Joshua Land

A fair-minded (but hardly apolitical) grunt's-eye view of the war in Iraq that trusts the audience to draw its own conclusions.

Atmosphere trumps plot throughout, enabling the movie to survive an unfortunate, if inevitable, final-act turn.

Todd Verow's overstuffed Vacationland promises more than it delivers in just about every sense.

The master propagandist comes across here as a brooding, insecure megalomaniac--or at times, a bitchy member of a particularly malevolent high school clique, an effect enhanced by some of narrator Kenneth Branagh's English line readings.

A few American soldiers are interviewed in a halfhearted attempt at balance, but Berends, who thankfully eschews narration, makes his own p.o.v. clear enough.

The movie recovers from a sluggish opening act to pack some real suspense in its second half.

A stark, relentlessly deglamorized vision of ghetto life, La Sierra is essential viewing for anyone who ponied up for the aestheticized amorality of the Brazilian "City of God."

Chaos lacks the audience-implicating boldness or howling political outrage of that landmark (Wes Craven's "Last House on the Left"); where Last House was provocative, Chaos is merely disgusting.

While the questions may be universal, they're not particularly original, and the responses largely run the expected range, rendering the whole project less enlightening than your average collegiate coffee-and-cigarettes bull session.

Grappell implicitly uses the juxtaposition with the martyred Kurbas to gauge her commitment to her own art. Light From the East drinks freely from the triumphalist cup of the glasnost era.

A movie refreshingly lacking in social graces, Piggie uses the transparency of video to x-ray the psyches of characters obsessed with the essence of things.

Surprisingly bearable family comedy.

Establishes a strong sense of milieu in these street scenes, and while the movie's not without its flaws--much of the dialogue is colorless and Lisa seems a bit too together to be hanging out with Curtis--it's never less than credible.

It's tough to be sure of anything in this murky experimental feature, which sadly fails to live up to its title.

Not only is the candid (but never prurient) treatment of early-teen sexuality and drug use too hot to handle, but the narrative blend of fairy-tale wonder and nightmare logic feels sui generis.

Its title an acknowledgment of the reality of evil, Shake Hands With the Devil touches on the unanswerable hows and whys, but its ultimate subject is the terrible burden of command.

Too glib to qualify as satire, Hair High nails the high school experience.

With its unobtrusive visual style, Justice plays like a near-parody of documentary objectivity, subtly suggesting the malleable nature of "truth," both in the courtroom and the movie theater.

Poorly organized mishmash of archival war films, scholarly chatter, and literary quotations.

Lively, intelligent look at the art of film editing.

Wranovics's entertaining documentary feels appropriately detached.

Micheli's documentary finds a fresh angle via the intersecting stories of two stuntwomen.

Frustratingly little here grapples with the day-to-day realities of life in Chechnya and the surrounding areas.

A formal hodgepodge, Congo suffers from abrasive voice-over narration, stilted re-enactments, and an awkward courtroom conceit, but gets by on its shocking material.

As a director (Caan) occasionally falls prey to the rookie mistake of excessive crosscutting, fragmenting the dramatic momentum created by his fine cast.

It's all pleasant enough, but the pretty pictures, languid pacing, and endless stretches of mood music eventually combine to soporific effect.

This witless satire dares to take on the culture of--get ready for this--reality TV! Arriving a stupefying five years out of date, Surviving Eden is a not particularly rigorous attempt at mockumentary.

A triumph of documentary activism nine years in the making.