Order may be restored to the Circus, the "bad" elements weeded out, but in the jaundiced world the film has spent the last two hours so effectively delineating, the barriers between good and evil have been shown to be essentially meaningless.

A boldly conceived assemblage of diverse and seemingly random fictional materials, Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg is concerned with nothing less than those hardy perennials: sex, death, and modernity. And coming of age a little too late.

Although the film remains continually fanciful, it always reminds us of the stakes in which precocious childhood rubs up against the possibility of a childhood denied altogether.

A sense of anachronism is what provides the film with its melancholy heart.

In Joshua Oppenheimer's extraordinary The Act of Killing, film becomes the medium for a bold historical reckoning--and in more ways than one.

It not only makes for riveting cinematic drama (all the more impressive given that it relies so heavily on recounted words rather than illustrated actions), but for first-rate muckraking.

Not only sets up the writer's life as representative of the transitions of early modern Jewish life, but posits his oeuvre as an ongoing chronicle of the shift from a vibrant, unified Yiddish culture to a fractured world-in-exile.

A slick, entertaining offering, playing at times like a tarted up "E! True Hollywood Story."

Shat makes Our Idiot Brother work is the endless appeal of watching Rudd's lovable idiot run roughshod over the sophisticated New York mini-universe while winning the confidence and admiration of everyone around him.

Rachid Bouchareb casts his account of the horrifying aftermath of tragedy on an intimate scale, allowing the halting words and frightened faces of his two leads to tell us as much as we need to know about the uncertainties of those faced with tracking down their lost loved ones.

A study of the this former mining region in both its de-industralized present and its past state as an active coalfield, The Miners' Hymns arranges its two parts as a set of binary oppositions.

The film successfully positions its point of view with the developing countries that suffer the most immediate consequences of global warming rather than the developed countries most responsible for climate change and from whose citizenry Jon Shenk's prospective audience is likely to be drawn.

The film proves that neither gross-out gags nor pseudo-sophisticated Woody Allenisms are necessary to make a smart, funny comedy.

The director's clear-minded approach allows her subject's more challenging aesthetic-political mix to shine through, even if it's at the inevitable expense of her own filmmaking proclivities.

Proves how invigorating genre filmmaking can be in the hands of a savvy, perpetually inventive director.

Tsui Hark's film is the veteran director's chance to let his imagination run riot in the context of a high-budget, 3D IMAX production.

Thanks to Melanie Lynskey's performance, the movie feels like a believably worked-out, sympathetically presented study in thirtysomething uncertainty.

There's no coddling the audience in Vibeke Løkkeberg's verité heave of disgust as the full consequences on the Palestinian people of Operation Cast Lead are made sickeningly clear.

The mixture of different techniques and varied views results in a rich, multi-faceted look at one of America's most misguided policy initiatives.

Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims refuse to use their subjects as test cases for any sort of larger thesis.

Alejandro Landes's Porfirio is an ugly movie to watch, but it's not without purpose.

The film unfolds in unhurried dramatic terms that come to take on an almost fatalistic force.

James Marsh carries forward the mood and menace of the opening into the balance of the work, perfectly matching his aesthetic strategies to the story's shifting moral terrain.

Shawn Levy's occasionally uproarious, warm-hearted comedy is about different generations educating each other, but it never seems rote.

Haney's movie is not great cinema, nor was meant to be, but as an introduction to one of the myriad dangers threatening our earth, it serves its cause well enough. And that, after all, is the whole point.

Expressionistic rather than analytical, Passione, John Turturro's cinematic ode to the music of Naples, Italy, unfolds as a compendium of tuneful performances bracketed with the barest of contextualization.

Chockfull of ideas in a way that's both scattershot and more than a little exciting.

What Puiu seems to be suggesting is that the complexities of human behavior and relationships are beyond the power of the law to comprehend, but are they also beyond the power of the cinema?

Even as an "18 months later" epilogue ensures us that everything's hunky dory, this is one surprisingly grim celebration of a group Rapaport obviously loves.

One Day conveys a real sense of the poignancy of individual lives unfolding over time, but the film's ultimate embrace of conventionality ultimately undercuts the not inconsiderable accomplishments the project had worked so hard to achieve.

Mozart's Sister is too often just one more rehashing of the "Aw, didn't women have it tough then" thematic that never forces the viewer to acknowledge that maybe they haven't got it as great as we'd like to think today.

If this oddly delineated narrative often falls between two stools, then the replacement of brightly bombastic opera battles with dimly lit, more conventional action sequences is a similarly unwelcome development.

A not insignificant act of oral history, Gabor Kalman's There Was Once… makes for considerably less compelling cinema whenever it turns its focus away from the talking-head testimony of the Holocaust survivors of Kalosca, Hungary.

The film's inquiry into the artistic method remains somewhat at the superficial level, but the directors do a fine job of emphasizing both the circumstances that lead to the music's creation and the satisfying result of the irrepressible sounds.

Oliver Laxe goes full-on meta by casting himself in the role of a visiting moviemaker who travels to Morocco to shoot footage with disadvantaged children living in a shelter.

Even as it takes pleasure in imagining the wheeling and dealing that politicos make when no one is looking, it never offers as much insight into the process by which a president is made as its premise would seem to promise.

The surest sign that a filmmaker recognizes the insularity of his or her project is the presence of perfunctory attempts to hint at a wider political context.

As director Liza Johnson understands, simply being over there changes someone, no matter if anything unusually traumatic happened to the person.

Nothing here is wrong, but beyond pointing out that sexually charged teenage girls are likely to be misunderstood in an oppressive small town, there's nothing that's especially insightful here either.

Nanni Moretti's latest is a mixed bag that too often settles for easy, superficial laughs.

This is one vampire film whose sexless, generic ending betrays a promise of revisionist complexity.

The astonishing footage of apes in their natural environment is made perfectly accessible and then nearly undone by a narration track that plays to the audience's basest desires for gag-inducing cuteness.

The film too often undercuts its goals by indulging its director's need for self-affirmation at the expense of the movie's far more compelling central subject.

The title of Susan Froemke's documentary is both an expression of aspiration and a statement of achievement.

Dreams of a Life succeeds in making its point about the unkowability of the people in our lives, but there isn't quite enough substance here to fully sustain the film.

Much of the film's final act is given to alienated walking, which too often plays as an abstract study of triangular arrangements in which non-speaking figures move across a barren terrain.

The film contains far more passion and a tad more complexity than the dominant and typically more staid model of middlebrow costume drama.

Peter Ho-Sun Chan and Deonnie Yen Chan are too resourceful to let things remain dull for long.

The slightly dour tone is the perfect backdrop for the director to skillfully weave together his varied narrative strands in a surprisingly entertaining medley.

It too often feels like just one more aesthetically uninspired documentary that gives way in the end to a special round of pleading for its specific cause.

The film works best when it focuses viewer attention most acutely on the story, deflecting it away from the director's manipulations.

A little too deliberately balanced in its depiction of its three leads, but it largely makes up the difference with its informed grounding in the economic and social terrain of contemporary France.

All of this could be very funny, but while the film does deliver some strong comic turns, far too much time is spent watching an inactive Kofman whining about his lot.

One is left wondering what exactly the now moldy "anything is possible" sentiments of our 44th president have to do with a music whose history and cultural meaning we've just spent the last two hours not learning nearly enough about.

It's all very tastefully handled by Ben Sombogaart, shot in plenty of staid compositions whose denuded color scheme suggests a historical remove, but it rarely generates any heat, even during a pair of graphic, but not particularly erotic sex scenes.

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's shtick - a relentless verbal sparring comprised of dueling impressions, poetry recitations, absurdist riffing, and comic one-upmanship - works best in small doses.

Battle for Brooklyn brings up larger quandaries about urban development which it doesn't begin to address.

To drive home the pathos of Nim's mistreatment, James Marsh frequently makes questionable use of the creature's apparent similarity to human beings, trading complex analysis for easy sentiment.

This is one film that's overly reliant on a dubious central symbol, schematically employed.

This schizophrenic conception of Gosling's character is indicative of the film's largely dichotomous view of romantic relationships.

Of the film's three principals, it's only teenage Michael--more than ably embodied by screen newcomer Harmony Santana--that writer-director Rashaad Ernesto Green seems to have much of a feel for.

The first four of the film's 1980s-set episodes are shorter in length and more anecdotal in nature than the last two and deal primarily with the pageantry and inflexible customs behind the regime with a perspective at once amused and bemused.

The film is less corporate parable than intricately crafted revenge drama whose intensively detailed plotting can't hide the fact that the whole thing seems like a lot of work for a glaringly modest payoff.

The film lacks the immediacy of the Dardenne brothers' pictures, the electrifying sense that anything might happen, while also avoiding their penchant for redemptive resolutions.

Only Jackie Chan, in a comedic supporting role as a Zen-trained cook who applies his culinary techniques on the battlefield (he "stir-fries" one enemy in a giant pot and "kneads" another like dough), provides any measure of relief.

3 is a smidgeon film. Take a smidgeon of scientific/ethical discussion, throw in a pinch of dance/poetry/dream sequences, tie the whole thing up with split-screen montages and you no longer just have a film about a love triangle, but a Godardian objet d'art.

Joan aside, the film goes down easy enough.

The relationship between the two leads neither deteriorates nor seriously improves and last-minute romantic developments don't so much as give shape to the narrative as play as perfunctory gestures of closure.

The Rum Diary, Bruce Robinson's amorphous hodgepodge of a film, wants to be many things: period recreation, social commentary, morality play, romance, an insider look at the newspaper game.

A typically anodyne rom-com given a certain poignant piquancy by the paralyzing shyness of its romantic leads.

This film has too many weak, unconnected strands (what's the subplot about the narrator's father doing here anyway?), too much overtly expositional dialogue, and too unfocused a narrative to really cohere. And then there's that whole matter of expendable whores.

Offers up little more than a tired morality play about the dangers of power, rehashing stale insights about the narcissism of the documentary impulse.

Steven Meyer's documentary treads a middle ground between illumination and cheap waterworks.

Rather than bringing out the symbolic inner lives of the characters, these sequences seem like the intrusion of an aggressive authorial personality on a film whose subject-as well as the fact of Har'el's outsider status-demands that the filmmaker simply sit back and observe.

Fails to dig too deep into the politics or inner workings of the new right-wing youth movement it profiles, remaining content with simplistic conclusions about pro-Putin thuggery.

The film wisely avoids giving its material a large-scale epic quality it can't sustain, but it also results in a project that lacks the complexity to register as more than a handsome little sketch.

Less concerned with rendering the specifics of its setting (a small Maori town on the New Zealand coast) than in calling on bouts of whimsy and superficial cultural signifiers to approximate the headspace of its central characters.

Joseph Cedar's Footnote is a sour, rather unpleasant affair that hinges on acts of Jews behaving badly.

For the most part, this is a boys-will-be-boys movie that excuses everything its pair of protags do in the name of some sort of cosmic order.

While everything here is mostly unspoken, and the film itself hints at a broader set of concerns than simply two lost souls meeting on foreign ground, Here too often feels like a jumble of ideas that don't quite cohere.

Both an informative bit of agitprop and an ultra slick and slightly self-satisfied bit of entertainment.

Suffers from both an odd, ineffective structure and a low-key tone that jars uncomfortably with the subject matter and makes the film's stakes seem unnecessary low.

The film is far too indulgent with its lead character to do more than hint at the ways that one form of male egotism can morph into another.

What saves the film from being simply a schematic mother-daughter reconciliation drama is both the reluctance and prickliness that Catherine Keener brings to her character.

Class privilege and sexual politics are inextricably linked in Trishna, Michael Winterbottom's blunt, self-consciously brutal, and rather loose updating of Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles."

Nancy Savoca's film begins in caricature and ends in sentimentality, only briefly hitting the sweet spot in between.

A half-hearted morality tale about taking responsibility for your actions as a sign of impending maturity.

Fitfully engaging, but the documentary turns into a touchy-feely isn't-it-wonderful-we're-all-saved love fest as soon as the universalists begin to dominate the interview segments.

Jason Moore's film is more or less successful in inverse proportion to the degree that it plays its material by the book.

Undeniably rousing, but deeply irresponsible, Argo fans the flames surrounding historical events likely to still remain raw in the memory of many viewers.

The film is somewhat flimsy, tinged with the impulse to make the elderly characters just the right amount of ridiculous for the benefit of younger viewers.

The film is too tepid in its treatment of its central character and her situation to generate any real emotive charge.

This twist-heavy World War II drama would play as an absurdist comedy if the director wasn't so dead set on excluding just about any trace of humor from his self-serious project.

Allen Hughes may suggest an air of pretty menace, but he does little to make the sequence work as a legible genre scene.

For all the revelations about the way the rich operate, there's little juicy pleasure to be had in the proceedings.

The characters never sound like they're actually talking to one another, but rather delivering Jeff Lipsky's echo-chamber monologues.

The film seldom pushes beyond the bare-minimum dictates of the thriller, only rarely offering up a memorable action sequence.

The alignment with Herman's perspective, even as it never downplays the gravity of his crimes, leads the film into a set of obvious conclusions.

Even as Deb comes to embrace the vibrancy of urban life, she's still prey to a blinkered suburban viewpoint which becomes inscribed in the film itself.

Life lessons abound in Buck, most of them tied to endlessly reiterated comparisons between man and horse.

Sarah's Key becomes a musing ("meditation" would be too generous) on the importance of uncovering the past that fails to honestly contemplate why such an act is significant.

For a film that had once made some pretense toward exposing such dangerously submissive attitudes toward Hollywood romance, Friends with Benefits's conclusion can't help but seem more than a wee bit disingenuous.

Of all the vaguely philosophical, calculatedly left-of-center dialogue that peppers Miranda July's The Future, no line is more telling than the writer/director/star's late-film declaration, in the guise of her character Sophie, that "I'm saying okay to nothing."

Francesca Gregorini and Tatiana von Furstenberg's film is episodic, but the episodes don't achieve any kind of cumulative effect.

Played as broadly and as crudely as you please (in terms of acting, direction, "edgy" dialogue), Prince of Swine paints a grimly ugly portrait of male sexual violence and female submission.

Naturally, given the film's somewhat precious air of spiritualism, the parroted phrase that speaks most clearly to Lyman is a quotation from the book of Ecclesiastes that gives the film its title and gives Fiona a chance to offer a blithely optimistic interpretation of that most dour of Biblical books.

The film is so careful to avoid the luridness that would seem inevitably to accompany an excavation of child kidnapping, forced labor, and rape, that the result is a plodding, overly tasteful procedural that holds up its hero as an incorruptible embodiment of goodness.

What unfolds is a predictably anguished story of true love thwarted by material circumstances, or in the terms dictated by the film, rationality triumphing over romance.

Like most of the film's performances, Sisley's comes off as flat and impenetrable, the result both of a certain stoical conception of character and the dissipation of focus that arises from the movie's perceived need to encompass so much.

When does intensity and commitment supersede historical understanding?

Nuri Bilge Ceylan has to be the least kinetic of working filmmakers - and not simply in the sense of static camerawork or lack of narrative momentum.

The first half of the film is a virtual compendium of high-culture references, topical concerns addressed almost in passing, and narrative fracturing devices.

A (relatively) tasteful and restrained approach to potentially lurid subject matter isn't necessarily any better than one that gives in freely to what might be seen as a filmmaker's baser impulses.

Gentler and less aesthetically assaultive than offerings like 0s & 1s and Catfish, but it's not necessarily any subtler or more enlightening.

Debbie Goodstein-Rosenfeld's film seems oddly anemic when it deals with anyone but Chazz Palminteri's Joe.

Far more concerned with indulging a slightly less glossy Slumdog Millionaire-like aesthetic than dealing with the frayed relationships of its characters.

A predictable, drawn-out romantic comedy that happens to be set in the shadow of impending apocalypse.

What's perhaps most off-putting about the movie isn't its increasingly stale humor, but the way it ultimately validates its characters' worst impulses.

Shifting between wacky situation comedy and somber familial drama, Why Stop Now? isn't invested enough in either mode to convincingly pull off its genre-hopping ambitions.

While the heart of the movie is the at-times strained relationship between the two leads, it all unfolds rather by the numbers, dictated more by the expected arc of such things than the demands of the characters.

Director Erik Canuel fails to deliver us from the inevitable hermeticism of the material.

With Danny Way almost never weighing in directly, the film's attempts to portray his story as an inspirational tale of triumph over adversity scarcely registers.

Cassavetes puts over this simple, poorly acted story with moody lighting, self-consciously "beautiful" gore, and an annoying penchant for impressionistic quick-cut flashbacks, all of which get in the way of rather than enhance the supposed fun.

Amardeep Kaleka's documentary often seems like little more than preaching-to-the-converted, New Age drivel.

Mukunda Michael Dewil's film has the makings of a taut little thriller, but the writer-director has the twin disadvantages of needing to include dialogue and to rely on the services of Paul Walker to embody his protagonist.

High school creative-writing-class ironies of all kinds abound in The Help.

Excepting a momentary late-film lapse into eye-rolling double-exposure tomfoolery, the film is as aesthetically bland as a film could conceivably be, the perfunctory camerawork imbuing the proceedings with an ugly, indistinctive gloss.

The making of The Way must have been a nice moment for father and son, but why must the rest of us suffer?

Not everyone's life is compelling enough to warrant the documentary treatment, but whether this truism applies to master puppeteer and current Sesame Street producer Kevin Clash is a question that Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, Constance Marks's fawning portrait of the Muppet- master fails to answer.

It's hard to say which is worse: the unfunny caricatures or the indulgent soul-searching.

Cédric Klapisch settles for a mixture of bland obviousness and crudely manufactured drama.

Overly expository dialogue abounds throughout Martin Guigui's movie, as do questionable filmmaking choices and plenty of stupidly unconvincing actions taken on the part of the film's characters.

Albatross is simply a compendium of bad ideas.

Unsurprisingly for a film detailing terminal disease, this is a largely solemn affair, often verging on morbidity in its elongated deathwatch.

Mostly the movie's varied storylines cough up the same platitudes: being pregnant sucks, having young children is a misery, but it's all worth it when you're holding that newborn in your arms.

The film is awash in blandly brown-toned cinematography, action scenes more violent than rousing, and a whole host of bathetic subplots.

A year in the life of a young woman unhappy in love and uncertain in career, Lola Versus could easily be faulted for the narrowness of its worldview.

In Jay and Mark Duplass's film, the fragile middle-aged male ego is indulged, massaged, and, finally, critiqued.

A safe, laugh-free exercise that gets to have its fun, such as it is, because it's all in the service of the most conservative notions of domestic normality.

The Details is as smug and self-satisfied as its privileged lead character.

The film speeds ahead with almost gleeful disinterest in dealing with the narrative challenges it sets up before resolving them in the most perfunctory ways imaginable.

Essentially a horror movie in which the source of the horror shifts from capital-M men to crazed lesbianism.

Writer-director Nika Agiashvili buys into the concept of the American dream with the zeal of a true believer.

What most rankles about the film is the way that its insistence on paternal instincts as the principal signifier of male adulthood leads it to sanction the most childlike behavior of all.

David Guy Levy's movie foregrounds the potential ugliness of modern technology in order to comment on it. But that doesn't make the film's visuals any less hideous.

Only a few snippets escape the uncritical narcissism that the film celebrates and, despite their unimaginative employment, they stand as something of a rebuke to the film's dominant images.

At once hopelessly amateurish and given to desperate assertions of auterist "virtuosity."

Awesomeness seems to be the chief quality prized by both the film and its characters; all other considerations--like safety, property damage, and especially good taste--are secondary.

Until its pair of ludicrous twist endings, which complicates its message and logistics in ways that make little sense, Gabe Torres's Brake plays like a more simplistic version of Buried tailored specifically to a hawkish right-wing crowd.

This dry-as-dust enterprise bogs down in an almost total lack of energy and imagination that no amount of faux earnestness can overcome.

While the male characters are certainly not presented as models of enlightened behavior, their antics and crises are indulged in a manner not extended to their female counterparts.

It seems as if Craig Zobel wants to implicate the audience in these proceedings, but he doesn't have a very clear idea how to go about it.

If you've ever seen Psycho, or even if you know anything at all about the film, Sacha Gervasi's Hitchcock would like to congratulate you on your savvy.

By the dictates of the boys-will-be-boys party genre, 21 and Over is so tame that it barely manages to even be offensive.