Nine points regarding Shane Acker's film, 9. Just be careful not to get bogged down in all the deep pseudo-symbology.

The movies of the American workplace would be worse off without the skeptical empathy of writer-director Mike Judge. It’s not that Judge is any kind of labor-relations expert, or even a cinematic genius. It’s just that he knows what it’s like to have to work for a living and how that knowledge might well be channeled into diverting entertainment.

In the Loop offers a deliciously corrosive backstage view of the Iraq War years, as Brits and Yanks danced around what they knew was a foregone conclusion of their own making.

Inglourious Basterds ranks among Tarantino’s greatest achievements, but it is not a shiny summer bauble. It is more like a house cat hunting for 152 minutes, depositing a bloody, broken bird at your feet and expecting you to love it.

Neill Blomkamp said he wanted to make a film that “didn’t depress the audience and kind of ram a whole lot of ideas down their throat that maybe they didn’t feel like hearing.” Could there be a more disheartening statement of purpose by a young artist or a more cynical underestimation of an audience’s intelligence?

Julie & Julia doesn’t match the delights of such sensual, aesthetic food movies as Le Grande Bouffe, Babette’s Feast, Tampopo or even Woman on Top. It merely dramatizes Powell and Child in contrasting routes to media success via book and blog publishing, TV and film celebrity.

“War is a drug,” the opening quote of The Hurt Locker tells us, and the human species’ addiction to it is nearly as old as the ground on which each battle is fought. But like a bad trip, the fever dreams created by every new conflict are unique and ever-adapting. In historical wars, the primitive nature of weaponry required close range in order to fight, which also meant you knew where the danger could come from and there was no faceless enemy.

Little girls with long black hair get a bum rap at the movies this week. Little Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), the 9-year-old wayward youth in the title role of Orphan, may be a standard horror-flick bad seed, but she relishes her own wickedness—just as the movie seems intoxicated by its inevitable future as midnight-screening schlock. The girl and the picture both succeed by taking familiar setups to demented extremes

For viewers who haven’t read the Harry Potter books, the newest movie will make no sense. For avid readers, the film holds true to the story line but fails to capture the darker subtext of JK Rowling’s magical realism.

Every Little Step, Adam Del Deo and James Stern’s absorbing documentary about the 2006 revival of the Broadway hit A Chorus Line—in other words, a movie about the casting of a musical that’s about actors auditioning for a musical—is a rabbit hole well worth tumbling down.