish best served cold, as the novel suggested, but steamy adaptations simply can't be doled out lukewarm.

Despite committed and heartfelt performances - especially from the perennially charismatic Peters - director Lisa Albright's soapy semi-autobiographical tale fails to scale the low hurdle of believability.

Its historical import as a peripheral civil-rights document can't be understated.

Intrigue and eroticism abound, all of it watchable, none of it particularly exciting. And the misty widescreen photography lends the proceedings a funereal air of respectability that's like catnip to Oscar voters.

No exchanges flare into true weirdness; rather, the mood is lingering and tentative. Undoubtedly, this is the movie's intent, but it's a fairly banal comment on foreign estrangement (or love) that could have used some roughing up.

No amount of eccentric Americana (or slyly marginal inventiveness) can salvage this strangely lifeless - and largely laughless - gonzo comedy, which is doomed by a flimsy script, one-dimensional characterizations and distractingly inept child acting.

Dree Hemingway, daughter of Mariel, commits to some unnecessary nudity, but also impresses with her subtlety.

The more that fright-flick conventions take over, the more the movie's recognizable and resonant human fears are dulled.

Skyfall has the feel of both a ceremonial commemoration and a franchise-rebooting celebration, especially in the ways it attempts to too cutely sync up the '60s-era Bond mythos (casual misogyny and all) with the more complicatedly "Bourne"-inflected recent episodes.

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.