Ms. Bledel works her “Gilmore Girls” charm to the hilt, but no amount of cerulean-eyed sparkle can transcend this level of thudding mediocrity.

Soon becomes tiresome, but it’s emblematic of a film that is dancing as fast as it can to entertain.

A sedate chronicle of the highs and lows of the environmental movement, Earth Days is less a rousing call to action than a bittersweet stroll down memory lane.

What’s really missing here is a story of artistic regeneration: by the time we encounter a dazzling excerpt from the studio’s post-trip film, “Aquarela do Brasil,” we are only reminded of what might have been.

Propelled by an eccentric cast of characters and increasingly seamy locations, Fix dashes headlong through Los Angeles with a little charm and a lot of verve.

Radiating a distinctly retro vibe, this throwaway thriller from the German director Christian Alvart tosses a bone to Renée Zellweger, who chews it to a nub as Emily Jenkins, a harried social worker.

Nine years in the making and timeless in its observations, Highway Courtesans is an intimate look at some of the youngest practitioners of the world’s oldest profession.

A forest of talking heads and pointing fingers, The Empire in Africa is a noble but failed attempt to explicate the tragedy of the 11-year civil war in Sierra Leone.

Everyone’s sorry about something in Forgiveness, a glum drama about the way repentance can do more damage than the sin that precedes it.

Alison Chernick's film skims the surface of a strange and celebrated career. After a meager 72 minutes, the man who once stretched an obsession with testicles into a five-film cycle remains as unknowable as ever.

A moody thriller with more emphasis on mood than thrills.

Though buoyed by Anthony Marinelli’s moody score and Denis Maloney’s gutsy cinematography, Self-Medicated suffers from severe dramatic droop.

A lesbian-foodie fairy tale that keeps its appetites well under control. The title may hint at naughty pleasures, but the director, Pratibha Parmar, is more interested in pappadams than passion.

Unsubtle, condensed and bullet-point simple, “War Made Easy” avoids fancy visuals for a uniformly drab and dispiriting aesthetic. Sporadically narrated by Sean Penn (evincing all the personality of a potato), the movie is cinematically inert if ultimately persuasive.

Best enjoyed as a sampling of Ms. Zorrilla's combustible energy and still dazzling screen presence.

Charts a sentimental struggle toward manhood with period-appropriate charm.

The movie offers too little of Crash's justly revered lyricism and too much of his self-mutilation and manufactured chaos.

Any comedy that can combine death, abortion, Jewish ritual and a mariachi band without curdling into complete lunacy deserves a modicum of respect. In the case of My Mexican Shivah, more would be pushing it.

What makes the journey compelling is the relaxed chemistry between the young actors and an insistently apprehensive tone that pervades even the most prosaic exchanges.

Though not without its charms -- the scenes in Mumbai are comically chaotic -- Offshore might have raised more chuckles when it was made, in 2006, than in the economic chill of 2009. And not only in Michigan.

As the film picks up speed it also accrues a socially progressive agenda. If only this were half as well developed as the female leads.

If you can resist the urge to run for the exit, you may leave the theater feeling a lot more hopeful than when you went in.

Despite the film’s sketchy aesthetic and barely animate lead, its tone is carefully contrived: I’ll wager no one in your circle is as dryly funny or spontaneously surreal as Harmony’s nonsupport group.

More a designer frame for actors than nourishing entertainment. Like the Chinese food the leads are always arguing over, the story leaves you hungry for more.

Korean director Hong Sang-soo unleashes yet another emotionally stunted antihero in Night and Day, a rambling study of male arrested development.

Offered only hints of life away from the barre or of Sy’s relationship with his coolly poised benefactress, viewers will see either a very fortunate young man or a beautiful protégé, dancing as fast as he can to please everyone but himself.

Purports to be a documentary about the American public school system. In reality, however, it’s a bludgeoning rant against a single state — New Jersey — which it presents as a closed loop of Mercedes-owning administrators, obstructive teachers’ unions and corrupt school boards.

Audiences will be either captivated or irritated, depending on their tolerance for high-concept whimsy and high-energy theatrics. By the end of the wake itself, they may be wishing Binew’s illness were running ahead of schedule.