Tatum is touching as the stressed, decent provider trying to make something bad from his past not destroy his future. Yet the real surprise is Tracy Morgan, in a small but transformative role as the heavily medicated adult incarnation of Jonathan's childhood friend.

In equal parts mesmerizing and disorienting, Over Your Cities (the title comes from the biblical story of Lilith) plunges viewers into the earth, wind, and fire of Kiefer's massive-scale projects.

The outsize ideas, creativity, and spirit of this birdlike, unconventional-looking woman - called "my ugly little monster" by her mother, Vreeland resembles John Hurt in a jet-black wig - still dominate a project occasionally lacking the same attributes.

Conveying, with a light touch, important lessons for kids on the necessity of civic engagement, the perils of edit-ad conflicts, and the need to honor difference, Miss Minoes is also an ailurophile's dream, featuring a fantastic array of tabbies, calicos, and Birmans that always hit their marks.

The played-out scenarios in Olnek's first feature, such as Jane's sessions with her therapist, are soon outnumbered by inspired silliness, like tears shed over a revolving dessert tray in a diner.

The Island President also shows how the most high-minded idealists inevitably become deal-makers: The toothless agreement eventually ratified in Copenhagen - which calls for but doesn't require CO2 reductions - is lauded by Nasheed as "a very good, planet-saving document."

As Alex Ross Perry's "The Color Wheel" - another micro-budgeted sibling story - shows, a film about relentlessly repellent characters is much more fascinating, if not courageous, than one that tries to explain, redeem, or forgive them so easily.

The Wise Kids suffers from a theater workshop-y tendency to rest too long on pauses and silences to convey dramatic heft. But the blunder is ultimately overshadowed by Cone's excellent young actors, particularly Torem, burrowing deeply into her character's zealotry and anguish about being left behind.

The pleasure of Jacquot's film is in watching various strains of discreet, heated, and deluded passionate attachment performed.

Now 79, the man with the snow-white ponytail in the radio booth hasn't flagged; as one of Fass's contemporaries says, "He can let someone go on and on and on."

In its closing minutes Potter restores the calmer observational tone and mood that distinguish much of Ginger & Rosa, providing a lovely summation of its main character's age-appropriate contradictions.

Bell, unlike Katherine Heigl and Sandra Bullock, who executive-produced their big-screen debasements of 2009, brings enough effervescence to the film that she's able to spark believable chemistry with a usual dud like Josh Duhamel.

No matter how many trips to Kung Fu Island our hero makes, nothing in Black Dynamite captures the exhilarating absurdity of Pam Grier hiding razors in her Afro in "Coffy"--or the loony genre experimentation in "Pootie Tang."

The Coco of Fontaine's project--which she co-wrote with her sister, Camille, freely adapting Edmonde Charles-Roux's book L'Irrégulière: ou, Mon itinéraire Chanel--can be described as courtesan before couturiere.

Shameless Eisenhower-era corn.

A clumsy spoof of Hollywood, EP always roots for its hapless heroine. But where this trifle fascinates most is in its connections to David Lynch's masterpiece.

The film tries--and fails--to swing both ways, nostalgically glorifying its subject only to smugly revel in Levenson's ignominious demise.

A docudrama with a good heart but a heavy hand.

Lang's film, the last he made in the U.S., exposed the immorality of the death penalty; Hyams's retread offers only more plot and longer, louder car chases.

A typically bombastic lives-of-the-artists production made even more stilted by having all the actors (including the Spanish ones) speak accented English.

Though calling out the abominable oppression of women, even in a vehicle as didactic as Bliss, serves at least some redeemable purpose.

The sanitized moppets in the new Fame sing the body generic.

Tsukerman is not interested in disproving or discounting theories, but merely assembling them.

Occasionally diverting but ultimately forgettable, My One and Only will become unforgivable if it inspires other former competitors from "Dancing With the Stars" to go in search of lost time.

Ozon's fractured-working-class-family magical realism, liberally adapted from Rose Tremain's short story, "Moth," works best in specific moments.

As with most fam-cam documentaries, dysfunction pushes the story along, tipping over into exploitation.

I can’t recall ever squirming as much as I did during Ronnie and Will’s first kiss; shiny, buff Hemsworth looks like he’s locking lips with an Andy Hardy–era Mickey Rooney in a wig.

As in the films that precede it, the mysteries--and terrors--of desire also propel Handsome Harry, which reunites Gordon with Luminous Motion's Jamey Sheridan, here in the title role.