Total Recall

Is the new “Total Recall” remake as good as the original? No. It’s several times better. I have liked Ah-nold in certain action vehicles (“The Running Man”) and especially in the right kind of self-referential and self-deprecating comedy (“The Last Action Hero”), but let’s not mince words: With legendary German hack Paul Verhoeven (“Showgirls,” “Starship Troopers”) at the helm, the 1990 film was a mess.

Craigslist Joe, The Imposter

Craigslist Joe

The Imposter

Joe Garner’s documentary “Craigslist Joe,” about the month the Angeleno spent “living off Craigslist” – traveling the country depending for food and shelter on the kindness of online strangers – is an oddly inchoate, at times unintelligible picture. The project itself never takes coherent shape: Must he merely survive? Must he go anywhere in particular? Must he accomplish anything? Honestly, it feels like an excuse for a privileged Hollywood kid (his buddy Zach Galifianakis produced) to make his first feature. Having arrived at a few self-evident epiphanies, Garner tries to give the movie heft toward the end, but only lurches into the maudlin. His movie’s a bit of an embarrassment.

Celeste and Jesse Forever

Call it the Chodorow Inversion Principle: The more dialogue in a contemporary romantic comedy, the less amusing, clever and truthful it is. Example #4,291: the laugh-free zone “Celeste and Jesse Forever,” with writer-star Rashida Jones as the co-founder of a “trend forecasting” PR firm and Andy Samberg as the goldbrick artist she’s divorcing – but still goes out with every night and lets stay in her guest house. As they begin to date other people, they still talk to each other – nonstop – and the effect of all their cutesy-poo shtick on us is enervating.

Killer Joe

You won’t soon forget “Killer Joe.” It’s a loaded gun of a movie that fires itself straight into the collective American conscious, with a final scene as iconic and indelible as Glenn Close resurrecting from a bathtub in “Fatal Attraction” or Javier Bardem asking a store clerk to call a coin flip for his life in “No Country for Old Men.” In August 2012 in America, either you’ve seen “Killer Joe” or you haven’t, and if you have, you’re talking about it.

360

I’ll admit it. I’m the target audience for “360.” From “Grand Canyon” to “Short Cuts” to such Oscar bait as “Babel” and “Crash,” I’ve always been a sucker for any halfway decent interconnected-vignettes movie. Director Fernando Meirelles keeps this globetrotting picture spinning breezily along, with some lovely visuals and a must-have soundtrack. “360” doesn’t play with foreground and background as interestingly as, say, “2 Days in the Valley,” and none of the stories resonates much after the credits roll, but I enjoyed the one involving Anthony Hopkins, Ben Foster, and Maria Flor, and the performances are universally solid. "360" is a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, adult entertainment.

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

There’s a rumpled messiness, an unfinished quality, to both the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei and the biographical documentary “Never Sorry.” Ai rose to prominence in China by working within the system; the government even commissioned him to work on the Bird’s Nest given pride of place at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. But after the devastating earthquake that killed 70,000 in Sichuan province, including 5,000 schoolchildren, Ai gained international fame with his multimedia projects commemorating the young victims and implicating the state, with its poorly constructed schoolhouses, in their deaths.

The Well Digger's Daughter

I'm sorry to report that "The Well Digger's Daughter" is no "Jean de Florette" or "Manon des Sources." It's a big snooze. Director-star Daniel Auteuil puts some pretty pictures of Provence on the screen, but underlines them with such a blaring score, you can't enjoy them in peace. There are some nice supporting turns by the two men who vie for the affections of Auteuil's daughter, but she has no charisma whatsoever, and Auteuil, giving himself the lead, hams his way from here to Marseille.