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A perfect storm of misguided homage and curdled auteurist tics, Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop manages the headache-inducing feat of both amplifying the Coen Brothers’ worst directorial tendencies and mixing them with the Chinese director at his most bombastically hollow. That the film is an adaptation Blood Simple, one of the Coen’s leanest and least mannered films, makes these accomplishments all the more dubious.

Though visual appeals to realism have long been used in horror, The Blair Witch Project was a breakthrough in its bringing a documentary aesthetic to mainstream horror, raising the stakes by introducing the witnessing presence of a camera. However savvy we may be in understanding the manipulability of images, docu-horror trades on our persistent belief in the photograph’s objectivity, distorting its truth claims to terrifying extremes. The Last Exorcism, like Diary of the Dead and Paranormal Activity, follows this premise . . .

The Milk of Sorrow could be accused of miserablism and, simultaneously, of false uplift, but it's always more complex and challenging than a simple synopsis would lead one to expect. Llosa has an eye for striking and beautifully framed compositions: that early shot of Fausta against the window; the image of her and her uncle at a wedding, separated by an "x" of white fabric; the overhead shot of Fausta pulling a wedding dress out over the body of her mother.

Rumor has it that the film rights to the life story of Jacques Mesrine, France’s most notorious and popular tabloid criminal, were first offered to Jean-Luc Godard, shortly after the subject’s violent death in 1979. Godard supposedly didn’t want to make a film about Mesrine, but rather one about an actor who wanted to play Mesrine. In a typically Godardian flight of fancy he had envisaged Jean-Paul Belmondo sitting in a chair reading Mesrine’s autobiography out loud to the camera and . . . well, not much else. Belmondo, unsurprisingly, told him to forget it. . . . After 243 minutes of film, spread over two parts, the audience for Jean-François Richet’s much heralded and decorated 2008 movie could be forgiven for wondering wistfully how Godard’s version might have turned out.

It is a departure for its director in the proportion of it that is assembled from outside footage, as many of the events it covers took place before its production, and much of the new footage is talking-head-type interviews (not that his first two features eschew outside materials; Fighter, in particular, makes beautiful, sometimes abstract use of archival photographs and films, for example in matched dissolves between locations as they looked when Jan and Arnost were young and as they looked when the film was being shot). He adapts deftly, though, without sacrificing any immediacy.

We get a lot of close-ups of women staring off wretchedly into the distance in Altiplano, the new film from the international directing and producing team of the Belgian Peter Brosens and American Jessica Woodworth that takes place in the Peruvian Andes. These pensive, painful visages belong largely to two main characters: the nobly plainspoken and simple Saturnina (Magaly Solier), an impoverished Peruvian woman preparing for marriage to the nobly plainspoken and simple Ignacio (Edgar Quispe), and Grace (Jasmin Tabatabai), a Belgian former war photographer whose eye-doctor husband, Max (Dardennes’ mainstay Olivier Gourmet), has arrived in the Andes to treat the natives.

As in most Western films that attempt to translate Chinese culture through the lens of their own touristic fascination, each dramatic turning point seems designed to echo catchwords like “honor,” “loyalty,” and “perseverance.” When the film reaches its half-assed political-thriller climax, in which Cunxin falls prey to the deceptions of an evil Chinese official who believes him a poor ambassador of Maoist ideology, it finally reveals itself as a B-movie mockery of the political intimidation that continues to oppress Chinese artists to this day.

Manoel de Oliveira’s Eccentricities of a Blonde Hair Girl, huggable at 64 minutes, occupies the filmmaker’s by-now familiar nether-Lisbon, in which lives are lived simultaneously in 1609, 1909, and 2009. Oliveira’s a filmmaker at which the adjective urbane could be lobbed equally as praise or slight depending on your tolerance for his scarily coherent (especially of late) body of work. And there aren’t too many surprises to be found within the scant boundaries of Eccentricities, except of course those inherent in any Oliveira film.

Aiming for a sensual slowness, Cairo Time is instead full of odd fits and starts. A brief, dreamy episode has Juliette donning a hijab and exploring a mosque on her own, and one wonders where the film might’ve gone from here if it instead explored the individual wanderings of a woman unexpectedly alone in a foreign country. When Tareq first takes Juliette on a boat ride on the Nile, you sense he does so out of obligation to his former colleague. But slowly, the movie stacks the building blocks of the relationship: the two share a hookah—Juliette’s first time—and play a game of chess, which inevitably lead to long walks around the marketplace and town. Music plays over postcard-pretty scenes; the pyramids gleam incredibly in the background.

The film is a minefield of on-the-nose “messages” about the horror and absurdity of war. A shady deal between Israeli soldiers and Muslim-hating Phalangists is struck in front of a gigantic poster of the World Trade Center; Shmulik deflates a conversation about death by telling a Saving Private Ryan–esque anecdote of hormonal adolescent hi-jinks involving his father’s passing and a consoling but arousing schoolteacher; a soldier who asks his C.O. to telephone his mother to tell her he’s okay meets a predictably ironic fate at film’s conclusion.

Typical of the writing and pacing in director Aaron Schneider’s film is a line from the funeral director’s assistant (played by Lucas Black), drawn out for so long that sighs from the audience are audible between his pauses: “You wanna be at your funeral. Party. Alive? But. You can’t have a funeral if you’re not. Y’know. Deceased.” This comes somewhere in reel three, after Felix (played by Robert Duvall) has twice pitched his request. The writing is where the trouble starts, but the story’s tiresomeness is also two parts Schneider’s fault. He edited the film as well, and the audience would be obliged if Schneider would trim all the laborious reactions by half.

While The Atomic Café darkly mocked Cold War fears with a found-footage barrage of “Duck and Cover” industrial films and tasteless pop culture detritus, Peter Watkins’s 14-and-a-half-hour television series The Journey engages the nuclear question from rare multiple perspectives: sociological, economic, psychological, environmental, and so on. . . . Of course, not all documentaries need be so exhaustive. But they should probably be more expansive than Countdown to Zero, which merely succeeds in scaring the living daylights out of the viewer.

Sally Potter’s marvelous 1992 film of this undeniably strange, altogether wonderful book now makes its way back to theaters after a digital restoration, and in a bleak cinematic landscape, this oddball film feels especially vital. While it’s decidedly unlike Woolf’s other most widely read novels (e.g., To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway), Orlando would also seem to be an unlikely candidate for cinematic treatment, though it feels unadaptable for altogether different reasons: a narratively dense, suspension-of-disbelief challenging fantasy, Orlando makes no excuses for its flights of fancy and contains an excess of plot.

If he were half the incisive social critic he thinks he is, one could make a case for Todd Solondz. In an age when such films as Little Miss Sunshine and Juno adjust their characters’ neuroses into palatable “eccentricities,” a healthy dose of authentically savage, dark humor would serve American independent film well in challenging liberal complacency and political correctness. Given the infrequent cinematic output of Terry Zwigoff, bitter, parodic, button-pushing misanthropy is rarely represented at the local art house. But Solondz has not helped fill the void. If anything, he precipitated it.

The filmmakers who have succeeded most spectacularly with dream imagery—Deren, Buñuel, De Palma, and those Lacanian jokesters Hitchcock and Lynch—have succeeded by finding ways to inscribe the inscrutable without fixing meanings. Even a career plodder like Wes Craven managed a moment of authentically groggy oddness when that lamb skittered through the school hallway in A Nightmare on Elm Street. The effect comes from the sense that figures and objects (and their attendant symbolic content) are entering the frame unbidden. Nolan’s mise-en-scène is too spotless for that . . .

In a perfect world, Pedro González-Rubio’s Alamar would be widely hailed and received as the movie of the summer. Escapist in the truest and least perturbing sense of the word, this conceptually gentle but artistically bold fiction-documentary hybrid takes viewers to a lush, vivid natural world—the second largest coral reef on the planet, the Banco Chinchorro to be exact, located in Quintana Roo, Mexico. It is in this serene place, never made overly picturesque or romantic by González-Rubio, that we grow acquainted with a father and son.

Eighty-seven-year-old Alain Resnais, still standing, still stubbornly modernist in his artmaking, puts all the swirling questions about the viability and sustainability of the U.S.’s lower-budgeted filmmaking into stark relief. Remove CNC and Canal+ participation for a moment . . . or, better yet, assume the U.S. provided similar cushions: who would be there to take state money and make our Wild Grass, an endearingly idiosyncratic, playfully risky, and formally rigorous statement of cinematic purpose?

While Restrepo is undoubtedly an important document, it may be too close to the experience of combat to adequately comment on the experience of this war. While I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of insightful war films being made in the midst of conflict, there’s a certain lucidity that comes with distance. As with The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987) or The Fog of War (2003), it sometimes takes decades for the truth to emerge, only once the dust has settled.