Offers an intriguing outsider's document of Russian culture reinventing itself from the outside in; its main export, however, seems to be good old-fashioned Ugly Americanism.

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.

The performance sequences feel intimate and exhilarating-but in the end, Li's journey is compelling only when he's onstage.

Yet even with the rich, inherently cinematic texture of the urban setting and two excellent native outer-borough actors in Morales and Reyes, Gun Hill Road falters thanks to its paint-by-numbers storytelling.

The movie indulges a few too many whims, but it's never less than alive.

Brando-wheezing Gandolfini never slums it, but there’s still no shaking the sense that a pro has shown up for amateur hour.

The Freebie grimly reaffirms the status quo, concluding it's better to have no sex at all than to forsake the Ikea-furnished domestic dream.

The girls are worth rooting for, but their pursuit is secondary to one sorry-ass dude's redemption. That's a win?

Postdivorce reconciliation tales - not to mention mother-whore disquisitions - don't get more elaborate than this.

With its rock-skimming male bonding alternating between grisly homicides and a florid Mexican standoff that begets a tidy take-the-money-and-run finale, this tale seems less timely than merely tall.

It's less a film than one long advertisement for itself-and for the fact that mindless entertainment truly knows no borders.

The film works to inform as well as to preserve an air of mystery around Bernstein, an apt approach that occasionally slips into the willfully opaque. By all accounts, this secretly important man was tough to live with, but not too hard to love or admire.

Lilien certainly captures Pale Male's wild animal beauty in loving close-up. What his film needs, however, is distance.

It's another episodic, shaggy-dog parade of L.A. denizens caught in moderately compromised positions.

Despite a few moments of surprising insight, Twelve Thirty comes off as more mechanistic than organic; it's composed rather than truly lived.

Messina and Ireland thrive under that gaze, and dismaying affectations aside-the characters go needlessly unnamed - the movie articulates the enduring allure of a love defined, and heightened, by restrictions.

Shared tragedy can bind together the most unlikely of people. Movies often make too much of that truism, but surprisingly committed performances from actors like these can still make it feel like something meaningful.

It's a functional sequel, but with all that spirited slicing and dicing, the director could have at least broken a sweat.

Cassavetes adopts a grammar that occasionally slides into parody but mostly comes across as committed style. Kiss of the Damned contributes little new to the genre save a taste for alluringly tactile sex scenes and an avoidance of gore.

While Shapiro does a fine job of emulating kink classics like "Blow Out," his film lacks one element that De Palma wouldn't have been caught dead without: a sense of humor.

The culture wars may be simmering throughout writer-director Ben Hickernell's script-the Save the Whales and pro-choice bumper stickers on Will's VW invite a brutal barfly beatdown-but the real casualties are momentum and narrative cohesion.

Neither Janney nor Keener can rise above the rote hatefulness of their madwoman caricatures, whereas Laurie and Meester fare better at playing liberated dreamers who go against the dreaded grain. But shooting fish in a barrel tends to unintentionally conjure sympathy for the fish - or, in this case, for perfectly unhappy suburbanites.

Radnor tries to pin a tail of significance on this donkey, but he seems content with light comedy and mere proficiency. To which we can only reply: Nothankyounomoremilquetoast-please.

The problem is that the filmmaker brings D-grade craft to these B-movie exertions, making his florid maximalism more entertaining to talk about than endure - despite the best efforts of his ardently slumming A-list cast.

This remake of ’70s Spanish horror film "Who Can Kill a Child?" is less a contemporary upgrade than an eagerly creaky exploitative throwback.

Impassioned, but wearisomely didactic, diaspora drama.

Jaglom can craft a scene and stage organic conversations, but if his saps and suckers never wander beyond a hermetic view of the real world, then so what?

The problem is that screen mayhem has a tendency to translate as hip posturing, and Little Birds' scenes of shoplifting shenanigans and pistol-whipping showdowns all too readily conform to indie-film form and style.