Gulf War veteran Mike (Chiwetel Ejiofor) runs a Brazilian jujitsu school in L.A. Hard and painful, his lessons are premised on masculine values (and the questions about such values that perennially complicate David Mamet's universe). When Mike's classroom is literally penetrated by a bad-driving, drugs-seeking lawyer (Emily Mortimer), he's suddenly got a broken window - thanks to the accidental discharge of a gun belonging to his student, a cop named Joe (Max Martini, excellent here as he is in Mamet's TV series, The Unit). In need of cash, Mike takes a consulting gig on a Desert Storm film for producer Joe Mantegna, a decision that leads him - and his clothes designer wife, Sondra (Alice Braga) - directly into the sort of con-man hell that Mamet has made his metier. Confronting corruption and greed that undermine martial arts-ish honor, Mike is alternately desperate, clever and goofy. It's hardly surprising that he ends up in a spectacular mixed martial arts showdown (beautifully choreographed by Mamet's own instructor, Renato Magno). For all the rat-a-tat overstatement, Ejiofor is something else - vulnerable, earnest and, yes, manly. —Cindy Fuchs

Premiered under a pseudonym to give director Claude Lelouch some breathing room after the midstream failure of an ambitious trilogy, Roman de gare is preoccupied with questions of authorship, and the notion that pleasing surfaces are not inimical to deeper content. Fanny Ardant plays a mystery novelist on the verge of a transition to "serious" literature, but her breakthrough may have been ghostwritten by kindly but off-kilter Dominique Pinon, who may also be either an escaped serial killer or a schoolteacher who has just walked out on his family. Lelouch's characters play games with one another, and he plays games with the audience, foreclosing possibilities and opening new ones so that you're never sure who's who or what they've done. The movie is glossy and easy on the eyes, but it's also eventually tiresome; Lelouch's misdirections start to seem like a way of distracting from a lack of substance, and the final flourish is a let down. The saving grace is Pinon's performance, a break from his usual grotesques and a sign of unexplored leading-man skills he has yet to fully exploit. —Sam Adams

Vastly different from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or their music-video work, the second feature by Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith (aka Hammer and Tongs) is a soft-hearted, self-consciously idiosyncratic tale of the unlikely friendship between a shy but creative schoolboy raised in a strict religious sect (Bill Milner) and a spiky-haired bully (Will Poulter) who has his heart set on winning a filmmaking competition. The year being 1982, their project is inspired by First Blood, but the plot quickly becomes tangled with Milner's private mythology, which he has scrawled, Henry Darger-like, on the pages of his Bible. Some of Jennings' flights of fancy are too clever by half, especially the scenes involving a French exchange student (Jules Sitruk) whose patent-leather boots and pubescent half-moustache drive the British schoolgirls to distraction. There's an astonishing sequence early on when Milner's fantasies spring suddenly to life and the English countryside is abruptly replaced with a mixture of hand-drawn animation and digital effects. But that particular combination immediately brings up the comparison to Michel Gondry's handmade daydreams, by which standard Son of Rambow is pretty thin gruel. It's pleasant enough stuff, but the movie's manifest sweetness isn't enough to compensate for its ramshackle structure.  —S.A.

A generation of kids grew up watching the Anglicized anime Speed Racer, but few would elevate their nostalgia to the near-canonization that the Wachowski Brothers have. Every charming flaw and colorful detail of the slight but fondly remembered original is not only worshipfully maintained but amplified, from the rushed expository dialogue (originally a product of the English dubbing) to the manic editing. At a little over two hours, the film seems as inconsequential as an average half-hour episode - only exponentially more tiresome. As with The Matrix, the Wachowskis have created a distinctive world with its own jaw-dropping rules of physics, but they've imbued Speed Racer with the disregard for story and character in favor of tech fetishism and overblown action that marred that film's two sequels. The candy-colored environment they've created doesn't so much bring the cartoon original to life as exaggerate it to a scale it can't help to support, and the relatively fine cast are swallowed whole. An impossible-to-follow (if only because impossible-to-care-about) plot about corporate control of the racing circuit is a bare excuse for action scenes that combine NASCAR, the WWE and Grand Theft Auto. Built for speed, surely, but desperately in need of some ballast.