Essential, if artless, baseball exposé.

Factor in a questionable use of 9/11 footage, and this is one film as misguided as the business-as-usual subject it aims to critique.

As a tone poem, Tocha's documentary can be mesmerizing. As a memento mori, It's the Earth feels a little lost in space.

Never do you sense an overriding intelligence; Cortés once found laughs and shocks within the coffin-confined Buried, but here's he's got too much room to wander into realms of the ridiculous.

Sorvino's Bronx bawler veers from mascara-streaked monster to outer-borough sage as each scene requires, while Savoca's agitated camera strains for handheld immediacy but ends up just looking amateurish and ugly.

Winterbottom's risks are welcome; it may be time, though, to invest more heart instead of head.

Once the rote plot takes over - the tension brought on by the film's you-are-there verisimilitude quickly devolves into soapily overwrought theatrics.

Puzzling and provocative, Alps has a lingering power and an effect that is thrillingly difficult to define.

It's obvious from Easy Money why Espinosa would be going places. So long as he takes Kinnaman with him, the gentleman can have our hard-earned cash.

Blessed with an improbable-but-true story that functions on many ironic levels, this clever documentary ultimately conveys more about the complex American character - shifting between intimacy and criminality - than a whole shelf of fiction films.

Thirty-six years later, this Molotov cocktail of fizzy champagne and feminist theory has not lost any of its combustible carbonation.

Credit the actors for making what might have been nothing but a well-intentioned message movie (which includes real archival testimony of rape victims) into an affecting drama.

Both Robert and Gus seem defined purely by their eccentric speech patterns, and it takes a while for the duo to register as anything other than acting-exercise conceits. But once the story takes a defiantly odd turn into thriller territory (really an excuse to hole up two talented thespians in a single location), the affected nature of the performances becomes a virtue.

If Last Ride leans heavily on fugitive-life lyricism, it benefits from an incredible father-son chemistry between Weaving and Russell-one that makes the movie's inexorable drive toward tragedy that much more gut-wrenching.

Those willing to indulge regardless will find a surprisingly satisfying character study, woozily shot and elliptically cut to mimic booze-filled blackouts.

Lotz's grudging fortitude provides enough engagement to let you overlook the cracks in the film's facade, but when she cedes the screen to Casper Van Dien's thick-witted police detective, all you can see are the gaps.

Though the story's wrapped-with-a-bow finale is never in doubt-ol' Meathead remains a populist, pandering Hollywood man through and through-Belle Isle still manages to cast enough of an enchanting spell.

They're not doing themselves any favors by letting this oldie out of the vault.

It's in between the lines that this movingly perceptive film scores a TKO.

This time, Stone is just sloshing around in the shallow end. When John Travolta and Benicio Del Toro show up for extended, cartoonish dialogues, you'll wonder what year it is, and let out a sigh of relief that the moment is long gone.

The 3-D performance footage is impressively lavish, though the film's unending idolization of the amiable singer will quickly exhaust all but the most devoted fans.

On the whole, it's passable stuff, a surprise, given how mechanical the masked character seemed.

The writer-director-star still hasn't learned to smoothly blend broad comedy and family-values sermonizing.

This time around, the director documents a 2011 Young solo show in Toronto (the musician's birthplace), but in an intentionally fractured way.

Sensation trumps cogitation-unsurprising in a Hollywood production-which doesn't negate the enduring allure of this beautiful bauble.

While Unforgivable stays true to this approach, its disparate souls feel too scattershot to be interwoven into a meaningful narrative tapestry.

There are subtler, more allusive films about stormy conflicts of the heart, but A Burning Hot Summer wisely knows when and how to surgically slice directly to the bone. It's a bad romance of the highest order.

Best are the film's tender ghostly visitations from Dad, evoked with a minimum of artiness, and the authentic, impoverished locations.