The latest war epic from Sam "One-Take" Mendes. Are viewers that cine-illiterate that they can't see the seams? There's a fade to black at around the two-thirds mark: how can it be an unbroken take? Apart from the obvious, this has more shots of young men walking from behind than …

The sighting of a stray Japanese submarine off the California coast ignites a slapstick panic which might more revealingly have been titled The Japs Are Coming, The Japs Are Coming. Steven Spielberg must have figured that if Stanley Kramer could resuscitate slapstick comedy (cf. It'a a Mad, Mad [etc.] World), …

George Orwell's vision of the future did not come true by the appointed time, but certainly became a cliché: Newspeak, Thought Crime, Big Brother — who looks here in his still photos (all we ever see of him) a bit like Lionel Atwill. The thought to do a new, commemorative …

The Mothers of Invention, Theodore Bikel, and Ringo Starr in a video-taped rock fantasy. It looks a lot like a television variety show, with a flat, oddly colored image, and with studio sets and skits and musical numbers, but it is several lengths raunchier, and longer, than Dean Martin's weekly.

A lightweight slate: nine films, but only two that marry really engaging visuals with narrative heft. Those two are Me and My Moulton, a middle sister's memoir of her family life in sixties Norway, and The Dam Keeper, a gorgeous fable about an orphaned pig who has to navigate the …

Conservative thinking-type person Dinesh D'Souza tries to unravel the mystery of Obama the President by investigating Obama the man — or rather, Obama the son of his anticolonial father. The film gets off to an interesting start: D'Souza is an ingratiating investigator, and he pays a fair amount of attention …

Hang it all, the short film form is supposed to give the little guy a chance to shine. Sure, I may not have the budget for a feature, but then, not having the expectations brought on by a budget gives me room to play. But this year, only the Pixar …

At last. After the "We're too old, but who cares?" middle-aged hijinks of The Hangover and the "We're too young, but who cares?" high-school hijinks of Project X, the Drunken Bromedy genre takes up the entirely age-appropriate collegiate hijinks of 21 and Over. Miles Teller plays the master-bantering mastermind, Skylar …

Michael Winterbottom's re-creation of the Manchester pop scene from the mid-Seventies through the Eighties: i.e., from punk to rave. Breathless, chaotic, self-consciously "postmodern" -- which translates into raggedy, uneven visuals and a main character who addresses the camera with full knowledge of future events and full awareness that he's in …

Pretentious, heart-on-sleeve New York movie pointedly set post-9/11: the blue beacons of light that stand where the Twin Towers once stood; the clean-up operations in the pit below the windows of one of the main characters; the Osama bin Laden wanted posters; the firefighter shrine at an Irish pub; the …

Girly fairy tale to do with the proverbial always-a-bridesmaid, twenty-seven times by actual count, with a closetful of once-worn gowns to prove it, who stands mutely by as her slutty younger sister returns home and steals her dreamy boss right out from under her nose. Screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna and …

In the violent prologue, a ski-masked commando team of animal-rights activists storms the Cambridge Primate Research Center to liberate the experimental chimps, heedless of the attendant's warnings ("You've no idea!") that the chimps have been "infected" with rage. Sure enough, the chimps do not exactly embrace their liberators. Twenty-eight days …

Zombie recurrence in the U.K., under U.S. military occupation, and under Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (of Intacto) in place of Danny Boyle (of the original 28 Days Later). The scrappy, scruffy digital visuals are largely annoying (as if the zombies weren't bothersome enough), though there are some effective scenes, …

Just diverting enough, thanks in large part to the weary charm of Denzel Washington's undercover DEA agent, and the earnest charm of Mark Wahlberg's undercover Navy investigator. (The wiseassery Wahlberg uses to cover the earnestness, alas, quickly wears thin.) Thanks also to a willingness to make almost everyone at least …

Honest-to-gosh Western, a rare sight in the 21st Century, thick as fleas fifty years earlier, when the original 3:10 arrived. The remake is done in the decadent style of shades-of-brown realism, luxuriantly whiskered and shaggy-haired, yet preening and grandiose, with amplified passions, topographical sprawl, and an overblown (and significantly altered) …