Best of all, filmmaker Bennett Miller (Capote) uses this brainiac sports movie to remind viewers that money is neither the measure of a man nor the ultimate assessment of quality; it's a myopic metric based on past accomplishments rather than future potential. After all, success isn't always about the home runs so much as just getting on base - again, and again, and again.

Cloud 9's plot is thin, the conflict lazy, and the resolution sudden and unsurprising. That's a shame, because stronger development in the story department might have made this film a minor sensation.

If the story were more arresting, and the filmmaking more original, then the notions of post-9/11 assimilation might be more compelling. As it stands, the movie just serves up another warmed-over Ellis Island rehash.

What’s refreshing about Pascal-Alex Vincent’s dramatically thin but richly atmospheric feature debut is that it recognizes the essential truth of the conceit: all seminal voyages are journeys of heightened awareness, as visceral as they are emotional.

God bless their antics, but the Yes Men’s jestful jousting feels more like tilting at windmills

Albou’s film conjures an irresistibly evocative atmosphere of stifling limitations, as well as a frank view of the female body that vacillates between carnal, sacrificial and beatific. Its caustic beauty is hard to shake.

This reverential, sentimental and occasionally bittersweet film only erratically illuminates his (Eric Kandel) ideas. Rather, Petra Seeger prefers to honor Kandel’s boyhood remembrances as a Jew in Nazi-era Vienna.

What is impressive is the filmmaker’s facility with atmosphere, plus his ripe eye for giving blue-collar bruisers just enough dimension to make them more than mouth-breathing meatheads.

Packs a forceful punch.

There are riveting moments, especially in tastefully shot interviews with former captives, who quietly describe their physical and psychological torture.

More than a few moments feel implausible or overwrought; yet the movie, about two people so desperate to be alive, is eerily haunting.

The boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl-and-turns-heartbreak-into-great-art plot is as hoary as they come, but Mariscal's eye-popping artwork and the evocation of a bygone musical era (Charlie Parker at the Village Vanguard, Tito Puente at the Palladium) are delirious.

While Unforgivable stays true to this approach, its disparate souls feel too scattershot to be interwoven into a meaningful narrative tapestry.

Even the soundtrack is mostly on-the-nose jug-band hokum, except for one cue: a searing old-timey version of the Velvet Underground's "White Light/White Heat," courtesy of octogenarian bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley. If the rest of the movie had the same energy, spontaneity and soul, it would have been more potent than 190-proof hooch.

A film that could have been memorably haunting is, sadly, all too forgettable

The grizzled veteran actor, naturally, elevates the material like a pro, yet the entire exercise feels thin and reedy, trading in geriatric sentiment instead of hard-forged emotion.

Dramatically handcuffed and smothered in overbearing mood music, this lightweight New York crime thriller is desperate to look and feel gritty; the cast, meanwhile, deliver vein-popping diatribes between clenched teeth and weep openly in a desperate ploy to earn gravitas.

Less a nightmare than a case of bad indigestion, this ’80s horror reboot is a primer in the humorless recycling of potent pop culture.

It’s truly a milquetoast Scooby Snack for pet-friendly families who thrill to computer-generated mouth movements on real-life four-legged critters.

Lessons are learned, bullies get their comeuppance, and every Wonder Years plot device is trotted out for maximum and-I-was-never-the-same-again nostalgia.

Both Reitman and his first-rate cast do their best to add depth. The real tragedy of Young Adult, however, is the story's lack of tragedy.

Lamely tries to update "Breakfast at Tiffany’s" for the Twitter set. Too bad Truman Capote’s not around for rewrites.

Despite a plucky soundtrack and frantic editing, the movie shows otherwise wan interest in the gaggle of faux-transgressive bad girls who bare their dulled claws at England’s establishment ethos, as though that notion alone were somehow fresh and cheeky.

Numbingly simplistic in concept and execution.

Sherman based this obtuse psychosexual dystopia on his own hippie upbringing; the result is virtually teeming with bitter resentment for the drug-addled parent collective that inadvertently turned his adolescence into a chapter from "Lord of the Flies."