The rousing speeches and booming battle scenes are all well done as far as blockbuster spectacle goes, but you can't help but feel the filmmakers' resistance to the story's grimmer undercurrents.

The film's depiction of [Clayman's] reality is rendered with cinematic brio and forceful clarity.

Despite a committed performance from Palminteri (ripping through scenes like an aged bulldog), Debbie Goodstein's loosely autobiographical drama is as nondescript as made-for-pennies independents come.

Cluzet and Sy nonetheless make for ingratiating foils; the extended opening sequence in which the duo outwits a pair of cops like a hell-raising Laurel and Hardy could be a stellar short comedy if it weren't married to the deadly self-serious shtick that follows.

Organizing the mercurial emotions and tics is director Joachim Trier, making good on the promise of his 2006 feature debut, the lit-related drama Reprise. This one's even better-it's about the honesty that often takes root in survivors, a rarely explored subject-but Oslo, August 31st is not an easy film.

Kinji Fukasaku's slick, sick nightmare is best left to the quasi-banned realm where it exists as a perfect satire; when brought into reality, it's a touch awkward.

Anderson's romantic fantasia is after something much more complicated and profound-an ever-renewing balance between the hopes of youth and the disappointments of age.

You do sense, though, that the people behind MIB3 (mainly veteran producer Walter F. Parkes and script doctor David Koepp) were smart enough to let the audience grow up a bit, enough to get the Andy Warhol jokes and one brilliantly weird creation, a delicate alien who can see every outcome at once.

Ron Honsa's PBS-appropriate doc pays lip service to the utopian space's history, and features (too-)brief snippets of performances and modern-dance legends - Merce Cunningham, Mark Morris, Suzanne Farrell - praising the landmark.

Their brotherly bickering may be a useful time killer until the new Arrested Development episodes drop, but it's ultimately foamy filler added to a frustratingly frothy film that says nothing about its subject.

While American Animal's finely tuned filmmaking is leagues above the usual Indiewood sloppiness, all the movie-quoting manic episodes feel like empty grandstanding; it's hard to tell where D'Elia's own psychotic cinephilia ends and the character's begins.

This is a movie about a subculture, made for that subculture; only hard-core Xboxers need apply.

No one expects a Samuel L. Jackson thriller to be Shakespeare, but David Weaver's wanna-be '70s-grindhouse cheapie doesn't even achieve serviceability.

Judging from Sánchez's Lovely Molly, he'd like to get lost in the trees again, but now knows the path too well.

The real star is Rafie, the golden pup that plays Quill; dogs can be taught to sit or lie down, but they can't fake the sort of connection he makes with the people around him.

There's nothing strictly wrong with any of this, except for the fact that even a buttoned-down period piece like "Topsy-Turvy" feels sexier.

If What to Expect represents the best tearjerking laugh-machine that Hollywood can birth, it's probably time to get those story ideas implanted in vitro.

It also serves to undercut fine performances by Connelly and Harris, whose choices are constantly destabilized by scripted swings between comedy and drama, realism and fantasy, genuine catharsis and indie-film ornamentation. Black's overactive melodrama is more than a representation of schizophrenia; it's the embodiment of it.

Polisse builds to one of the most hilariously misguided climaxes ever conceived; let's just say that this soapy symphony of squalor literally doesn't stick the landing.

What's the word on the film debut of Rihanna, playing a sass-mouthed petty officer? Dreadful (ella, ella).

Rarely do movies-never mind foreign ones, of any nationality - explore an honest-to-God ethical quandary. Elena, in its concentrated austerity, often resembles a lost chapter of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Ten Commandments–themed Decalogue.

Though the finale feels a bit anticlimactic, the lysergic atmosphere, synth-heavy score and logic-resistant story line more than earn Beyond the Black Rainbow's concluding quote, borrowed from another classic midnight movie: "No matter where you go…there you are." See the late show.

Some will call The Color Wheel daring. Others will remember that it takes more than desperate shocks to add substance to the sloppy diddlings of a dilettante.

Even the stoniest face will crack when Aladeen sums up our cultural moment in a rousing, uproarious climactic speech worthy of both Chaplin and Team America.

Filmmaker Gérald Hustache-Mathieu has fun recasting Monroevian moments and setting up parallels between the fromage-hawking hottie and the late silver-screen sex symbol - bring on the Miller, DiMaggio and JFK avatars.

Though overly dependent on a roundelay of talking heads, the film escalates into an ace legal thriller, spinning a web of shame that snags everything from the Austrian government to America's most beloved not-for-profits.

Oddly enough, the film's best pro-tech argument is its look; shot on a consumer-grade digital camera, it's a testament to how elegantly framed low-budget projects can look these days.

Look elsewhere if you want a linear timeline of Sebald's life or don't possess that titular virtue; everyone else will want to make a beeline to their local bookstore.