A clever riff on the legend of the Seal’s Skin, Ondine concerns the unexpected relationship that develops after divorced Irish fisherman Syracuse (a brooding Colin Farrell), while out trawling the ocean one misty morning, nets himself a barely alive woman (Alicja Bachleda). Claiming to not know who she is, the beauty assumes the name Ondine…

Considering his career-long interest in man’s alternately harmonious and hostile relationship with his environment, Werner Herzog would have been an ideal choice to helm 127 Hours, the story of climber and canyoneer Aron Ralston, who spent the titular duration at the bottom of Utah’s Blue John canyon, his arm wedged between a boulder and a…

Despite the inspired sight of Robert Downey Jr. punching a young boy in the stomach, Due Date may be the year’s least amusing comedy, a mismatched-duo road-trip saga which suggests that star Zach Galifianakis, only a year removed from his breakout turn in The Hangover, has already exhausted his lovable-absurdist-weirdo schtick. Paired with Downey Jr.’s…

A leaden faux-thriller that, given its inability to generate suspense or provide any nuanced commentary on its based-on-real-events concerns, eventually falls back on one-note domestic-drama uplift, Fair Game sleepily recounts the saga of Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts). A covert CIA agent, Plame was outted by the Bush White House in retaliation for her husband, ambassador…

A companion piece to his 51 Birch Street, The Kids Grow Up nominally charts director Doug Block’s daughter from childhood to her departure for college, though while the filmmaker intends the film to be a rumination on his own empty nest hang-ups, it in fact soon becomes a portrait of the documentarian as an insufferably…

An amazing true-life tale told in mundanely conventional Hollywood fashion, Conviction charts Massachusetts native Betty Anne Waters’ (Hilary Swank) unerring 16-year crusade to free her brother Kenny (Sam Rockwell) from prison, where he was serving a life sentence for murder. The hook to director Tony Goldwyn’s film is that, in order to exonerate her troublemaking…

Michael Douglas plays an old dog performing familiar tricks in Solitary Man, a rote saga about a 60-year-old playboy tumbling, fast and hard, toward change-of-heart epiphanies. Douglas is Ben, a New York car dealer mogul who, after learning that he may have a serious heart condition, embraces a carpe diem ethos by detonating his marriage…

Sidestepping political debate for on-the-ground reality, Restrepo tags along with an army platoon as they travel in May 2007 to East Afghanistan’s treacherous Korengal Valley to secure the creation of a road that will provide greater transport of supplies to the mountainous region’s locales. Directed by Tim Hetherington and The Perfect Storm author Sebastian Junger,…

Performing a clumsy historical-uplift routine, Mao’s Last Dancer recounts the true-life saga of Li Cunxin (Chi Cao), who in the ‘70s was forcibly trained by his native China’s communist regime to become a ballet dancer, and whose life was forever changed by an opportunity in 1981 to study dance for three months in Houston, Texas…