Strange visitor with assimilation challenge shakes up local status quo—we could be talking about Footloose, but we’re in fact referring to The Thing, another recently renewed early ’80s movie memory.

Promoted as a teen suicide awareness film, Archie’s Final Project comes off as a gratuitous exploitation of teen angst, made for the attention-deficient, packaged in elaborate production. The irony of this movie is it seems derived from the very same self-indulgence it aims to illuminate.

If you are a 12-year-old girl who has never seen Harold and Maude, you may find yourself in some kind of heaven watching Restless.

Moneyball is so inside baseball, it’s inside out. Imagine not just another movie reverie on the virtues of the American pastime, but one with the mind-set of a back-office stats wonk. Nonfans will be hard-pressed to think up a more boring prospect—and accordingly shocked at how entertaining the film actually is.

The redoubtable Charlotte Gainsbourg emerges unscathed from Antichrist, Lars von Trier’s 2009 succès de scandale, as the pointedly named Dawn O’Neil, a newly widowed mother of four, in The Tree. French filmmaker Julie Bertuccelli’s Australian drama has more to say about mourning than the similarly named The Tree of Life and has jellyfish to boot.

Contagion is the name of the film because it’s also the name of the most developed character.

Playwright Martin McDonagh, who made an exciting transition to film with the crime comedy In Bruges, is one of a kind. His brother John Michael McDonagh is another matter entirely.

We greet The Debt with a sense of relief, if only because its title could portend some hasty hectoring documentary about Congress figuring out its financial “super committee,” and this movie is something else.

Sarah’s Key would like to reassure you that there is still a place in this world—or at least in its movie theaters—for the grave Holocaust drama of child endangerment.

Given the specific nature of the 11th Annual Native Cinema Showcase, which coincided with Indian Market and showed more than 40 films from Native filmmakers worldwide, I was curious about exactly who would fill the auditorium at the New Mexico History Museum. As the week progressed, it became clear: anyone and everyone.