There are no lava-spewing natural phenomena or gut-wrenching slaughterhouse sequences in this unofficial companion piece, but you do witness sex tourists in Bangkok choosing numbered "girlfriends" as if they were picking out lobsters in a tank.

A 25-words-or-less pitch for The Day He Arrives - shot in luminous black-and-white - might go something like: "Hong Sang-soo does Groundhog Day."

Jean Gentil shares a certain searching quality that marked the best of Bresson's films - and for once, the inevitable analogy with his work seems appropriate.

If you know nothing of the concentrated work of France's Robert Bresson, it's almost a crime to start here - like launching yourself, on the "expert" level, into the most boring, baguette-laden video game ever.

Fightville doesn't pummel you with outsider viewpoints - it doesn't seem to display much of a point of view at all.

The use of real musicians (both professionals, like Nellie McKay, and street performers) provides a certain authenticity to the performances, but the film's wide-eyed view of New York as a wonderland of harmonic diversity soon grows as tiresome as the film's trite romantic shuffling.

The paeans about national pride and brotherhood may be regional, but constant slow-motion battle scenes and squishy sentimentality are strictly wanna-be Tinseltown.

Somebody give Werner Herzog an IMAX camera already, and let's see what a real filmmaker does with the format.

The story's treacly all-souls-in-alignment outcome is never in doubt, but as Kasdan dogs go, this is light-years better than Dreamcatcher.

They've taken an intriguing story about female neuroses with gothic overtones and turned it into a graceless, butt-ugly attempt at Twilight-lite.

Question: What's the only thing worse than doing an unfaithful film adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel? Answer: Doing a completely faithful one.

No one's asking for a somber account of simian life, but perhaps Buzz Lightyear could keep quiet for a bit and let the monkey business speak for itself.

Surprisingly entertaining, thanks to the cast's collective chemistry and the film's balance of appealing elements for both sides of the gender divide.

Brava, Mia! The exceedingly talented Ms. Hansen-Løve (the writer-director of Father of My Children) is sure to win many more fans with her latest feature, an incisive, exhilaratingly frank examination of l'amour lost.

The tunes, flooding every frame, remain perfect.

The metafriction between these classic dupes and today's idiots chafes uneasily.

Hurt tries on an English accent as if he were in the Walmart changing room and a splendid-in-theory supporting cast - Simon Callow, Joanna Lumley, Arta Dobroshi - either ham it up or make moony eyes. Extra discredit to the embarrassingly jaunty score by Sodi Marciszewer, which should be taken behind the recording studio and shot.

In allowing Dreier to shape his own narrative, too many lame excuses are allowed to pass, as the financial schemer spins his own story dangerously close to self-pity.

Forget the snark about him ransacking Eric Rohmer's bag of tricks; the gentle ironies and droll, bitter wit here prove Hong is the French New Waver's heir apparent.

The movie adaptation's version of religion may be more nuanced than the usual Left Behind fire-and-brimstone sermonizing you find in much contemporary pro-Christian cinema, but it still leaves behind a sulfuric stink.

Something happens here, but it isn't life.

With his sophomore feature, "Tony Manero" (2008), filmmaker Pablo Larraín gave us both a memorably maniacal main character and a black-joke metaphor about the free-floating psychosis wafting through Pinochet's Chile.

You'd follow these two anywhere - even down a long, winding and perilously close-to-pointless road.

From the auteur of "Torque" (2004) comes this instant headache: a panicky snark-schlock horror-comedy that reduces everything to a hyperactive squall of white noise.

Schemel is a major rock & roll survivor; Hit So Hard is a minor rockumentary at best, as well as a seriously missed opportunity.

Fellag does for the film what his Lazhar does for the pupils: He's soothing and entrancingly enigmatic enough to keep us fixed to our seats.

Who would have thought that the man behind such wackadoo fantasies as "The Professional" and "The Fifth Element" was capable of being so bloody boring?

Charmingly, like a throwback to the pre-Twitter age, here's a horror film that's been made with no reasonable way to discuss it beforehand.