Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Alex Cox's Straight to Hell Returns, which showed in some theaters in 2010, is along the same lines as Apocalypse Now Redux, but on a different scale. It's the same as Straight to Hell (1987), but Cox did a little editing and added some more blood. When the movie opened in 1987, viewers may have expected something along the lines of Cox's previous original but more straightforward features, Repo Man (1984) and Sid and Nancy (1986). Instead they were treated with a deliberately weird, nonsensical modern-day Western; most people turned up their noses, or ignored it altogether.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***½

HBO's Ricky Gervais Show is basically an animated version of British comedian-actor-writer Gervais' hugely popular podcast--previously a radio show--and while calling it the funniest cartoon series ever based on a radio show/podcast may sound like damning with very faint praise, what's important is that it is indeed funny. Sometimes screamingly so.

(Sometimes screechingly so, if you count their running "Monkey News" segment.)

The premise of the show is simple: Gervais sits in a radio studio with his frequent cohort, Stephen Merchant (a frequent creative partner in crime, including co-writer and co-director of the UK Office and the series Extras, in which Merchant also appeared). They are joined by their producer Karl Pilkington, who Gervais dubs the "round-headed buffoon," and they chat and muse on various odd news, thoughts, history and so on.

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****½

I'm going to go even farther than my usual don't-spoil-the-movie commandment by saying damn little about the "plot" of Catfish, the one-of-a-kind documentary from first-time/full-length moviemakers Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost and starring Shulman's immensely photogenic and charismatic photographer brother Yaniv (also known as Nev).

I knew nothing about this movie when I attended a press preview, along with a full-house audience, a few weeks prior to the theatrical debut of the film. I suspected it might be a documentary, though I also wondered whether it might not be faux or mock. After a few minutes of watching, it certainly seemed real enough. And yet, in our prankish internet age, including this year's I'm Still Here, who knows? So I was prepared to go with it either way -- doc or narrative. But so quickly did I get wrapped up in this tale of a filmmaker and his friend who begin to follow the love life of the filmmaker's brother as it blossoms and evolves over the Internet that I soon did not care a whit whether the movie was real or fake. Either way, it was excellent -- and in my book that's what matters.

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

We look to the films of Agnès Jaoui -- The Taste of Others, Look at Me, and now Let It Rain (Parlez-moi de la pluie) -- for a kind of confirmation: the suggestion that life, however harried and bizarre, is full of marvelous little things, moments sad or sweet and often funny that quietly resonate. There are plenty of these moments in the writer/director/actress' new film. The husband in bed at the end of the day, feeling abandoned because his wife is reading; the French-Algerian young man who has decided to make a documentary and now must endure round-after-round of eyebrow-raising from the "French"; there's even a scene of characters getting high on pot that manages, against all odds, to break new ground.