Mark Holcomb

What's unexpected is how thoroughly The ABCs of Death's ample duds overshadow its treasures, and how uninspired it feels as a whole.

Nawal's travails are more in the vein of a Latin American soap opera than Greek tragedy, and Jeanne and Simon's climactic, genuinely god-awful discovery plays like artistic sleight-of-hand rather than the profoundly tautological revelation it aspires to be.

Tender irony and dark humor abound in Israeli director Eran Riklis's latest account of bureaucracy colliding with burgeoning compassion.

Porterfield intersperses these delicately underplayed scenes with doc-style question-and-answer exchanges that, while initially jarring, achieve maximum cumulative impact.

A wispy mix of boy-boy romance and noir-lite potboiler, the Shumanski brothers' (Wrecked) latest wastes a promising premise by loading up on tender whimsy and skimping on grit.

A must-see for opera lovers and a snappy diversion for cinephiles.

A quietly impassioned, genuinely stirring indie rarity.

Charles Bukowski, the bard of post-war L.A.'s working-class underbelly, was no ordinary cult writer, and John Dullaghan's thorough, compelling doc Bukowski: Born Into This does a credible job of showing why.

It may not be particularly innovative, but the film's crisp, unaffected style and air of gentle longing make it unexpectedly rewarding.

Happily, beneath the film's nostalgic veneer and tooth-rattling visual and aural effects lies a mature ambiguity that's unusual for a holiday blockbuster -- and all but unheard of in a Tony Scott movie.