The larger message remains clear: Unified communities have more power than they realize, and the most vicious enemy of progress is learned helplessness.

Baer asks all the right questions.

What you're seeing isn't wire work or CGI -- it's stunt choreography, beautifully executed, flawlessly cut together and brainlessly thrilling.

The result is something close to a textbook example of how NOT to visualize spiritual principles of the "be here now" variety.

While we at home can't come close to experiencing the war in any real sense, we do come away from Scranton's film with a greater sense of the soldiers' everyday fear, helplessness and horror.

Billed as a dark comedy, brothers Jay and Mark Duplass' shaggy, ultra-low-budget tale of a tense New York-to-Atlanta road trip is more accurately a relationship-hell drama peppered with strangled laughs.

The action come fast and thick, and the sentimentality reaches near-operatic proportions.

First and foremost a celebration of Cuban dance and music.

That this deceptively quiet crime thriller about an ex con's troubled homecoming sat on the shelf for four years before finding commercial distribution speaks volumes about both the voracious appetite for sand/surf/summer-break cliches and Hollywood's willingness to pander to it.

But for all the sound, fury and spectacle, the film feels vaguely hollow and unsatisfying.

A bizarre hybrid between Euro erotic thriller and a parable of Jewish awakening.

It's easy to envision the big-budget remake, but hard to imagine a mainstream American production capturing the original's sour, sweaty immediacy.

Sardonic and steeped in the tumultuous history of the former Yugoslavia, this absurdist comedy of contemporary mores can be appreciated even without intimate knowledge of its specific cultural context.

Gore looks as energized and purposeful as Mother Earth looks sickly and mad as hell, which is no doubt why many commentators suggested it was less an environmental action statement than a test balloon for future political ambitions.

Unlike, say, David Cronenberg, who manages to establish a crucial, critical distance between his audience and his schizophrenic protagonist in his adaptation of Patrick McGrath's similarly themed "Spider," Carrere re-creates the insane mind through his camera, and diffuses his point about subjective experience by inadvertently raising questions about truth and the movies.

Naturally there's plenty of adolescent drama both on stage and off, and if the film ultimately feels a little thin, that's also to be expected.

Only McKellan seems to understand the profound silliness of the film in which he finds himself, and he camps it up accordingly.

It's very funny, and the little woodland critters that make up the cast are a kiddie-pleasing bunch.

Hippolyte subsequently reinvented himself first as a director of baroque erotic thrillers and then as music-video maestro to pop tarts like Britney Spears, but stalk-and-slash horror -- for all its porn-movie rhythms -- appears to have defeated him.

Were there more meat on the bones of this fable about hypocrisy and spiritual hollowness, Marsh's pacing might seem deliberate rather then merely slow.

The film's main attractions are the Charlottes, but the price of watching their eerie psychological pas de deux is to endure muddled metaphors and goofy gadgetry.

Canadian-born choreographer Alison Murray draws on her own experiences as a 15-year-old runaway living in squats and on the streets, in her feature-filmmaking debut, which is a clear-eyed look at the pleasures and price of abandoning conventional mores for experimental lifestyles.

Aside from its frank consideration of preteen sexuality, the most daring thing about Cuesta's extraordinary film is its willingness to put honest, intelligent dialogue in the mouths of kids.

Overall it's slick, brainless entertainment.

It's enjoyable and profoundly unlikely to make a lasting impression on anyone.

A big success in Europe, the film has already spawned two sequels, the first of which is due to be released in the fall.

Though the story is formulaic, the bleakly naturalistic performances give it an uncomfortable sting.

The result is fearlessly divisive and will no doubt play according to viewers' preexisting perceptions.