Carion is no Jean Renoir, but he does strike an appealingly low key of tender, faintly goofy affinity between the combatants.

The last half hour bogs down badly, with a cynical fake-out ending and a final scene that borders on non-sensical.

Tonally, however, Earnest boasts perfect pitch, thanks mainly to the blithe, nimble actors.

The photographer's show-don't-tell stance is admirable, but it can make him a problematic documentary subject. War Photographer infers the psychological and physical toll of his peripatetic existence, but provides scant insight into his technique.

Preposterous enough to entertain.

Sargent's whole enterprise doubles as a '70s archaeological dig.

One of Gitaï's greatest assets in Kadosh is such stillness, which leaves facile outsiders' judgment out of the frame and thereby deepens our immersion in the narrative.

Doillon's ease with young performers is again seamlessly evident.

Not to imply that our Claude's gone native, but here his unabiding fascination with bourgie-style repetition compulsion bears some resemblance to sympathy.

Remains a genial lesson in how to both honor and subvert womanly expectations.

Though angry and sorrowful, Trembling Before G-d, beginning with the title, is above all a work of reverence.

The performances can be stiff, but a kinetic mix of anxiety, dread, and numbed resignation is always palpable.

The wonderful-terrible dervish of Umbrellas reaches peak abandon, worthy of Vincente Minnelli, when Geneviève sobs out a plaint for Guy as a carnival whirls outside the shop.

Code Unknown is Haneke's most expansive and, oddly, hopeful work -- not a gaze into the void, but a fierce attempt to scramble out of it.

Slick and sober, fiercely contemporary, and rigged by a fail-safe three-act structure, Dirty Pretty Things nimbly straddles the line between realism and popcorn pop, but it knows which side its bread is buttered on.

Hudson is ebullient, never cutesy, and her accent stays in tune.

Albeit scattershot, Phantom does cohere as a satire of keeping up appearances in which everything is as it appears.

This film is solidly built, faithful to its material, and utterly lacking in pretense, but its maker is still running in place.

The whole of Sunshine State is less than the sum of its parts, but the parts are often lovely, and always true.

Once Drake reaches the candlelight vigil that acts as his penultimate set piece, he sustains an impossible balance between mordant wit and articulate bewilderment.

The week's guilty pleasure is The Count of Monte Cristo, a gorgeously photographed, sumptuously designed adaptation of the Dumas swashbuckler boasting the most ludicrous dialogue since director Kevin Reynolds's "Waterworld."

Like a kid playing make-believe, In America is blithely confident of its own contrivances; it only benefits from a certain unselfconscious naïveté. And as with a misjudged Christmas gift or a mawkish sympathy card from a kindly relative, one can hardly doubt its uplifting intentions.

Almost inevitably for a documentary of this stripe, it risks aestheticizing poverty--but here it's usually the kids themselves who compose the most arresting images.

The film marks a welcome departure from the usual rah-rah machismo of the semi-nationalist action adventure, but Jordan never escapes the mighty shadow of "The Thin Red Line"--from the grace-note inserts of exotic birds, snakes, and foliage to Ledger's laconic, sometimes haiku-like voice-over to Klaus Badelt's embarrassingly Zimmer-derivative score.

My friend even supplied a blurbable quote: "The best dumbass-buddy comedy I've seen since "Wayne's World!"

Unfortunately, the delicious snatches of reflexive wit function as mere intermissions between the distended action sequences and Michael Bay–style megatonnage, which have earned Pixar its first ever PG rating.

Director Waters and screenwriter Tina Fey (also cast as the voice-of-reason math teacher) aim less for the usual high-gloss caricature than acutely hilarious sociology, nailing the servile malice of 15-year-old girls.

Doesn't quite know how to take its leave; it tapers off like a curling cigarette trail, but it lingers like a ghost.