Amy Biancolli

To be fair, War of the Buttons is a film with a modest agenda. It does not attempt to provide a complete or even vaguely realistic depiction of the rural French resistance in the endgame to World War II. Instead, it provides a fable.

The main source of astonishment is the precision exhibited everywhere, from the slyly vintage look of Rodrigo Prieto's cinematography to the gradual, cinching tension in Chris Terrio's careful screenplay.

It is pure, retro-cinematic joy.

Any movie that features a character calling herself Fat Amy has a pretty firm grip on irony. It helps that Fat Amy is played by Rebel Wilson ("Bachelorette," "Bridesmaids"), my favorite eccentric Aussie practitioner of lip-curled comic timing.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower hurts. It hurts because it depicts the loneliness, anxiety and all-out quivering mess of adolescence in a manner not often seen since John Hughes' heyday.

The cutest darn thing in Hotel Transylvania is the way Count Dracula spazzes into a brilliant red devil-face when provoked. The second-cutest thing is his annoyed response to being misquoted by idiot humans.

When the screenplay sticks to the tricky business of living - trying, then screwing up, then stumbling forward anyway - it hits its mark with confidence, and the big ensemble cast responds with tight little performances of affecting vulnerability.

When it's over, this documentary lingers as a testament to extraordinary human bravery. It stands as one of the most heartbreaking and suspenseful sagas of the year.

The best scenes are filmed inside the cruiser, dashboard shots that face inward instead of out, catching Gyllenhaal and Peña in moments so playful and true they make all other buddy cops look bogus by comparison.

Features an exceedingly dapper Richard Gere in a series of nice suits and handsome close-ups that serve no purpose other than to remind us how exceedingly dapper Richard Gere looks in nice suits and handsome close-ups. The rest of the movie registers as a loss of: time, money, talent and logic.

In the end - and every story needs one - The Words is a decent, ambitious, unoriginal film about a decent, ambitious, unoriginal writer. Both aim for greatness. Both fall short.

Headland works hard to reconcile the wild and the tame; if she never quite gets the balance right, ya gotta admire her bold juxtaposition of overdose-resuscitation gags with lessons on self-loathing and bulimia.

In its way, the film is more concerned with the love between friends than the sex between strangers.

The whole thing runs about an hour too long: It should have been a TV show. The adventure's too big for the kids who would love it the most.

It all adds up to a fine, funny exercise in disheveled self-deprecation: a self-portrait of a guy who can't control a major portion of his life. Which, when you get right down to it, could describe almost any of us.

Some films are harder to watch than others - not because they're bad, which makes for a different sort of painful viewing, but because they touch on areas of such profound moral discomfort that the mere act of watching makes us feel complicit. We feel like gutless witnesses to a crime. And that's what makes Compliance such a hard thing to stomach.

What makes this whole thing work is, first of all, Wilee's ride, an elegant machine that lacks any gears or brakes.

As for Butler's screenplay, it's less beguiling than preachy.

The kid is a charmer, the message is heartfelt - love your kids while you can - and, OK, the ending might jerk a few tears, even from a crank like me. OK, it did.

The resultant spoofery is nonpartisan, or at least vague - we never learn which of these flesh-pressing idiots is the Republican and which is the Democrat - and raucous in its send-ups of the moral, financial and sexual peccadilloes of the common political animal.

Much like its own characters, it dithers too much - and it dares too little.

When its biggest trick is finally revealed, it is not entirely satisfying.

For all of its dazzlingly rendered cityscapes and nonstop action, this revamped Total Recall is a bland thing - bloodless, airless, humorless, featureless. With or without the triple-bosomed prostitute.

The combative, off-putting Dark Horse features many of writer-director Todd Solondz's usual preoccupations: misery, complexity, stunted emotions, misplaced dreams.

The less-good stuff: the pirates, who are so blandly and predictably drawn that they sap all the personality out of Peter Dinklage (as an ugly ape skipper), which isn't easy. And the plot, which just barrels forward with very few surprises.

The film is its own beast, and it's a rare one.

So. What part of this is boring? All of it.

No matter how well made, well acted and well intentioned, Lying Dingbat Procrastinator movies are excruciating to watch. Case in point: People Like Us, a film hell-bent on dragging its protagonist (and, sadly, us) through the LDP narrative playbook.