Madonna’s second directorial effort W.E. has been greeted by a torrent of negativity, with critics assailing her revisionist portrait of the illicit romance between King Edward VIII and the American divorcée Wallis Simpson to the tune of a 14% on the all-powerful Tomatometer. If it’s not quite the unholy mess that the reviews have promised, there’s no question that this is a sloppy, hubristic affair. It looks pretty, with style and eloquence to spare, but it’s perilously over-directed. Apparently the Material Girl never met a random cross-cut, outsized camera movement, or other unneeded flourish that she didn’t like.

That penchant for pristine visuals at any cost is just part of what detracts from the terrific performance by Andrea Riseborough as Simpson, which could have provided the core of a great picture. The British actress has beauty and intelligence to spare, the sort of charismatic movie star screen presence that carries you through the slowest moments. You want to watch her. Unfortunately, Madonna only lets you do so for half of the movie’s rather trying two hours. The rest of the time, we’re stuck with an unnecessary 1998-set corollary to the 1930s-set main action. There, lonely American Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish) obsesses over Wallis and Edward, spending all her time at a Sotheby’s auction of their estate.

So we are treated to endless scenes in which Cornish stands still with her eyes shut tied to a tame romance between Wally and security guard Evgeni (Oscar Isaac) and a lot of stupefying ruminations on the broader meaning of the Edward-Simpson romance. The contemporary stuff is so superfluous, and does so little to enhance the meat of the picture, that one wonders if Madonna (who co-wrote the screenplay) intended it as some sort of self-reflexive portrait of her own interest in the real narrative. Otherwise, it’s just pure filler.

The story of the relationship of Edward (James D’Arcy) and Wallis, which spurred a crisis in Britain because of her divorces (among other reasons) and eventually caused Edward’s abdication from the throne, is a fascinating, multilayered one. There’s a fine movie still to be made about it. Madonna’s simply isn’t it.

Further, the filmmaker loses ample credibility by treating her protagonists as martyrs, whitewashing Edward’s almost-certain Nazi sympathizing and other less savory traits. Madonna has compared herself to Simpson, so the unabashed admiration makes sense, but let’s be honest here: Framing a woman who’s most notable for getting married three times as some sort of misunderstood feminist icon is a big stretch.

The Upside: Andrea Riseborough is great and the movie is filled with sumptuous, refined visuals.

The Downside: The 1998-set scenes are completely unnecessary and Madonna over-directs, adding a wealth of superfluous flourishes such as unneeded pans, aggressive camera movements, slow motion and more over-stylized touches. Further, the film stretches credibility in its treatment of the historical characters.

On the Side: The King’s Speech offers a more effectively crafted, honest-seeming treatment of the same events.

Your Sister’s Sister is perhaps the most high-concept movie I saw at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, but it’s also one of the funniest and most heartfelt. Sometimes, a precise, discernible pitch really does have potential. And after this film and Humpday (in which two straight male friends decide to make an amateur porn film together), writer-director Lynn Shelton is fast establishing herself as one of the independent film world’s masters of such fare.

Her new picture parallels pensive shots of the pristine, misty splendor of the Pacific Northwest with the story of three lonely, likable locals who are searching for happiness. Mark Duplass stars as the directionless Jack, struggling to cope with the recent death of his brother. Emily Blunt plays Jack’s best friend Iris, who is also his brother’s former girlfriend. To clear his head, she offers him the run of her family’s vacation home on a picturesque island off the Washington coast. Iris’s half-sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt) is already there, though, looking to escape a trauma of her own: the end of a seven-year relationship. A drunken night with Jack leads to hilariously awkward sex and, eventually, serious consequences when Iris unexpectedly shows up the next day.

On its simplest level, the movie offers the chance to hang out with enormously appealing characters imbued with three-dimensional vibrancy by the terrific actors. As this is a slow-building, deceptively low-key film, with a narrative that doesn’t rely on grandiose revelations or over-the-top dramatics, spending time with these characters must be a pleasure, not a chore. The cast pulls it off: Duplass is more likable than he’s even been, Blunt exudes kindheartedness, and DeWitt adds a quieter, soulful sadness to the mix.

They master Shelton’s clear-eyed naturalistic dialogue, which has a way of cutting through the fat in a scene and getting at its emotional truth in serious, sincere and funny ways. Gradually, it becomes apparent that the film is structured around a clever and sensible quasi-twist, which I won’t specify here, but even then Shelton is primarily focused on developing her characters in a meaningful fashion.

In some ways this is an archetypal Sundance film, but it’s such a grounded enterprise that you forgive it some clichés. It’s easy to emotionally invest in these three actors, who play such openhearted, relatable people, and Shelton looks at the construction of the threesome’s offbeat bond with the patience and smarts of a filmmaker who trusts her actors to communicate what needs to be communicated. What ultimately emerges, then, is a hopeful, upbeat film about people finding comfort and strength in their loved ones, a rare feel-good movie that truly earns that designation.

The Upside: The movie is authentically funny and sad, starring three appealing actors playing likable people.

The Downside: It’s a bit too minor to leave a standout, lasting impact.

On the Side: The movie, which will be released later this year by IFC Films, is one of the best 5 of the 20-plus films I saw at Sundance.

—

Snuggle up with the rest of our Sundance 2012 coverage

The notion that nobody walks places in Los Angeles is one of the biggest L.A. clichés, right up there with the belief that Southern California is populated by beautiful sunglasses-wearing people who spend most of their time doing cocaine when they’re not driving around in their convertibles, loudly yammering about the biz.

Still, based on my limited experience there (and City of Angels dwellers, feel free to correct me), the aversion to walking is actually kind of true. At the very least, the idea provides an interesting way into the cross-coastal, gender-driven culture clash at the center of Nobody Walks, a film from New Yorkers Ry Russo-Young (director and co-writer) and Lena Dunham (co-writer), about a New York filmmaker named Martine (Olivia Thirlby) who arrives in L.A. to work on a movie with married sound designer Peter (John Krasinski) and to stay with his family at their home in Silver Lake, in part because she doesn’t drive.

With her pixie haircut and free, seductive spirit, Martine has a transfixing effect on the men she encounters. As this irresistible force upsets the family dynamic inside Peter’s home, erotic desires pervert rational thoughts and painful truths are exposed.

The film is a charged, atmospheric production that trades in subtly heightened sexualized tensions. There’s very little plot, just scenes of men melting in Martine’s presence, intersected with a similar scenario featuring Peter’s psychotherapist wife Julie (Rosemarie DeWitt) and an admirer (Justin Kirk) and a far more sinister one in the same vein involving Peter’s teenage stepdaughter Kolt (India Ennenga) and her much-older Italian tutor (Emanuele Secci).

Russo-Young’s third feature directorial effort turns the standard homewrecker story on its head. Martine is not the villain here; she’s just doesn’t belong in Los Angeles with Peter’s family. A lazier movie would have framed her as an uncaring temptress; this one sees and draws out the person inside the beautiful skin. She’s mysterious and naïve, unafraid of her sexuality but somehow unaware of its power.

This is a tough part, requiring an actress capable of exuding a sexual, transfixing presence while simultaneously seeming like an actual human and selling us on some inexplicable behavior, without the aid of a lot of dialogue. Thirlby straddles that line convincingly, achieving the difficult effect of simultaneously seeming open and obtuse, smart and clueless, and keeping the audience engaged.

The subplots don’t work as well as the main narrative, as the stuff involving DeWitt and Kirk feels tossed off and the leering, creepy tutor is a superfluous, one-dimensional invention. The film struggles when it flirts with melodrama and the events at hand lose credibility if too much logic is applied to them.

But Russo-Young is less interested in a literal enterprise than in producing a lyrical mood piece about the burdens of being a beautiful woman surrounded by weak-willed men. It’s an engaging production on that level, but also in some respects a radical, fascinating statement that subverts and reorients the usual interests of this sort of eroticized production.

The Upside: Ry Russo-Young’s movie turns what could have been the standard story of a homewrecker seducing a husband into an engaging feminist statement.

The Downside: The script isn’t perfect, as its subplots range from mundane to outright off-putting.

On the Side: This is an interesting, difficult film, so naturally it hasn’t been picked up yet at Sundance. The modest star power and intriguing subject matter should get it a distribution deal eventually, though.

Click here for more from Sundance 2012

I’ve listened to Paul Simon’s Graceland at least a thousand times (no exaggeration), so if you’re looking for an objective analysis of Under African Skies, Joe Berlinger’s documentary about that seminal work, you won’t find it here.

Perhaps someone who doesn’t have virtually every lyric of every song on Simon’s masterpiece memorized, someone who doesn’t tear up just thinking of the “Mississippi Delta shining like a national guitar,” could do a better job of telling you what’s what when it comes to this movie.

All I know is that as I sat and watched it I felt my childhood come alive on screen. Each familiar chord reminded me of those countless hours I spent listening to these songs over and over again, whether as the soundtrack to family dinners, the accompaniment to late-night homework sessions or the auditory salve on a long, boring car trip.

Of course, I’m just one of millions of admirers of Simon’s masterpiece, an album that sold millions of copies, won Grammys, launched a massive tour and is today widely considered one of the most important cultural achievements of the past century. So Berlinger’s got that going for him.

The filmmaker hooks you in by playing on that enthusiasm and keeps you riveted by thoughtfully tackling the improbable journey of the Apartheid-defying record. The picture traces the initial source of Simon’s fascination with South African music and journeys behind the scenes of the recording sessions with a wealth of great artists (from Ladysmith Black Mambazo to the late Miriam Makeba).

Intriguingly, Berlinger delves into the maelstrom of controversy that greeted Simon’s defiance of the cultural boycott on South Africa by making his record there with local artists. And by structuring the picture from the point-of-view of Simon’s return to the country in 2011, for a 25th anniversary concert with many of his original collaborators, the filmmaker is freed from a simple, straightforward recap of the familiar story. Instead, the distance of time affords a new perspective on just what the album represented politically, as the film incorporates deeply personal testimony from Simon, his collaborators and Dali Tambo, the co-founder of Artists Against Apartheid, which opposed Graceland.

A 2011 clear-the-air conversation between Simon and Tambo serves as a compelling framing device, fraught with emotion. No one is unfairly portrayed here. The picture unabashedly takes Simon’s side in its depiction of Graceland as a collaborative effort that offered South African artists the chance to perform on an unprecedented global platform, promoting a message of unity and drawing a different, positive sort of attention toward the black community suffering under Apartheid. At the same time, Berlinger respectfully presents the counterargument, which holds that the decision to go ahead on the album unfairly valued the lives of Simon’s musicians over the greater good of a people fighting against a horrendous, institutionalized wrong.

But above all, this is a movie about the magical, transcendent music that Simon and his colleagues made, an unlikely harmonious blend with lyrics that in their own abstract way evoke the human condition. Consider this verse, from the title track, and the hopeful message it espouses about the experiences of falling in love and falling apart, before finding communal redemption.

There is a girl in New York City
Who calls herself the human trampoline
And sometimes when I’m falling, flying
Or tumbling in turmoil I say
Oh, so this is what she means
She means we’re bouncing into Graceland
And I see losing love
Is like a window in your heart
And everybody sees you’re blown apart
Everybody feels the wind blow
In Graceland

From the thrilling, opening accordion chords of “The Boy in the Bubble” through the driving drum beats and enthusiastic saxophone of “All Around the World (The Myth of Fingerprints),” the final track, Graceland delivers a masterful fusion of South African and American sounds, a lyrical, emotional and never less than beautiful cross-cultural journey. It offers an artist at the absolute height of his creative powers, joining an extraordinary array of top-notch South African artists to collectively create a one-of-a-kind joyous sound that you just can’t forget.

And that sound lives anew, again, in Under African Skies.

The Upside: This is a deeply moving, personal tribute to my favorite album, which has played a hugely important role in my life.

The Downside: Can’t think of one.

On the Side: Director Joe Berlinger just earned an Oscar nomination for Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory. If there’s any justice in the world, he’ll be back at the Kodak Theatre next year for this one.

Click here for plenty more Sundance 2012 coverage

When Gene Robinson became a bishop of the Episcopal Church’s New Hampshire diocese in 2003, it was a watershed moment for organized religion, to be sure. Yet to merely deem the election of the first openly gay non-celibate priest in the history of major Christian denominations a “watershed” is to understate the rather extraordinary significance of a single act that overturned a millennia-old tradition of intolerance.

Macky Alston’s documentary Love Free or Die is a film worthy of that momentous event. It follows the courageous Bishop Gene as he faces a wealth of hatred and distrust. He is excluded from the Anglican Church’s once-a-decade Lambeth Conference, and he faces death threats, cruel hecklers, and more while fighting for full-fledged equality in his church and a newfound understanding of the Bible’s most controversial elements.

Robinson, a folksy native Southerner with charm to spare, is a relentless advocate for LGBT rights, adept at interpreting scripture from that vantage point in a positive and forward-thinking way. Beneath his good-humored exterior, though, is the steel-eyed focus and unbending will of a man who knows he’s on an essential crusade for justice and won’t stop until he gets it.

Sure, we meet the bishop’s husband and his daughters and learn small blips of biographical details. We watch as he wins over skeptical parishioners. But the movie is not some quirky piece about an unlikely clergyman. It’s a story rooted to the here-and-now, an exploration of the most-essential front in what remains the last great civil rights issue. A certain understanding of religion, of course, is at the heart of homophobia. Change that paradigm and you’re on to something massive.

Love Free or Die is also an effective chronicle of a church in crisis. Alston incorporates conflicting, passionate testimony from Robinson’s colleagues to starkly illustrate the enormous schism facing the Episcopal communion. From a dramatic standpoint, the filmmaker has the good fortune of capturing the seminal 2009 Anaheim convention, at which the questions of ordaining gay bishops and officiating at gay marriages were conclusively addressed amid heartfelt public testimonies and a heated debate.

At the center of it all is Robinson, leading the charge that must be led and fighting the fight that must be fought. He’s put a great amount of trust in Alston here, in a sense signing over custody of the cause to the filmmaker. The best thing that can be said about this fine enterprise is that it befits the unsung American hero at its heart.

The Upside: This is a fine documentary, a nicely-observed character study/activist piece. Bishop Gene Robinson is quite lovable, really.

The Downside: Some of the most compelling moments in the film highlight Robinson’s conflicts with his Church and fellow bishops. It’d have been nice to see more of them.

On the Side: The movie premieres at Sundance tomorrow. I’d be shocked if we aren’t hearing about a distribution deal soon thereafter.

—

You know what sort of movie you’ve gotten with Joyful Noise long before Dolly Parton announces, apropos of nothing, that “I know what to do, yodel lee hee hoo.” You’ve already seen Parton grab spaghetti off a diner’s plate and throw it in co-star Queen Latifah’s face. You’ve seen Keke Palmer lead a rousing gospel choir rendition of “Man in the Mirror.” You’ve experienced the ups and downs of the wild, inconsistent shifts in tone and the perils of Todd Graff’s loose-limbed direction. But that unprompted half-a-yodel is a litmus test. Perhaps you’ve bought into the schlock Graff is slinging, shut off your mental faculties and embraced the Latifah-Parton show, in which case it’s just Dolly being Dolly. Alternatively, that avalanche of vomit that’s been amassing inside your throat with each inane, lazy moment finally finds its way onto the floor.

I found myself somewhere between the two extremes throughout this exceptionally mediocre film, which only benefits from the fact that it’s never boring. The story of a small-town gospel choir prepping for a singing competition is singularly uninteresting, even if things pick up when they perform their pop covers (Usher and the Beatles are among those victimized alongside Michael Jackson).

Yet once you’ve accepted that Joyful Noise is not actually worth seeing, its spirit keeps things afloat. The filmmaker and his cast clearly have no idea that they’re making a comedy, so the movie is filled with the painstaking earnestness of a bad film made with the best of intentions. There are so many great examples of this, beyond those mentioned above, that it’s hard to know where to begin.

It’s awfully hard to not, on some level, love a movie in which Latifah’s choir director Vi Rose Hill demands that her daughter Olivia (Palmer) “respect my snoring,” which makes even less sense in context. Or one that treats a character with a very mild case of Asperger’s as if he’s stricken with AIDS, constantly bemoaning his terrible life.

The screenwriting is so awkward, so poorly edited, that your jaw stays rooted to the floor from start to finish. Characters arbitrarily shift between hating and liking each other. The only consistency is that no one in the film does anything that an actual real-life human would do under a similar set of circumstances.

Then there are the bizarre narrative choices. Graff regards the sudden and unexpected death of a choir member as a fount of humor. A romance develops over the course of one conversation. We barely even see the choir preparing for their competition. There are two interminable deeply-personal, reflective ballads, sung by Latifah and Parton on that hoary cliché – the empty, darkened stage.

A halfwit underdog story that never establishes the stakes, pays lip service to the economic struggles within the small-town setting and offers a heavy dose of ill-fitting, broadly telegraphed dramatics, Joyful Noise should be much less tolerable than it is. But if you should find yourself trapped at this diva show and are willing to give in to its heightened stupidity, you’ll get your money’s worth in a perverse sort of way.

The Upside: Unintentional hilarity. Lots of it.

The Downside: Lazy storytelling, terrible acting and inexplicably inconsistent characters, among many other problems.

On the Side: Some critics have wondered if Dolly Parton’s plastic surgery is a major problem when it comes to taking the movie seriously, which is sort of like wondering if a leaky drain was the problem on the Titanic, if you catch my drift.

On the surface, In the Land of Blood and Honey seems like a vanity project of sorts for its maker, Angelina Jolie. After all, the actress/humanitarian/super-mom is one of the few figures in Hollywood who could strive to make a Bosnian War-set Romeo and Juliet with subtitles and actually get it done.

Yet the finished project suggests that we might have found a new director to watch. Jolie brings a sincere, serious vision to this ambitious enterprise. Crafted with a veteran’s skill, the film ably traverses a range of emotions, from the intimate warmth of bedside scenes to the cold, calculated brutality of war at its most horrific.

Shooting mostly in Hungary but working with an all-Bosnian cast, Jolie brings alive the terrible, destructive ethnic conflict that erupted between 1992 and 1995, after the former Yugoslavia split apart. Her narrative imparts the conflict’s heartaches through its focus on the forbidden, strife-ridden romance between Ajla (Zana Marjanovic), a Muslim artist, and Serbian policeman Danijel (Goran Kostic).

If you’re going to take on such a highly charged subject, you’ve got to go all the way with it. Jolie doesn’t shy from its challenges. She’s unafraid of difficult, uncompromising set pieces, offering an unflinching depiction of wanton criminality. Ajla is taken prisoner and subjected to considerable indignities and abuses along with her fellow Muslims. The violence is sudden and explosive, and Jolie always stresses its human cost. In one harrowing scene, for example, the Serbian officers use the Muslim prisoners as shields.

It’s a testament to the strength of Jolie’s craft that the taboo relationship at the picture’s core is interwoven into the wartime fabric without seeming like a superfluous cop out. Though Ajla and Danijel enjoy small moments of happiness — in bed, say, or when they visit an abandoned art gallery — the movie stresses the impossibility of their romance. Submerged within each scene shared by the main characters is the sense that they just can’t work. Matters of the heart can’t compete with the pull of familial and nationalist ties, or an atmosphere rife with wanton, casual hatred.

The actors affect a convincing bond while simultaneously subverting it. They’re genuine in their declarations of love for one another, and the opening scene — in which they seem blissfully happy dancing in a disco, until a bomb destroys it — makes it clear that at another time, in another place, things might have worked.

But their scenes together are defined by Ajla’s submissiveness and Danijel’s sadness, as if both characters are consumed by the realization that broader forces will drive them apart for good. The characters want to shut out the chaos surrounding them by escaping in each other’s arms, but they’re never able to do so. Even during the most tender of scenes, Jolie and her actors never let you forget the horrors looming outside the bedroom door. That — as much as any of the gritty, realistic depictions of violence — drives home the tragedy of war in this assured cinematic debut.

The Upside: Angelina Jolie shows that she is an accomplished director, with a keen visual eye and strong sense of thematically consistent storytelling.

The Downside: At times, the film feels a bit too familiar.

On the Side: The film is, as The Wall Street Journal notes, “a tough sell,” but it’s well worth your time, even if you’re rightfully skeptical about the whole thing.

Albert Nobbs is a study in tasteful restraint. But that doesn’t mean it’s slow, passionless or dry. Rodrigo Garcia’s film trades in subdued emotions and subtle currents of longing that are deeply felt, driven home by the great performances of leads Glenn Close and Janet McTeer and a screenplay that’s attuned to the sense of wonder — and the longing for something better — that accompanies the pursuit of an unlikely dream.

Close stars as the title character, a devoted and rigid butler at a small 19^th century Dublin hotel. Albert has a secret, of course. He’s a woman, living as a man to work and save enough money to open a small tobacco shop. When the obsessive, justifiably paranoid Albert meets Hubert Page (McTeer), a handyman facing the same predicament, he’s inspired to begin opening up, moving forward in his store-owning aspirations and fomenting a romance with the deceptive maid Helen Dawes (Mia Wasikowska).

The real story of Albert Nobbs begins and ends with the terrific acting. The lead part offers Close — who co-wrote the film and co-produced it, after having played Albert on stage — her greatest acting challenge. She meets it with a fullness of being, the sort of comprehensive disappearing act that characterizes the best performances. With a modicum of dialogue and a wealth of complicated, internalized reactions, Close succeeds at imbuing Albert with the strength of spirit that belies the indignities he faces.

McTeer’s fierce performance as Hubert displays a sort of progressive pride that drives home the character’s primary function — to show Albert that there is another way to live. He’s the catalyst that opens the protagonist’s heart and mind to the possibility that his time has finally arrived, to the thought that he might well have found his escape from a life of secrets and servitude. The actress offers an ideal counterbalance to Close’s overarching restraint, a literate, decidedly modern take on a 19^th century figure that frames her as a woman carving out her destiny as she sees fit, however unconventionally.

There’s never any sense that Albert might actually achieve his dream of running the tobacco shop with Helen. The film stresses its impossibility by relentlessly focusing on period social mores, establishing and playing out the class and gender divisions that have forced Albert to disguise his identity. At the same time, a subplot involving Helen and her true love Joe Macken (Aaron Johnson) stresses the dark ulterior motives underlying her involvement with Albert.

But Albert Nobbs would be a less authentic character study had Garcia indulged in flights of fancy. Whether things end happily for Albert is not, after all, the point. This is a movie that dwells squarely within the interior world of its protagonist, indulging in the hopeless optimism of life’s possibilities, not the unrelenting despair of its realities. It’s a snapshot of Nobbs at a time of great joy after years of hardship, when it finally seems as if things are going his way.

The Upside: Glenn Close and Janet McTeer.

The Downside: Mia Wasikowska’s character is underdeveloped and the movie doesn’t leave the lasting impact of a great piece of cinema.

On the Side: This is a passion project for Close. She won an Obie for playing Albert on stage in 1982 and spent years trying to turn into a film.

War Horse is a sprawling war epic that’s so old-fashioned it belongs in a museum. Not only has director Steven Spielberg painstakingly recreated the look and feel of a classical picture of this scope, imbued with a heavy dose of mid-century British formalism, he’s essentially made a carbon copy of a David Lean movie.

Such a nostalgic enterprise would be welcome if it told a story worth telling, with the strong, determined characters and bold cinematic brushstrokes of a Lean picture. Spielberg’s film does nothing of the sort — it’s a stodgy, ridiculous movie with a horse that simultaneously serves as an allegory for the bond that unites all mankind and a symbol of profound, idealized purity.

The picture follows Joey the horse as he passes from owner to owner, experiencing World War I along the way. He’s bought by poor British farmer Ted Narracott (Peter Mullan), just before the Great War, and trained by Ted’s son Albert (Jeremy Irvine), who’s a clean-scrubbed bundle of boundless idealism.

Once combat begins, Joey is shipped across the English Channel, where he finds his way onto both sides of the conflict. Various soldiers take possession of the horse; he participates in an ill-fated charge, aides in an escape from duty, and performs other traumatic tasks. The horse’s only brief respite comes when he takes up residence with French teen Emilie (Celine Buckens) and her kindly grandfather (Niels Arestrup).

War Horse has been adapted by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis from the Tony-winning play by Nick Stafford and the children’s book that inspired it, written by Michael Morpurgo. Despite the widespread acclaim for the material, it’s hard to get past the fundamentally flawed fact that the audience is meant to feel a strong emotional attachment to a horse. That would work if this were something like Black Beauty, with its equestrian protagonist, but War Horse assumes we’re predisposed to care about Joey because he’s a majestic creature, I guess, and he’s had such a transformative effect on so many one-dimensional characters.

Those characters couldn’t be a less stimulating bunch. They’re a depressing allotment of dull personalities that speak in an aggressively mannered style. They’re artificial archetypes — the determined farmer, the good-hearted soldier — produced with an eye for overwrought stagy dramatics. To be fair, the screenplay doesn’t allot any of them enough time to reveal any extra dimensions, as it’s quickly on to the next owner.

At the same time, the treatment of World War I is so manufactured and tame that it can’t be taken seriously. Of course Spielberg isn’t aiming for a grungy, realistic portrait of trench warfare. The Great War’s version of Saving Private Ryan this is not. But the movie offers such a refined, tasteful portrait of a gruesome experience that it almost makes it seem like a sort of grand noble adventure.

Spielberg never lets you forget that this is a movie about a horse bestowed with the magical ability to bring out the best in the people surrounding him. There are many noble qualities imbued in Joey, none more ridiculous than his remarkable ability to sap the tensions from war. The filmmaker embarks on a full-on assault on your tear ducts that culminates when Joey is stuck in no man’s land, and “silly” human conflicts are put aside for the equestrian Jesus.

Veteran cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s widescreen work is predictably impressive. Soldiers mount horses in a sweeping, golden wheat field and low angles impart the massive scale of the conflict. The images have a subdued gritty quality throughout some of the combat scenes. At the same time, the movie too often opts for a pristine, painterly approach, with the characters framed just-so against the sprawling countryside, as John Williams’ score predictably rises and settles and Spielberg hammers away at the audience.

The grandiose touches fail to disguise the movie’s pedestrian qualities, particularly the deadening predictability with which it imparts its dated vision. At times War Horse is too precious in its family audience pandering — for example, it could easily have lost the frequent cutaways to a honking goose waddling around the frame. At other times it’s so impossibly broad and wooden that its heart is submerged beneath the over-calculated exterior.

No matter what direction things go, though, it’s consistently clear that Spielberg was the wrong director for this material. And that might be what’s most notable about the whole thing.

The Upside: The widescreen cinematography is evocative, there’s a strong supporting cast and the occasional nice, tasteful, old-fashioned touch.

The Downside: The movie is impossibly dated and often laughably ridiculous, imbuing a horse with an impossible array of saintly qualities.

On the Side: If you saw War Horse on stage, we’d love to hear what you thought. It had to be better, right? Right?

Roger Corman’s career in show business spans nearly 60 years, so audiences may initially wonder what might be left to say in a documentary about the exploitation master. Yet Alex Stapleton’s Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel offers a comprehensive, enlightening portrait of this most influential filmmaker-mogul. The doc offers a well-rounded treatise on Corman’s indelible influence, benefiting from a strong cast of talking head contributors and the ease with which Stapleton parallels his subject’s career with larger historical currents within the industry.

The movie employs a straightforward linear approach in charting Corman’s filmmaking life, which began when the Stanford engineering grad found work in 20th Century Fox’s mailroom, advanced to the position of story reader, and eventually quit to begin making pictures himself during the ’50s. It charts the highlights of Corman’s various periods, including the American International Pictures and New World Pictures eras, and offers a wealth of testimony from Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, and others of the premier cinematic talents who got their starts with the B-movie maestro.

That Corman impacted so many famous careers is not a new revelation, but the spectacle of so much A-list talent (add Jonathan Demme and John Sayles to the ranks, among others) testifying to his pervasive influence drives the point home forcefully. When Nicholson chokes up talking about what Corman’s meant to his professional life, or Howard breaks into a childlike grin while he recalls directing Grand Theft Auto, the message comes alive in a unique, valuable way.

At the same time, the picture hinges on the compelling surprise revelation that Corman’s not the heady, mad-barking huckster one might have expected, but a kindly, conservative-dressing, old-fashioned elderly man. He waxes eloquently and speaks with such a strong, refined self-assuredness that you almost can’t believe that he helped dream up something like Night Call Nurses.

To the engaging mix, Stapleton adds period footage, choice clips from Corman’s highlights (among them House of Usher and Little Shop of Horrors), and lowlights and a strong sense of the ways this innovator revamped Hollywood filmmaking and its target audience before the studios caught on and outspent him.

The documentary meanders at times, as would any flick of this structurally cut-and-dry mold. There aren’t any meaty behind-the-scenes stories or tales of drug-fueled blow-ups, the stuff that really grabs one’s attention when it comes to these sorts of insider-driven enterprises. Corman’s World is the simply told story of a complex man or wildly contrasting tastes and images, who launched a multitude of amazing careers and changed his industry forever. And that’s more than sufficient.

The Upside: This is an insightful, engaging look at a cinematic legend.

The Downside: The film employs a cut-and-dry, straightforward structure that limits its effectiveness.

On the Side: Roger Corman is still going strong now, producing movies some 57 years after he started in the business. That’s amazing.

Filmmaker David Gordon Green continues his strange journey through ’80s cinematic iterations with The Sitter, which resurrects the babysitting comedy form most famously portrayed in the minor classic Adventures in Babysitting. And if it’s still not entirely clear why the once-respected indie auteur has devoted such energy to painstakingly mainstream work, at least The Sitter is a tolerably mediocre trifle, not an abomination on par with Your Highness, Green’s other comedy from earlier this year.

Jonah Hill, sporting his since-shed heft for the final time, stars as aimless college dropout Noah Griffith. Convoluted circumstances find him at the home of his mom’s friends the Pedullas, babysitting their three nightmare children. Eldest son Slater (Max Records) is a cauldron of anxieties, daughter Blithe (Landry Bender) is an aspiring celebutard, and the recently adopted Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez) loves destroying things. When Noah’s manipulative love interest Marisa (Ari Graynor) promises sex in exchange for a cocaine delivery, he packs the kids in the minivan and a surreal road trip through Brooklyn begins.

The screenplay by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka commences at a funny, fast clip, cycling through an array of plot developments. Green keeps you engaged in the darker side of the Brooklyn journey’s earliest stages, which includes exploding toilets and a trip to a gay bathhouse/gym/drug-dealing compound. For awhile, at least, there’s genuine interest in the next weird step.

Hill, back in the manic comic mode that’s his forte after his strong dramatic work in Moneyball, establishes an amusingly frazzled interplay with his three gifted young co-stars. He’s at once hopelessly overwhelmed and fatherly toward them, stuck in impossible situations but always ready to dole out a helpful bit of advice. At the same time, each child’s single defining personality trait is sharply realized. Records makes a convincing mini-Woody Allen, Bender delivers her adult-minded dialogue with endless spitfire enthusiasm, and there’s a certain mystery to the way Hernandez lurks around the edges of the frame.

The whole shebang hums smoothly for about the movie’s first half, but it runs out of steam. The plot gets increasingly more convoluted, with less of an emphasis on genuinely creative, outlandish touches. Simultaneously, the transitions between the plot-driven set pieces and the accompanying character-driven moments grow steadily more awkward and abrupt. The overarching thinness of the entire enterprise comes into stark relief as plot details are tossed aside, the one-dimensional stereotype-centered humor takes hold, and the movie more or less avoids a climax entirely.

In the end, the premise isn’t fresh enough to sustain 81 minutes and the movie doesn’t have the wall-to-wall, propulsive energy of a great farcical enterprise. Green stops pushing buttons and settles for the mundane when the movie demands the offbeat and the dark.

Put another way, it’s never a good sign when a movie’s most notable, unique feat is wasting co-star Sam Rockwell.

The Upside: Jonah Hill and the kids are funny.

The Downside: The plot is pretty thin gruel that’s barely sustained over a slim 81 minutes.

On the Side: David Gordon Green should be admired for making the movies he wants, no matter what people think, but it’s hard not to wish he’d get back to more serious stuff. He’s certainly got the chops for it.

It’s hard to overstate just how amazing it is to consider a big-budget, major studio-produced 3D family adventure centered on Georges Méliès. Before now, the work of the early cinematic innovator, whose movies (most famously 1903’s A Trip to the Moon) revolutionized and advanced special effects, has been relegated to film history texts and brief snippets of televised specials. If there’s one filmmaker to make Méliès matter again, to introduce him to a mass audience, it’s Martin Scorsese. After all, the Oscar-winning legend is not just one of the foremost cinematic masters, as a noted film preservationist, he’s among the chief protectors of the long, glorious and frequently threatened legacy of the motion picture.

In Hugo, Scorsese transforms the trappings of a 3D holiday picture into a loving tribute to Méliès and the earliest masters of the cinematic dream factory. From the structure of its narrative, to the details of its plot, and the industrialized nature of its majestic visuals, this is a film infused with the joy and wonder of movies.

Set amid the glittering magic of Paris in the early 1930s, the film follows 12-year-old orphan Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), who secretly lives in a train station. Hugo, who winds the station’s clocks, dwells inside a labyrinthine interior comprised of enormous grinding gears, rising steam currents, and other elaborate metallic concoctions. Among the latter is a non-functioning automaton brought home by Hugo’s late father (Jude Law), which the young man works on incessantly in the hope that he can bring it back to life.

At the same time, the protagonist actively avoids the stern station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), while coming into contact with a cranky toy shop owner named Georges (Ben Kingsley), and Georges’ precocious goddaughter Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz).

It’s no great secret that Georges is, in fact, Méliès and it’s no accident that before discovering the old man’s true identity, Hugo and Isabelle fast become movie buffs. John Logan’s script, adapted from Brian Selznick’s book “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” regards cinema as a metaphor for life. Just as so many crucial technical processes must go right for images to be projected onto a screen, the movie says, so too are we all essential parts of the machinery of existence. Over the course of the film, Hugo comes to understand the role he is meant to play in that vast framework.

Scorsese, working with cinematographer Robert Richardson and production designer Dante Ferretti, applies this principle to the look of the film. The filmmaker plays with three-dimensional perspective in the depiction of Hugo’s enormous industrialized home. The camera soars and darts through space, careening above the streets of Paris, climbing winding staircases that are dwarfed by heavy machinery and pulling up and away to frame the characters against the technological apparatuses that make this testament to modernity churn with life. Scorsese’s vision offers a meticulous representation of the various contours of architectural design that comprise the train station. The look of the film is defined by a wide collection of aesthetic influences, among them steampunk, M.C. Escher, the romanticized Paris of the movies, and a heavy dose of silent comedy’s playful expressiveness. It’s an all-in approach that presents a riveting amalgamation of many styles and sensibilities that have shaped Scorsese’s own relationship with cinema.

At the same time, the movie offers a compelling old-fashioned adventure, as Hugo and Isabelle strive to unlock the secrets of the automaton. In its free-spirited earnestness, the story stands apart from Scorsese’s usual muscular mode of storytelling, which tends to emphasize the violence caused by and visited upon flawed male characters. The filmmaker’s handling of the narrative shows a malleability that’s somewhat unexpected, as he forgoes any sort of temptation to muddy the innocent, permeable sense of discovery.

It’s a 3D production that cost a reported $170 million, but Hugo is a deeply personal work. After all, at its core, the film is really about Scorsese sharing with us, on a deep visceral level, his extraordinary affection for the medium that’s his passion, his profession, his everything.

The film, then, is a movie about why we go to the movies.

The resurrection of cinema’s earliest moments — the first showings of Lumière films, the kaleidoscopic frenzy of Méliès’ sets — harkens back to a period when movies seemed to be infused with limitless mystery. At the same time, it evokes the awe-inspiring, irreplaceable sensations that can only materialize when one sits in the dark with a projector’s flickering light overhead, transported away as magic unfolds onscreen.

The Upside: In its own way, this is a masterpiece that at least deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Martin Scorsese’s best.

The Downside: The movie drags ever so slightly during some parts of its first half or so.

On the Side: It’s amazing that Scorsese has made a 3D $170 million movie about Georges Méliès. A-ma-zing. Who said the auteur was dead?

The bleak, grey world of Tyrannosaur will be familiar to anyone who’s spent time in the cinematic universe of British miserablism, that subgenre of grim movies set on the isles. Protagonist Joseph (Peter Mullan) inhabits a milieu of depressed flats and rundown pubs, living a hopeless existence on the estate in Leeds. Yet, the movie is the feature filmmaking debut of the terrific character actor Paddy Considine, who is not content to simply wallow in the misery.  The director transforms what, at first appears to be the straightforward portrait of a violent man, into an affecting love story that chronicles his subtle redemption.

In doing as such, the filmmaker has given an exceptional vehicle to Mullan and Olivia Colman, who plays a shopkeeper named Hannah. Considine’s characters are not simply defined by first impressions and easy conclusions; instead, they’re afforded the opportunity to grow and change, to reveal the reservoirs of experience, the unexpected strengths and profound, hidden weaknesses that collectively define their lives.

When we first meet Joseph, he’s at his lowest point, having kicked his beloved dog to death in a drunken rage. The mysterious middle-aged man shakes and throbs with palpable fury, a powder keg of volatility. One day, in a fit of sheer desperation, he stumbles into Hannah’s store. She’s kind to Joseph and promises to pray for him, a gesture that affects him deeply and sends him back to see her again.

Considine favors classically composed, sedate images, opting for long takes and an overall unhurried focus that emphasizes the internal lives of his characters as set against the unhappy landscape. It’s an actor-friendly approach that gives Mullan and Colman the chance to inhabit the characters with a fullness that’s often lost when filmmakers opt for hurried visceral spectacle.

The actors reward Considine’s faith with two of the year’s most interesting performances. When the film begins Joseph, who professes his kinship with dogs and their instinct for violence, barely grasps his last shred of humanity. Hannah, on the other hand, is a picture of kind, saintly strength. Soon, however, it’s revealed that Hannah’s home life is anything but the middle-class fantasyland Joseph imagines it to be, as husband James (Eddie Marsan) abuses her in inconceivably vicious ways. Simultaneously, the movie slowly unpacks the source of Joseph’s pain, showing him to be a man as capable of deep feeling and courage as he is unrestrained violence.

The actors seamlessly convey these complexities, subverting initial preconceived notions of the characters. Their interior lives are deeply, powerfully felt in even the quietest of moments, as when Colman tenderly fixes Mullan’s tie, or when Joseph slowly escorts the battered Hannah into his home.

Their connection isn’t a romantic one, exactly. It’s too complicated for that and Tyrannosaur is too smart a movie to settle for easy answers. Instead, Hannah and Joseph are kindred broken spirits, staring into an abyss of death and despair. They’re joined by their struggle to retain some shred of dignity, some semblance of hope for the future, when all seems irrevocably lost.

Don’t be afraid of the movie’s grim facade: this is an uplifting journey worth taking.

The Upside: The movie is extremely well-directed and it features two of the year’s best performances.

The Downside: It’s often impossibly bleak.

On the Side: The movie won Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman, and Paddy Considine prizes at Sundance (World Cinema breakout performance nods for the actors and the World Cinema Award for Directing: Dramatic for Considine).

The dancing, singing penguins of Happy Feet return for another dose of eco-themed animation in this sequel from George Miller, which proves two truisms. First, there’s still a lot of mileage in the spectacle of penguins tap, tap, tapping in unison and belting out cover songs. Second, this franchise is not the clarion call to action on climate change that it wants to be.

The star of the first film, Mumble (Elijah Wood), is a father now, struggling to connect with his adolescent son Erik (Ava Acres), who feels misunderstood and marginalized because he can’t dance. For Erik, a surrogate role model of sorts emerges in The Mighty Sven (Hank Azaria), a flying penguin who preaches messages of empowerment. After a shifting glacier traps their community of emperor penguins in a vast valley, little Erik will need all the confidence he can muster when he, his dad, and two of his friends are called upon to save the day.

Happy Feet Two offers an impressive vision of the Antarctic expanse, with its outsized predators, endless snow-packed tundra, and perfect storm of natural wonders. Miller’s vision wows in 3D, often functioning as an animated version of one of those science center nature spectacles. As the camera glides over the peaks and valleys of this foreboding southern world, you’re swept up in the danger inherent in such a primal landscape.

Yet, while the first movie offered the genuinely unsettling spectacle of Mumble confined in an aquarium and terrified by human visitors, this sequel restricts the protagonists to their Antarctic home. The existential threat posed by the dual obstacles of overfishing (a bigger theme the first time around) and climate change is less deeply felt, as the movie settles into rather ordinary coming-of-age adventure territory.

The father-son stuff is dealt with haphazardly. Mumble is still a straitlaced bore and Erik is so cuddly, so fluffy, that he’s hard to take seriously. He’s less a full-fledged character than a stuffed animal brought to life. In its focus on those two less-than-scintillating characters, the movie manages to waste the talents of master vocalists Azaria and Robin Williams (returning as Mumble’s friend Ramon and a penguin guru named Lovelace).

At the end of the day, though, Happy Feet Two works because the prospect of penguins singing covers hasn’t lost its appeal. You’d have to have a heart made of stone, for example, to not smile when Erik and two baby seals begin an impromptu rendition of “Under Pressure.” Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation,” heard earlier in the film, might have never sounded better.

The cuteness factor, when combined with the awe-inspiring computer-rendered landscape, propels the movie through its innocuous conventions. Forget the environmentalist stuff; the notion that problems can be solved through song and dance, which is the real message of Miller’s franchise, is a resonant one that’s skillfully portrayed.

The Upside: You really can’t argue with singing and dancing penguins.

The Downside: Mumble and Erik are boring characters and the father-son drama is less than compelling.

On the Side: Pink replaces the late Brittany Murphy as the voice of Gloria, Mumble’s wife and Erik’s mom.

The initial moments of Jack and Jill, a new comedy in which Adam Sandler plays twins, filled me with a small measure of hope. The opening montage of twins talking about their relationships was a nice touch. For its first few minutes, Sandler’s drag routine was actually funny. Maybe this wouldn’t be the cavalcade of self-parodying garbage that its trailer seemed to promise.

Alas, poor Sandler, ’twas not to be. After all, this is a Happy Madison production, ensconced in Dennis Dugan land, where once-young comic actors fast approaching middle age still make the same basic movies they were making fifteen years ago. Only now, they movies are worse.

Sandler’s the ring leader of this motley company of thespians, which includes regulars Nick Swardson, Allen Covert and Tim Meadows, as well as stalwart Rob Schneider, who’s credited on IMDb but who I don’t recall actually being in the movie.

Sandler deserves a lot of credit for being loyal to his friends. It’s an admirable trait and a rare one in Hollywood. Somehow, he roped Al Pacino into things this time around, so good on him for that.

But man oh man, why did he think playing cross-gender twins was a good idea? As Jack and Jill Sadelstein, siblings brought together for the holidays, the actor combines his familiar everyman shtick with a drag act that becomes so excruciatingly unpleasant it inspires involuntary shudders and post-traumatic nightmares.

His Jill is a giant ball of close-minded neuroses, unfiltered yapping and unhygienic personal habits. The movie treats her with sneering condescension. Time and again, the screenplay by veteran writer Steve Koren reminds us how repulsive she is, how utterly unattractive and, well, dude-like. She’s a nightmarish, monstrous caricature of a New York Jewish stereotype, the poor man’s Linda Richman with major gas problems and a propensity for “dropping chimichanga bombs.” No man wants her, she complains, and really, we can’t blame them.

There’s not much of a narrative here and only the vaguest outline of a plot. Jill visits Jack and his family, including wife Erin (Katie Holmes) and their two kids, and stays indefinitely. At the same time, ad agency honcho Jack needs Al Pacino (playing a heightened version of himself) to agree to a Dunkin Donuts endorsement. At a Lakers game, Pacino is instantly stricken by Jill, in whom he sees a kindred spirit, the Dulcinea to his Don Quixote, as the movie tells us innumerable times.

So, yes, the entire flick is one long corporate shill for the omnipresent donut chain. Royal Caribbean gets to feel the warm glow of the endorsement spotlight as well. And yes, if you do somehow find your way to this movie, you weren’t dreaming: Al Pacino really does show up to a bar dressed as the Man of La Mancha. He really does do battle with a ceiling fan. He also (spoiler alert, I guess) refers to “Scarface” in a rap about Dunkin Donuts, as if he wanted to make this spectacle even sadder than it already was.

I’ll never understand what could inspire a legend to participate in this dreck. Sandler is by all accounts a nice guy and he’s probably very persuasive, but that doesn’t quite explain this. Yet there the Oscar-winning icon is, tickle torturing the star while Sandler plays Jack dressed in drag and pretending to be Jill.

The movie is so misshapen it’s barely even a movie, but more of a one-joke gag reel filled with walk-ons and other brief appearances from the usual friends of Sandler (John McEnroe, Dan Patrick etc.). It’s a lot of witless lowest common denominator humor combined with excruciatingly broad characterizations, extraordinary condescension and a lazily applied moral that’s completely unearned.

In that sense, Jack and Jill has a lot in common with much of Sandler’s recent output, which has increasingly begun to feel like the work of a man who has stopped trying to make movies worth seeing and started chasing the easy profit. Movies such as the recent Just Go with It and Grown Ups are more slapdash, forced and, well, amateurish than Sandler’s earliest output.

There’s a method to the madness in Billy Madison, for example, with Sandler’s performance an avant garde, performance art rendition of suspended adolescence that carries the movie through its unfocused peaks and valleys.

Now, the joy radiated by the younger, energetic Sandler is gone, leaving only the wreckage and the sad specter of a once top-notch talent desperately clinging to the glory days of yore.

The Upside: There are a few funny moments.

The Downside: The movie is one long example of product placement, with a moronic and condescending story.

On the Side: Watch Sandler’s November 9 appearance on Letterman. It’s way more entertaining than the movie.

A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas is the world’s first interracial stoner buddy holiday comedy to be presented in the third dimension. It’s sure to be the last, too. A twin celebration of the joys of yuletide and bong rips, the flick is an appropriately manic and thoroughly nonsensical entrant in the popular trilogy that’s celebrated the joys of White Castle in one movie and condemned Guantanamo Bay in the next. This Christmas takedown is a one-time only feat, a symphony of pristine ridiculousness.

You go into a Harold & Kumar flick expecting a heavy dose of weed-tinged surrealism, and director Todd Strauss-Schulson, working with the familiar team of writers Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, doesn’t disappoint. This is a madcap farce that sends the now estranged heroes (John Cho and Kal Penn) on a frantic Christmas Eve journey into New York City to find a replacement tree.

But, really, the plot is completely incidental. The real star of the show is all the crazy stuff that happens. The creative team gives us a magical joint, a drug-addled baby, an enraged Mafioso (Elias Koteas), a Stop-Motion drug trip, an absurd church heist fantasy and a Christmas sweater-baring Danny Trejo. Neil Patrick Harris? He’s back too and in a fine encapsulation of the modus operandi for the project as a whole, he leads an elaborate holiday dance revue before getting very, very dirty in his dressing room.

The movie is filled with self-references, from Tom Lennon’s assertion that today is “three D — daddy daughter day,” to a nod to Penn’s real life White House experience and the magical appearance of a White Castle. The makers adopt an old-school approach toward the unabashedly superfluous 3D, hurling fourth wall-shattering effects straight at the audience. It would be fine if a giant Claymation penis never again leapt at me from the big screen, but as a one-time experience from the writers who gave us “battle shits” it gets a laugh.

This is the least structured of the H&K flicks, and after the scattershot Escape from Guantanamo Bay that’s saying something. Sure there’s the aforementioned insignificant plot, the familiar allusions to the sanctity of friendship and a moral about growing up and putting down the pipe. But 3D Christmas is really about its spectacle, both of the shiny Christmas movie variety and the ribald drug fueled sort that’s the hallmark of this franchise.

Its makers offer a flashy, freewheeling experience that is so adamant about not taking itself seriously that you sometimes wonder what you’re doing there. But just when the self-doubt starts creeping in, Santa gets shot in the head.

The Upside: Harold and Kumar are as funny and madcap as ever, their adventures filled with the usual drug-fueled surrealism.

The Downside: A real plot might have been nice. More NPH!

On the Side: If you love this franchise, the movie’s worth the 3D price, and I’ll choose to believe it wasn’t just incorporated as a price-gouging gimmick.

In Time squanders a promising metaphor on an abundance of sleek action scenes that seem to have wandered into the movie from a car commercial. Writer-director Andrew Niccol will always have a beloved, if underrated, place in the realm of modern day sci-fi crafters for his terrific eugenics drama Gattaca and his Truman Show script. But his career has floundered since then, and his latest flick fails to find the structural, atmospheric or plot-driven ingenuity to match its provocative premise.

Set in the proverbial not-so-distant future, the film depicts a human race genetically engineered to stop aging at 25. At that point, essentially, one is on the clock. “Time is the new currency,” intones hero Will Salas (Justin Timberlake). Costs are paid out in hours and minutes, days and years.

More than that, though, time is the lifeblood, the engine that keeps the heart beating. Each person is equipped with a green digital readout on an arm, a countdown to death. Acquire a lot of time, by working hard, or gambling, and you can live for centuries. Spend it unwisely, find yourself stuck in a minimum wage job, lose time to a mugger, or go into debt and 0:00:00 hits with blinding speed.

There are some logical flaws in this conceit and some details that are left unexplained. Chief among them: How is extra time created? Is it “printed,” like money? But Niccol offers a pretty tightly-wound portrait of this new society and the metaphor is a powerful one. We are all, of course, on an inexorable march toward death, forever bartering our remaining time above ground.

The film is undone by how little Niccol does with the concept. It’s surrounded by a painstakingly pedestrian narrative that finds Timberlake’s inner-city dwelling Salas taking revenge on the landed aristocracy that runs things in its luxurious fantasyland home of New Greenwich, after he’s given an extra century of time by a suicidal “one-percenter.” Salas, charged with the one-percenter’s murder, kidnaps heiress Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried). Yet she buys his “down with the rich” rhetoric, and soon enough the futuristic Bonnie and Clyde are after a big time time heist for the poor, with Timekeeper Raymond Leon (Cillian Murphy) giving chase.

The picture is almost comically flashy, from its gorgeous, impeccably dressed leads to the impossibly slick chase scenes, the glossy digital surveillance board that looms over Timekeepers HQ and the nouveau riche pleasures experienced by Salas. The “slum” scenes, set in abandoned lofts and on empty lamp-lit streets, offer a sort of stylized grit, while the noirish overtones are rendered obsolete by the absence of the muddled morality that sets apart such enterprises at their best.

There’s a clear division between good and bad, right and wrong in Niccol’s Robin Hood dichotomy. Timberlake and Seyfried are the pretty, empty headed heroes, their every action justified. Standing in their way are the wasteful New Greenwich elite, conspiring to kill off the poor for lebensraum, and the workman Leon, who will get his foe whatever the cost. The contemporary allusions — JT as Occupy Wall Street avenger — are no less obvious.

It’s all way too cut-and-dry, an enterprise in which a pedestrian plot and a straightforward aesthetic have been applied to a grand idea. The great speculative sci-fi writers and filmmakers could have made much more of it than Niccol. And one of them might have already. Hugo-award winning novelist Harlan Ellison has launched a copyright suit against the picture, claiming it rips off his 1965 short story “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman.”

Without having read Ellison’s work, with no opinion on the merits of his case, I think it’s safe to assume that you’d be better served seeking it out for you “time is money” dystopian fix.

The Upside: The “time as currency” conceit is a powerful one and the movie has a an appealing sleekness about it.

The Downside: The plot is extraordinarily dull and painstakingly one-note.

On the Side: If you haven’t seen Gattaca, rent it instead.

The Rum Diary marks Johnny Depp’s return to Hunter S. Thompson territory, following his cult favorite work in Terry Gilliam’s delirious adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Yet audiences expecting more of the same drug-fueled mania will be disappointed. While it’s filled with offbeat characters and the occasional stylistic quirk, Bruce Robinson’s film offers a straightforward, earnest narrative about a young marble-mouthed author finding his writing voice while fighting capitalist corruption.

Set in a volatile Puerto Rico, circa 1960, Thompson’s semi-autobiographical story follows struggling journalist/alter ego Paul Kemp (Depp) as he joins the staff at a local rag run by domineering editor-in-chief Lotterman (Richard Jenkins). It’s a day-to-day portrait of Kemp’s hard living in paradise, set against a backdrop of conflict between the natives hoping to protect their land and the capitalistic cronies interested in transforming the archipelago nation into an overdeveloped tourist spot.

The film moves and breathes a lot like one of those tourist calling card pictures, with pristine, sun-drenched wide shots of a beach framed by clear blue water contrasting with the sweaty interior of a dance club or the rustic charm of a crumbling Spanish-style abode. The aura of luxurious glamour is manifest in the sleek white outfits donned by the protagonists and the jazz-infused score as well.

As Chenault, girlfriend to ostensibly villainous developer Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), Amber Heard enhances the hedonistic undertones, being dressed up like a ’50s Barbie doll, proving relentlessly seductive in her illicit advances toward Paul and enjoying a skinny-dipping adventure or two.

But it’s all window dressing, as the conflicts are undercooked, Depp’s performance rote and the film mired in a sort of existential haze. The movie centers on the conflict between the downscale life of a freelance journalist and the high-end pleasures — a yacht trip, a Chevy convertible and various forms of resplendent scenery — offered by Sanderson, in exchange for Paul crafting articles that support his development plans.

That moral struggle is rendered with a sort of abiding disinterest, with Eckhart portraying Sanderson as your everyday sleazy huckster with a vision for the island that doesn’t exactly qualify as earth-shatteringly outlandish or offensive. The perfectly-coiffed, muscled developer lashes out at locals, drinks in the pleasures of his enormous wealth and demonstrates a steadfast propensity for getting what he wants. But the cause he represents never seems quite outrageous enough to serve as a professional pivot point for Kemp, an awakening to journalism’s noblest potential.

Having spent so much time playing various forms of oddballs, from Captain Jack Sparrow to Willy Wonka, Depp seems out of his depth as the relatively low-key, put-upon Kemp, who has a propensity for alcohol and experimentation with illicit substances but is at heart an everyday hard worker. The hushed, mumbled line delivery and all-around lack of proactive behavior neuters Depp’s expressive talents. In forcing the actor to find a way into a regular working stiff, the movie turns him into a personality deprived piece of scenery who’s routinely upstaged by co-stars Giovanni Ribisi (as Nazi-loving crime/religion reporter Moburg) and Michael Rispoli (playing Kemp’s frequently disheveled colleague/best friend Sala).

Mostly, the movie flounders because it never drums up the energy to meaningfully pursue its narrative or the drug-tripping, Voodoo priestess-visiting side adventures undertaken by the protagonist. It’s a parade of strange characters and pretty settings and a flick that pays lip service to the journalist’s obligation to go after “the bastards,” as Kemp calls the power-hungry capitalist heavies. All that’s missing is the inspiration, the spirit, the visceral sense that The Rum Diary is the sort of hopping, fun ride one expects from a fish-out-of-water tale about the Gonzo journalist’s early career, set on an island paradise.

The Upside: The movie is quite scenic and stars a lot of pretty people. The period details are precise and well-conveyed.

The Downside: There’s not much energy to the picture and Johnny Depp seems lost.

On the Side: For the usual reasons (development hell etc.), it’s taken more than a decade to get this film made and released.

The real-life experience of being seduced into a cult and dealing with its psychological ramifications is probably a lot like that undergone by Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) in Martha Marcy May Marlene. That’s the highest praise one could offer this engaging drama, which arrives in theaters after causing a mini sensation on the festival circuit, complete with an unfortunate title and a brand new Indie It Girl in Olsen.

Writer/director Sean Durkin‘s feature filmmaking debut isn’t going to cure global hunger or cause world peace, despite what the frenzied hype might suggest. It is, however, an assured work that achieves the tricky feat of offering a finely-tuned window into the existential burdens of its protagonist while simultaneously keeping her at a distance.

The picture’s split chronology parallels Martha’s introduction into the Upstate New York “family” led by the manipulative, charismatic Patrick (John Hawkes) and her re-integration into her real family two years later. Without launching into convoluted explanations for Martha’s actions, the film follows her experiences in the harrowing reclusive clan, which has a propensity for guns, austere clothing and psychological torture, as well as a general acceptance of vicious physical abuse. At the same time, she is shown adrift in the lavish lakefront Connecticut home of her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and brother-in-law Ted (Hugh Dancy).

In structuring his narrative, Durkin draws out the torturous nature of Martha’s particular form of post-traumatic stress disorder, in which random events trigger terrible memories and innocuous experiences blend with terrifying ones. The movie adopts a ground-level view of its subject, becoming firmly enmeshed in her disoriented, troubled mind. Flashbacks are tinged with suspense and horror; Durkin demonstrates an aptitude for generating tension and creating an atmosphere laced with unease, even when there’s little more than a hint of the sinister.

Olsen (little sister to Mary-Kate and Ashley, for the three readers who weren’t aware) really is pretty great, giving a haunted, grief-stricken performance that conveys a considerable degree of inner turmoil. At the same time, she convincingly blends into Patrick’s sadistic pastoral family, adopting a sort of blankly smitten approach as she listens to Patrick speak, or as she earnestly invokes the benefits of a “purifying” ritual. Olsen’s sharp work is doubly noteworthy because it comes without the sort of big cathartic sequence that might have been provided by a lesser filmmaker. Martha never quite says what she’s thinking, so it’s up to Olsen to help us find whatever wisdom and pathos there is to be found within the opaque character.

Martha Marcy May Marlene shows little interest in the typical rewards of moviegoing, eschewing dramatic payoffs, rejecting structural efficiencies and largely wringing the emotion out of the process. It’s a complicated effort, simultaneously evoking the allure of a remote, cut-off lifestyle — where it’s possible, as the characters note, to just “exist” — and the terrible realities that come with wholly submitting to another person. It’s a painstakingly realistic depiction of brainwashing’s corrosive effects and a movie that utterly rejects any sort of bigger picture approach. Put simply, it’s a film about the visceral facts of the depressing, confusing, exciting, terrifying moment that Martha is stuck in, and nothing more.

The Upside: Elizabeth Olsen is terrific. The movie offers an incisive look at the allure of life in a cult and the challenges of the “detox” process.

The Downside: It’s not as affecting as one might hope. Martha never really changes and filmmaker Sean Durkin makes a conscious effort to resist any old-fashioned emotional trappings.

On the Side: We’re pretty sure Mary-Kate or Ashley couldn’t quite give the same caliber of performance as their little sister.

By now everyone knows that after his upcoming two-part hockey flick Hit Somebody, Kevin Smith is done making movies. If Red State is any indication, the time’s right for his exit.

Smith’s Westboro Baptist Church-inspired horror-thriller has been making headlines since his ill-fated fake auction following January’s Sundance premiere. He’s taken it on the road, showing it to packed houses across North America. It played a week at the New Beverly Cinema in L.A. The filmmaker’s tweeted about it incessantly. Now, it’s on DVD.

And it’s still really, really bad, a simplistic, poorly-constructed exercise in low-rent genre moviemaking. It’s as if Smith made the movie just so he could promote it. Horny Midwestern teens (Michael Angarano, Kyle Gallner and Nicholas Braun) sneak away one school night to have sex with an older woman they’ve met online. Turns out the woman, Sara (Melissa Leo), is the daughter of the psychotic fringe preacher Abin Cooper (Michael Parks) and Abin really, really doesn’t like fornicating.

He hates it so much, in fact, that he has the boys drugged, tied up, and housed in an animal cage (Gallner) and a dungeon below his church (Angarano and Braun). After some fiery sermonizing, brutal executions are planned.

The movie has one great thing going for it: Parks, who’s an electric presence, oozing charisma as he spouts pseudo-biblical nonsense. The actor doesn’t exactly rally you to Cooper’s evil cause, but there’s a precision to his performance, a rhythm to his craziness that’s appealing in a Hannibal Lecter/Harry Powell sort of way.

Beyond Parks, this is an amateurish enterprise without an iota of suspense or an inkling of purpose. Smith has frequently admitted that he has no idea how to properly stage a shot, but his visual failures have never been more apparent than they are here. His frame is frequently cluttered with immobile characters, the action scenes offer torpid back-and-forth exchanges of machine gun blasts and the few non-cut-and-paste stylistic decisions backfire spectacularly.

The characters (again, other than Parks) are brain-dead one-dimensional bores. The teens are stereotypically sex-obsessed louts and you’re largely immune to their suffering. Smith undoubtedly told Leo to overact but she so overdoes the glassy-eyed fanatic thing that her Sara seems less like a human than a crazed homicidal robot. The narrative abandons them all early on, as the picture becomes one-part sermon and one-part shootout, with nary a convincing or meaningful personal detail to be found.

Smith is a talented writer and an adept chronicler of a particular strand of suspended adolescence (basically, the New Jersey type). He’s also one of the most publicly self-aware individuals working in Hollywood, so he knows his own limitations. The desire to do something drastically different is an understandable one, but it’s surprising that he thought he could pull off Red State. He’s out of his depth and his movie — which aims to be scary and suspenseful, but is neither — is mostly unwatchable.

The Upside: Two words: Michael Parks.

The Downside: Two words: Everything Else.

On the Side: I genuinely like Kevin Smith and appreciate his contributions to cinema. Thus, I look forward to forgetting this film ever existed.