No side overwhelms the other in the back-and-forth; you feel more like a profoundly uncertain moment is being marked, with little concrete sense of the outcome beyond mankind's enduring hunger for moving pictures.

Imagine if Frederick Wiseman and David Lynch had a bastard child, and you'll get a sense of the movie's off-kilter aesthetic, a potent and pointed mix of firsthand observation and surreal flights of fancy.

This is a drama about finding one's self-worth; you simply have to see it.

Morgan and preteen dybbuk host Calis draw some pathos out of their father-daughter discord, but you can't have a possession without a soul.

What really hurts is seeing Jamie Travis's name attached; for those of us who love his extraordinary "Patterns" trilogy, watching the talented Toronto filmmaker add his characterically kitschy touch to such a witless, faux-edgy movie can only be described as a Travis-ty.

Had Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley accidentally weaseled his way onto the set of E.R., it might have played out something like Lance Daly's medical-drama-cum-upward-mobility-thriller about a hospital's new resident (and resident sociopath).

The problem is that screen mayhem has a tendency to translate as hip posturing, and Little Birds' scenes of shoplifting shenanigans and pistol-whipping showdowns all too readily conform to indie-film form and style.

Within the first ten minutes, the movie proves the point that exploitation in Africa is rampant, but never goes any deeper than that; it's an undercover endeavor that never feels as if much is actually being uncovered.

An Austrian actor whose Easter-Island mug has graced movies such as the Oscar-nominated "The Counterfeiters" (2007), Markovics shows a keen attention to performers that you'd expect from a thespian-turned-director.

Coleman's life and work are treated as a continuum, which Clarke pulls from at will.

Even the soundtrack is mostly on-the-nose jug-band hokum, except for one cue: a searing old-timey version of the Velvet Underground's "White Light/White Heat," courtesy of octogenarian bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley. If the rest of the movie had the same energy, spontaneity and soul, it would have been more potent than 190-proof hooch.

After the story takes a cloyingly sentimental turn, this lean-and-mean thriller becomes bathetically bloated. Just a few spokes short of a wheel, guys.

The Apparition turns out to be nothing more than a series of feebly constructed "Boo!" scenes tacked together to achieve (barely) feature length.

The film is overcrowded with story lines and short on thrust, but fortunately, its protagonists carry the day with their candor and precocious poise.

The images wash over you - lush, gorgeous, impeccably framed - just as they did in Ron Fricke's wordless meditation "Baraka" (1992).

Filho so completely calculates his causes and effects, even going so far as to have the villain of the piece literally swimming with sharks, that you never fully feel the senses-altering charge of a truly impassioned polemic.

It's a comedy about the unchecked id; indeed, there's sleepwalking in it. But will those grunting strolls happen through a second-story window or on the highway? You're left cringing, and that puts Birbiglia in excellent company, alone though he might be in bed.

It's only a slight exaggeration to say Kold gives what may be the performance of the year - one that not only offsets the movie's momentary dips into self-conscious quirkiness but adds a genuine sweetness to the proceedings. Forget the muscles; he brings the heart and soul.

When Canet isn't dabbling in schmaltz, he's forcing text-message gags and metaphor-heavy vermin jokes down viewers' throats in a lame attempt at levity. Emotional fraudulence does indeed constitute a lie, just not a white one.

Interminable scenes of macho posturing and mock-Tarantino dialogue (including a lengthy dissection of the word fags!) mark time between a number of ineptly staged car chases that would embarrass the makers of "Cannonball Run II."

Sister is the one you remember; like the film, she's mesmerizing because of her flaws as well as her charms.

The highlight is a bruising pas de deux between Statham and direct-to-video star Scott Adkins, a sequence that channels yesteryear's testosteronized cinema instead of exhuming it. You can only hope the inevitable third entry will use that as a model.

A former stand-up comic, Miller lends a sense of puckish mischief to his tenderhearted, troubled Cupid, yet everything else about this drama - even the cultural and spirit-of-'68 historical touches - feels like Nesher is simply mashing several stock elements together and gracelessly parading them around.

Nothing - script, performances, comedy, drama - works in the slightest. To answer the title: Where do we start?

This handsomely made spook story (love those echo-prone hallways!) becomes less involving the more the narrative's mysteries are solved. By the time all the tarot cards are on the table, it's likely that you too will feel conned.

Only the animation seems forced, with its comic-book style and melodramatic tone registering as manipulative next to the brute reality of the documentary images.

Even with Gallic neomusical royalty like Catherine Deneuve joining in the fray, the whole endeavor reeks of the filmmaker throwing everything against the wall yet barely making anything stick.

There's some magic in the grab-bag method, but with all the furious wand-waving, the story itself never gets to cast much of a spell.