I'm very pleased that my Cinematical colleague James Rocchi both enjoyed Speed Racer and published his review before mine, and here's why: I couldn't wait for the damn thing to end. This garish, aimless film wore out its welcome (and its crayon box) after about 25 minutes, but the cinematic eyesore just kept lumbering on for two full hours. I know it's tough to keep kids still in a movie theater even when they like the movie they're watching, so I can only imagine what parents will be dealing with as Speed Racer's merciless stretches of blah-blah-blah hit the screen. Aside from three or four mega-flashy racing sequences, Speed Racer feels like the pilot episode of a Fox TV series called The Generic Family from Plastic World.

A young man named "Speed Racer" grows up to become a hot-shot car racer (imagine that), but when he refuses to sign with an evil tycoon, it kick-starts a third-act conflict that can only be solved by ... car racing! There's the whole of your plot in a nutshell, but I've left out the resoundingly clumsy flashback structure, the nominally interesting but ultimately pointless side characters, and several absurdly "emotional" moments that might have made an impact if they didn't occur on sets made entirely of bright pink styrofoam and glitter. There's also an allegedly mysterious character called Racer X, a button-cute and entirely superfluous girlfriend character, and (wedged in clumsily whenever things get dull) a mischievous little kid and his monkey sidekick.

Or you could just go see Iron Man again.

The HBO-produced documentary film Baghdad High offers a fairly basic yet intriguing enough premise: The filmmakers gave video cameras to four Iraqi high school students and asked them to simply record as much of their "normal life" as possible. (I'm of the opinion that any time you give a teenager a camera, you're getting everything BUT "normal life," but obviously I'm not the first to claim that the act of recording something instantly obliterates "normalcy.") The point here seems to be that ... hey, you know what? Aside from the fact that they live very far away in a country that's going through some terrible problems these days, these teenagers are a whole lot like ... our teenagers! Wow, how shocking is that?!?!?

What's most interesting about these kids is that, despite the fact that they all live in Iraq, they also come from very different religious backgrounds -- and yet they're still friends! (Hope for the future sometimes comes in small packages, I suppose.) All four of the boys are perfectly charming and entirely typical: They whine about homework, they stress over studies, they gripe about being bored, they argue with their parents, and they do all the stuff that your favorite teens do: Video games, pop music, sports, rough-housing, etc. So far all its admirable intentions, the simple truth is that Baghdad High makes a very good point about the similarities of human nature (especially where teens are concerned), but then it just sort of ... keeps making the same point over and over.

The low-key Spanish import Fermat's Room falls into that (very small) sub-genre that I've just now designated as "math horror." (Vincenzo Natali's Cube also belongs in this group, and maybe even a few other movies that I can't think of right now.) This is a strange but engaging Spanish thriller in which four well-established mathematicians convene after receiving a mysterious invitation, and then find themselves trapped inside a shrinking room. The only way out is to solve a bunch of math riddles, but the biggest question is this: Why the heck is someone trying to kill four mathematicians in the first place?

Handsomely shot and boasting fine work from its five main only actors, Fermat's Room is the sort of mystery / thriller that will appeal to folks who enjoy a good mind-bender as much as they dig a good foreign flick. It's certainly not as bizarre (or nearly as bloody) as Natali's Cube, but I'm betting the films would make for a pretty interesting double feature all the same. And while some of the in-movie puzzles are relatively obvious (hell, they even borrow one from Jim Henson's Labyrinth!), the movie as a whole proves to be sort of a puzzle in its own right. The third act revelations might not be all that shocking, but they work well enough in the low-key context of the piece.

If Seven Days Sunday were an American film, it would probably be some sort of push-button "after school special" affair, one that underlines all its main points and closes with a predictably simplistic message: Violence is bad. But Seven Days Sunday is instead a small German film that aims to dramatize an actual event -- and it's pretty impressive how the filmmakers never once stop to "explain" anything away. Sometimes bad people do bad things, and generally all we can do is analyze the aftermath and hope to prevent future horrors. Period.

Adam and Tommek are a pair of aimless teenagers who spend their days mired in one of Germany's more uncomfortable blue-collar neighborhoods. Although he's supposed to be some sort of altar boy, Adam is much more interested in trying to impress tough-guy Tommek. There's a cute blonde neighborhood girl who certainly seems to hold a torch for Adam, but the two boys are too busy stealing wine and robbing the locals to pay much attention to mundane things like puppy love. (Tommek definitely wants a piece of the blonde for himself, but she seems more than a little turned off by his "extreme" ways -- at the beginning, anyway.)

Forget about all the fantastic action. Dismiss the disarmingly smart, wry screenplay, and ignore the phenomenal supporting cast. Feel free to overlook the dozen components that make Jon Favreau's Iron Man the most uniquely entertaining superhero movie in a long time ... I've got the one main reason that this flick is worthy of your two hours and ten bucks right here, and that reason is named Robert Downey Jr. Like many movie fans of my generation, I consider Downey to be sort of an old friend. We all wept when Jami Gertz noticed his odd demise in Less Than Zero, we loved watching his evolution in films like True Believer and Chaplin, and we all felt pretty great when the guy finally kicked his well-publicized drug addiction.

Downey is a survivor, no doubt, and he's also a refreshingly engaging actor to watch -- and boy was I thrilled when Marvel announced that this would be the guy to portray Tony Stark. To those who don't know the Stark character from the comic books, let me just make it clear: Downey is the perfect guy to play a smug yet charming, sarcastic yet likable, and perpetually womanizing multi-billionaire mega-genius with a bum ticker. We all know the guy can play sly, snarky, smart characters, so much of Iron Man's early stuff is light lifting for the actor -- but when he starts getting angry? Noble? Heroic? The guy is aces across the board. Bottom Line: Downey has paid his dues, he's been through a lot of hell, and now he's a freakin' superhero who delivers the best popcorn flick performance since Johnny Depp first played pirate. Sometimes Hollywood actually works.

It's rare that a good film will irritate me, but it happened at least fifteen times during the rather intense Brazilian import Elite Squad, and here's why: The film is saddled with an omnipresent voice-over narration from the main character, and this running commentary deflates, detracts, and nearly ruins every GOOD thing about the movie. Every time the viewer is offered a chance to think for himself, make a decision about a specific character, or draw a moral conclusion about the onscreen mayhem -- up pops the stunningly unnecessary voice-over monologue. After a while it starts to feel like the filmmakers simply don't trust your intelligence, and so they insist on explaining every scene, every theme, and every possible motivation the characters might have. It's a damn good thing that Elite Squad has some other very solid assets in its corner, because that narration almost kills the whole movie.

Based on the book Elite da Tropa by Andre Batista, Rodrigo Pimentel, and Luiz Soares, Elite Squad takes us inside two very different Rio de Janiero police units. On one end we have the "regular" police, most of whom are either sickeningly corrupt or simply ineffective. On the other side we have the BOPE, which is Brazil's ultra-elite unit of peace-keeping ass-kickers. Even the regular cops step to the side when the "elite squad" arrives on the scene, and it's the leader of this unit who becomes our entry point.

Dying Breed is to horror movies what your favorite sandwich is to meal-time. And by that I mean this: It ain't exactly new. If I described the plot like this -- four well-intentioned but ill-equipped young adults travel into a very dangerous part of the world only to become victims of something horrific -- you'd probably start yawning right about ... now. So on the surface, Jody Dwyer's Dying Breed is a pretty familiar affair. Having said that, it's still got quite a few more assets than many of its ilk -- plus it's actually kinda creepy, impressively well-shot, and really quite gruesome on several occasions. So while sure, it's a fairly familiar old sandwich, it's still a sandwich that was put together with some actual effort, which is nice.

A bit more specifically: Two young couples decide to trek deep into the island of Tasmania. One of the four is looking for A) a species of wild tiger that's believed to be extinct, and B) a few reasons as to why her big sister died in the area eight years earlier. Along for the ride are a boyfriend, a wise-ass, and the wise-ass' girlfriend. (I'm actually doing the actors a disservice by describing their characters that way. They're not exactly mega-deep characters, but all four of the young actors deliver some surprisingly strong work here.) The first stop is a pub that's pretty much crawling with sweaty inbreds and drooling perverts, but after one stressful evening the quartet hits the rapids in search of deepest Tasmania. And boy oh boy is something nasty waiting for them to arrive.

The vampire movie has been pretty much done to "death" by this point, right? Even the good vampire flicks are sort of treading over familiar ground, yes? Longtime fans of the undead bloodsuckers have more or less accepted that the sub-genre has become a fairly anemic wasteland, true? Normally I'd have to reluctantly agree with those assertions, but fortunately I caught a really excellent Swedish film this morning called Let the Right One In. Not only does this fantastic little import add a lot of new color to the "vampire flick," but it also turns out to be one of the strangest, stickiest, and (yes) sweetest horror movies I've seen in ten years.

Oskar is a lonely 12-year-old Swedish kid who gets picked on by bullies at school, but when a strange new girl moves in to the apartment next door, the pre-teens strike up a warm little friendship. Ah, there's one big problem though: Newcomer Eli (pronounced Ellie) only looks like a 12-year-old girl, when in fact she's a vampire of indeterminate age. Eli lives with what horror fans know as a "familiar," a guy who will go out and get his charge some plasma when it's needed -- which of course is pretty often. Eli does all she can to keep her vampirism a secret from her new boyfriend, but the closer they get -- the stickier things become. (And while there's just a bit more to the plot, I'm ending my synopsis right there. Wouldn't want to chance spoiling anything.)

(Note: This review contains slightly salty language. I tried to avoid it, but the movie at hand made it pretty much impossible. Comedies about pornography are funny that way.)

I know tons of film geeks who were big fans of James Westby's Film Geek -- but unfortunately I wasn't really one of them. That's not to say it's a rotten little indie, but I felt the flick had some real tonal inconsistencies, plus the lead character was an insufferable, unrealistic idiot. But I thought there was certainly enough there to remember Westby's name for when his next movie rolled around, and I'm glad I did. Westby's latest, a mockumentary farce about a legenday porno director, is called The Auteur. It's based on a short film the director shot a few years back, it features the same leading man (Melik Malkasian) found in Film Geek, and (while it definitely sags just a bit in the middle section), it's really, really funny.

Arturo Domingo considers himself the Stanley Kubrick of pornography (or as he pronounces it with a cartoonishly Italian accent: porno-graff-ee) and he's got the filmography to prove it: After hitting the big-time (and getting tossed out of USC) with a film called Five Easy Nieces, Domingo's career is rocking. Along with his regular leading man Frank E. Normo, Arturo bangs out money-makers like My Left Nut and Requiem for a Wet Dream -- but things start to fall apart on the set of the epic war porno Full Metal Jackoff. Turns out that in addition to being a visionary artist, a sex genius, and an on-set tyrant, Arturo is also an insanely jealous man: His career crumbles when he alienates his lovely wife one time too many.

Now here's an intentionally grungy and effectively low-budget horror flick that actually feels like it's been hidden in a vault for the last thirty years. Allegedly based on some actual documented events that took place deep inside Texas during the 1970s, The Wild Man of the Navidad is certainly nothing new under the horror sun, but it's an admirably rustic, respectably presented, and (eventually) rather spirited little terror tale.

Our semi-hero is a misfit named Dale Rogers, who putters around in Sublime, Texas, as a welder of some sort. Poor Dale has a very sick wife, a rather twisted best friend/roommate, and a ravenous man-beast roaming his acreage. But when Dale loses his job, he's forced to open up his land for deer hunting, despite the fact that he KNOWS there's a ravenous man-beast roaming his acreage. Toss in a few subplots about moonshine, spooky legends, and creepy perversions, and you've got a flick that would probably make for a good double feature with Sasquatch or The Legend of Boggy Creek. (If you remember either of those movies, then you'll probably dig this one.)

A horror flick that takes place in Afghanistan in November of 2001? Intriguing, to be sure, but I'll admit to being more than a little skeptical as I walked in to check out Daniel Myrick's The Objective. I was half-expecting some sort of run-of-the-mill occult thriller that got mixed with modern warfare ... just because it's a topical thing to do. Happily, those assumptions turned out to be completely wrong. Since it works much better as a bleak adventure flick and a very sweaty psychological thriller, it'd probably be inaccurate to label The Objective as an out-and-out horror flick -- but I enjoyed it anyway, which means that most of the other genre fans probably will too. Heck, how often do you get to check out a movie described as a wartime horror thriller sci-fi adventure drama?

Without spoiling anything, here's the gist: On the hunt for a contact who will direct him toward some "WMDs," CIA agent Ben Keynes has returned to Afghanistain after a ten-year absence, and it's there that he takes charge of a gung-ho, no-nonsense, bad-ass military unit. Keynes has a very shady assignment, but his new charges are on a need-to-know basis ... and suffice it to say that the CIA guy's secret assignment is, well, it's pretty frickin' weird. On the surface, though, Keynes and his new troop must head out into the staggeringly unforgiving desert, and it's there that their mission goes from mysterious to bad to a whole hell of a lot worse. Suffice to say that something not human is definitely involved, but our heroes will have to make it through some perfectly mortal enemies before discovering any secrets.

It's not very often that the "credits line" in a movie poster will cause you to look twice, but I was both curious and intrigued when I read that David Ayer, Kurt Wimmer and James Ellroy were collaborating on a movie called Street Kings. Ayer is a prolific screenwriter who digs cop stories (he wrote Dark Blue, Training Day, S.W.A.T., and The Fast and the Furious) and recently directed his debut effort: the seriously underrated Harsh Times. Kurt Wimmer, on the other end of the genre spectrum, is the writer / director of sci-fi flicks like Equilibrium and Ultraviolet. And James Ellroy? A very respected novelist making his screenwriting debut. (His works have spawned movies like L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia.) And weirdly enough, although Street Kings is very similiar in theme and content to Ayer's earlier works, he's not credited as a screenwriter. Just Ellroy and Wimmer.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty interesting, but that was before I spelled it all out in a large paragraph. Now I just realize it was a cheap way to kick off a review of a film I don't really have a whole lot to say about. As yet another tale of dirty criminals and even dirtier cops, Street Kings works well enough, albeit strictly in a "been there, seen that" sort of way. (Heck, if you've seen Training Day then you've already seen much of what this new film has to offer.) It's a well-constructed piece filled with colorful actors doing fine work -- but much of Street Kings offers that weird vibe that occurs when someone's in the middle of telling a joke you've already heard two or three times: The new presenter might be a fine joke-teller, but as a listener you're left with little response but to smile and nod politely.

It ain't high art and it sure isn't "brilliant filmmaking," but the arrival of Craig Mazin's Superhero Movie is actually a (small) cause for (minimal) celebration. And here's why: Over the last few years, the word "spoof" has become synonymous with the phrase "wretched non-movie." One need only pick through titles like Date Movie, Epic Movie, The Comebacks and Meet the Spartans to see that the spoof movie is one good place to hide if you're very lazy. Just about every movie freak I know was skeptical of Superhero Movie because they've been burned too often by this sort of schtick -- but I'm pleased to note that Superhero Movie actually represents a (slight) upswing for the oft-maligned sub-genre. It's sure as hell no Airplane! -- but it sure as hell isn't Date Movie, either.

Written and directed by Scary Movie(s) scribe Craig Mazin (and produced by two of the guys responsible for not only Airplane!, but Top Secret!, Hot Shots, and The Naked Gun, too), Superhero Movie is a colorful mixture of the old-school spoof style (thank god for Leslie Nielsen) and the more current crotch- and fart-addicted sensibility. It's very broad, very silly, very episodic, and frequently very sloppy, but (and here's a big but) Superhero Movie succeeds over many of its cousins for one simple reason: It's pretty funny.

When I refer to David Schwimmer's Run Fatboy Run as "a modern-day screwball farce," that's a nice way of saying it's outrageously predictable, unabashedly sappy, and completely formulaic through and through. You know where the movie is going from frame one, and it sure doesn't take a lot of detours getting there. But the phrase "screwball" probably wouldn't have come to mind if Run Fatboy Run wasn't at least a little bit funny. Which it is. So if you don't mind an amiable-yet-seriously familiar 90 minutes -- and you're a big fan of British actor Simon Pegg -- I'd have no problem recommending the flick. Even if I'd never come close to calling it something brilliant.

The effortlessly likable Simon Pegg stars as one of those lovably lazy sad-sack types that you only come across in comedic films: Despite the fact that he left his pregnant fiancee (Thandie Newton) at the altar five years earlier, Pegg's "Dennis" is one of those losers we love to root for. (How a doofus like this ever scored a catch like Thandie Newton -- and then abandoned her! -- is one of the film's sillier conceits.) So when his former flame's smarmy new boyfriend (Hank Azaria) mentions that he'll be running in an upcoming marathon, Dennis senses a shot at redemption.

"A guy can teleport."

That's the basic plot of Doug Liman's alternately dry and ridiculous new action thriller Jumper, and the film takes great pains to NOT introduce anything that might distract from that one paltry premise: One really uninteresting guy can teleport wherever he wants (including bank vaults, beaches, and the head of the Egyptian Sphinx) -- up until the day that a ferocious (but also ridiculous) villain shows up to ruin all the teleport-y fun. And then we get a half-decent chase, a bunch of hyper-kinetically edited action, and a sequel teaser. For a 90-minute flick that focuses on a guy who moves real quick, it sure doesn't move all that slick.

Frankly, I expect a little more creativity from Doug Liman at this point, who seems to be coasting on fumes after delivering rock-solid action flicks like The Bourne Identity and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Jumper feels like it was made with a test-screening audience in mind, and those who consider themselves fans of the source material -- a series of novels by Steven Gould -- will probably find themselves sorely disappointed in the movie version.

The screenplay (which was cobbled together by professional script surgeons Jim Uhls, David Goyer, and Simon Kinberg) feels like 11 or 12 isolated sequences that were simply lifted from Gould's books, regardless of how well they actually mesh together into one cohesive movie. Once the heavy-handed voice-over narration subsides ... just give up. The movie stabs wildly at a small collection of plot points, finds none to its liking, and then just keeps on chugging towards the end credits.