Legendary soprano Galina Vishnevskaya doesn't sing a note as a Russian babushka visiting her grandson on the Chechnyan front in Alexander Sokurov's hazy tallying of the cost of war. Evoking the sights, sounds and smells of freshly oiled metal and bombed-out buildings, Sokurov favors texture over topicality. Closer to the vague babble of Russian Ark than the sensuality of The Sun, Alexandra drifts without direction at times, although it's full of startling moments, as when Vishnevskaya shoulders an automatic rifle and pulls the trigger, or a group of old men gather into the shadow of a half-destroyed building, slabs of concrete dangling above their heads.  —Sam Adams

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Stuck in a rudimentary rom-com plot, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler look appropriately distressed. Suddenly desperate for a baby but unable to conceive, organic supermarkets VP Kate (Fey) pays white-trashy Angie (Poehler) to carry her baby. With their contract negotiated by a smug commercial broker (Sigourney Weaver), the women are crassly opposed - especially when Angie leaves her husband (Dax Shepard) and moves in with Kate. Though Kate and Angie develop a friendship dressed up as cross-class romance, Kate is distracted by unilluminating relationships with her new-agey lug of a boss (Steve Martin, who stretches his one-joke characterization beyond the breaking point), sister-with-children (Maura Tierney) and bland new boyfriend (Greg Kinnear). Most depressing, the women are ritually observed, chastised and advised by wise doorman Oscar (Romany Malco, whose patience here, in a just world, would guarantee him a starring role in a real movie). —Cindy Fuchs

Stefan Ruzowitsky's Holocaust thriller won this year's foreign film Oscar, but don't hold that against it. It might not have been the best non-English-language movie released in 2007 - or really, anywhere remotely in the ballpark - but it's a solid, gripping work. Karl Markovics, a splendid actor with sunken eyes and a wedge-shaped face, plays Salomon Sorowitsch, an accomplished forger who is drafted by the Nazis to make bogus pounds and dollars, the better to sink the Allies' economies. A creature of pure self-interest, Sally accepts his privileged position in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, keeping his nose clean and his eyes averted. But other members of his counterfeiting team find it harder to ignore the atrocities going on outside the relative comforts of their enclave, namely Adolf Burger (August Diehl), on whose memoir the movie is loosely based. The tension between Sally's amoral pragmatism and Adolf's dangerous principles animates a lightly sketched morality play, although the movie punts when it comes to following either man's viewpoint through to the end. —S.A.

Suzanne (Juliette Binoche) is struggling to maintain her acting career and look after 7-year-old Simon (Simon Iteanu). Toward all these ends, she's hired a new nanny, Song (Song Fang). Song, a film student from China, is as quiet and observant as Suzanne is expressive and self-absorbed. During her first conversation with Simon, she names the inspiration for The Flight of the Red Balloon. "It's a really old film," she says. The boy doesn't know it, but he's living like it. Like Pascal in Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon, he's followed by a balloon. Each character in Hou Hsiao-hsien's film exists in a separate space, but they also reach toward one another. As relationships and reflections slip into and out of one another, they are revealed as potent and elusive. —C.F.

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South Boston loner Jason (Michael Angarano) is fan of old martial arts movies, which he browses at his local pawn shop. So who better, then, to transport to an alternate universe to do battle with an immortal warlord and free a mystical entity known as the Monkey King? While director Robert Minkoff's latest won't produce angry letters from offended parents (thing's so squeaky-clean it should be subtitled "My First Kung Fu Flick"), The Forbidden Kingdom will come off daft to anyone who's seen more than two Jackie Chan or Jet Li movies. Chan, as a goofball boozehound (a tinny reprisal of his role in 1978 classic Drunken Master), is goofy and filled with booze; Li's Silent Monk is, well, silent and monklike. The pair seems to be having fun as they train their disciple, rattling off an endless string of Confucius Lite adages and meeting in fight sequences breathtakingly choreographed by the legendary Woo-ping Yuen (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Matrix, Kill Bill). But all that star power's not enough to make up for excruciating decisions - like having love interest Golden Sparrow (Yifei Liu) talk exclusively in the third person ("She is sorry," she tells Jason after he opens up to her about his absentee father). —Drew Lazor

The Judd Apatow Alumni Employment Program strikes again, this time providing a vehicle for writer/star Jason Segel and director Nicholas Stoller, both of whom worked on Undeclared, while Segel also starred on Freaks and Geeks. Segel's screenplay largely follows the formula worked out by the producer and fellow former Freak Seth Rogen, employing intelligently lowbrow, bawdy comedy to temper their heart-on-sleeve romcom plotting (or vice versa). This time out, Segel is the slovenly guy, given to fits of crying and full-frontal nudity (Apatow never neglects the comic potential of male genitalia) after losing his - naturally - gorgeous, successful girlfriend. Kristen Bell is the title character, the star of a CSI-style show winkingly parodied with William Baldwin and Jason Bateman as her co-stars. He runs off to Hawaii, where he falls for hotel concierge Mila Kunis and hangs out with members of the Apatow stock company - Bill Hader, Jonah Hill and Paul Rudd, scoring laughs as a should-be-tired stoned surfer type. There's more concentration on story than in Superbad, and it runs in more predictable directions than Knocked Up or 40 Year Old Virgin, but the joy, as usual, is in the mercilessly mocking camaraderie of the cast, always quick to edge emotion with vulgarity. —Shaun Brady

The intelligently childlike exuberance of Jon Favreau's Zathura proved, as did Sam Raimi's juggling of genre action and self-aware humor in the Evil Dead films, that the director had the right mix of gleeful enthusiasm and respect for convention to helm a comic book adaptation. Tackling Iron Man, Favreau's greatest asset is the casting of Robert Downey Jr., apparently a fan of the comic, as a character whose misspent youth (and beyond) mirrors the actor's own. Downey imbues billionaire playboy Tony Stark, heir of a weapons manufacturing empire, with the pampered cockiness that makes his transformation into avenging angel absolutely believable; he's just sheltered enough that his combination of worldweariness and naivete make perfect sense. Downey's too smart an actor to drop all traces of his former life once the suit goes on, keeping Stark a charming asshole even when his motives are pure. Favreau wisely gives Downey room to improvise and a good deal more screen time than his metallic counterpart, so that even when the climactic battle comes along, Downey and Jeff Bridges are as present as their CGI avatars. There's enough wit and fun, not to mention hints at the future, to make the promised trilogy a welcome prospect. —S.B.

Loathsome as soon as it starts, Paul Weiland's wedding comedy submits that smart art history major Hannah (Michelle Monaghan) will fall hard and forever for dim, narcissistic, manipulative and self-pitying Tom (Patrick Dempsey). He first appears in her dorm room, mistaking her for her hot-date roommate. Afterward, they're best friends for a decade, while she restores paintings and he lives off the endless proceeds of having invented the "coffee sleeve." Because he's an inveterate bachelor (determined not to be like dad Sydney Pollack, now on his sixth marriage/divorce), she falls for the equally repulsive Colin (Kevin McKidd), a lumpy duke who moves her to his palace in Scotland, where he kills deer and throws trees for sport. When Tom realizes his true love for Hannah, he agrees to be her maid of honor in order to thwart the wedding. A pile-on of penis jokes, sex-toy jokes (Hannah's grandmother gapes and gapes, her neck adorned by glowing "thunder beads" she mistakes for jewelry), man-bonding and homophobic jokes ensues. Tom's basketball-playing best friends include happily married Sixth Man Kadeem Hardison and he gets his best maid of honor advice from a DVD, 12 Steps Down the Aisle by Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Not funny, not even a little bit.  —C.F.

Insistent on not making a "political film," Daniele Luchetti instead offers this playful parable of an ideologically divided Italy as harmless domestic spat. It's impossible not to look for the motives behind fellowship to extreme dogma, however, as Accio Benassi (played, once fully grown, by Elio Germano) turns his entire devotion from the priesthood to idolizing Mussolini. True to his skittish promise, Luchetti avoids examining the seduction of innocence by all-consuming belief systems, religious or political, and simply portrays Accio's conversion as light domestic comedy. Luchetti offers a glib, scrubbed-sterile rendition of neo-realism, a ramshackle 1970s Italy viewed through Wonder Years nostalgia. The choice of focus and tone is regrettable given the few satirical touches offered by Best of Youth screenwriters Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, particularly the "de-Fascistized" Ode to Joy. The rest of the lower-class Benassi family are devoted Communists, especially older brother Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio). Eventually both paths devolve into corruption and violence, but the focus is on rivalry of the sibling stripe, focused, naturally, on the girl (Diane Fleri) who Accio pines for as Manrico neglects. Fraternal rupture never quite comes to the head suggested by the title; Fascist or Communist, Luchetti shrugs, boys will be boys.  —S.B.

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. —C.F.

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. —S.A.

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.

In her directorial debut, Helen Hunt makes the same rookie mistake as many a thespian taking their first step behind the camera, overindulging the cast to the point where emotional pyrotechnics wrestle narrative to the ground. Hunt stars as April Epner, desperate for a baby with new husband Matthew Broderick, who suddenly realizes his emotional immaturity and takes off - but not before impregnating Hunt with some quick kitchen-floor break-up sex. She then has to juggle separation and impending motherhood with new romance and instant family with nice-guy Colin Firth. Then, after her adoptive mother dies, daytime TV host Bette Midler appears as April's tall tale-spinning birth mother. The film is full of these favor-reaping star turns, from the leads down to the inexplicable presence of Salman Rushdie as Hunt's obstetrician. Were it not for their peer at the helm, it's questionable whether any of them would have taken on the overripe screenplay, for which Hunt again shares credit. Crammed with verbiage, the script has everyone talking feverishly past one another with one voice like an amateur theater production. That hyper-stylized mode fits uneasily with the obviously personal story, stuffed with seemingly every issue near and dear to Hunt's heart. —S.B.

The sight of a gray-haired, deeply wrinkled woman in her 90s stepping to the microphone and reciting The Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go" to the acclaim of a grinning, largely middle-aged audience is undeniably cringe-inducing. The idea of senior citizens belting out modern rock songs is another egregious manifestation of the sidelining of the elderly as cute and disconnected. British filmmaker Stephen Walker takes an equally condescending approach, aw-shucksing at the Young @ Heart chorus' efforts and nearly baby-talking through interviews. But simply by virtue of following this group through a season's rehearsal period, Walker can't help but capture the reality of these seniors' situation, where the music - as alien to them as Sonic Youth and Talking Heads may be - is secondary to the social aspect in lives not yet over, despite assumptions to the contrary. The music in question is chosen by Bob Cilman, who founded the Northampton, Mass.-based chorus in 1982 and refuses to treat his charges with kid gloves regardless of their age. As gooey as the film itself gets, the singers themselves face the inevitable with good humor, and some of them manage performances of true poignancy that cut through the crowd-pleasing effortlessness of both performance and film.  —S.B.