"Hanging drywall?" Bobby says in disbelief. "Thanks, Jack, but I don't exactly see myself bangin' nails." He stalks away and Jack, seen only in silhouette against bright outdoor light, turns to his sister, Maggie (the wonderful Rosemarie DeWitt), and mutters quietly: "Your husband's such a dick."

Taken as a whole, "The Company Men" is about what you'd expect from an old-school TV showrunner: straightforward topical melodrama, with a throbbing social conscience, sympathetic characters, good actors and a script that regularly grabs a hammer from Jack's tool belt and attacks you with it, just in case you've wandered away from the theme. (In other words, it's a John Sayles movie in spirit, if not in fact.) Maybe it's the grouchy gravitas that Tommy Lee Jones projects and maybe it's the gouges and protrusions and rugged geography of his face, but as usual he gets to be the voice of the movie. Playing Gene McClary, a once-loyal V.P. forced out by evil CEO Jim Salinger (Craig T. Nelson), Jones not once but twice delivers sermons on the theme of "We used to build things in this country, dammit, and now it's all computers and big words and other pantywaist crap nobody can understand."

Wells dresses up the movie nicely with insider corporate-speak, gags about the horrendous "out-placement" centers where laid-off executives spend their days before hitting the bars, a few gratuitous shots of Maria Bello in her underwear, and some meaty marital drama between Bobby and Maggie, a sexy, ballsy gal whose working-class roots, it seems, have better prepared her for this vertiginous fall. A lot of this is compelling, after its didactic and heavily thematic fashion, but if you strip most of it away, along with Roger Deakins' handsome cinematography, you're left with the conflict between Jack and Bobby and something like "Shop Class as Soulcraft: The Movie."

Bobby really is an arrogant dick with a prodigious sense of entitlement, and he's got to go through an experience that's something like an alcoholic hitting bottom, or a religious conversion, before he can come back to Jack with the proper humility. Indeed, humping sheets of lumber and hanging drywall turns out not just to be a way to earn a crust of bread, but the key to renewing Bobby's family life and reinvigorating his marriage. Jack is revealed as not just a wiseass Boston carpenter looking out for his sister's family but a figure of almost Christ-like virtue and shamanistic power who connects Bobby to a realm of authentic masculinity and sexual potency, one from which he had been separated by money and possessions and education and the lust for power.

I don't mean to suggest that the tale of Jack and Bobby, and the underlying myths about manhood and work and self-reliance, have no power for me. Quite the opposite: Life in contemporary America is defined, to a large extent, by our anxiety about the fact that we can no longer do things for ourselves. We buy machines we do not understand and throw them away when they stop working in a year or two; we have outsourced the heavy manufacturing jobs to the Far East and the distasteful, low-wage jobs to immigrants.

As ham-fisted as Wells' dialogue is through much of "The Company Men," the phenomenon he describes is real. I can't imagine an American of any political orientation who wouldn't be affected by the idea that our country has lost something it can never get back. And we have all discovered how fragile an economic boom based on intangible, invisible products can be. Of course there are still millions of working-class Americans who actually make or build or repair things. But as that population has grown smaller and more socially insular, those people sometimes seem like symbols or avatars or objects of erotic fascination to the rest of us. (Remember the media's short-lived romance with "Joe the Plumber" during the 2008 campaign?)

Costner plays Jack Dolan as a likably crusty character, but within the larger context of "The Company Men" he's unmistakably a sentimental creation, and almost a supernatural being. Instead of the Magical Negro archetype found in way too many movies about white people in need of soulful healing, Jack is the Magical Working-Class Guy, whose work ethic and tough love replenishes all the spirit that was drained out of Bobby by living in a million-dollar house and driving a Porsche. I recognize that it's mean-spirited and unfair to wonder whether John Wells, for instance, plans to give up his nice house and his Hollywood career in favor of carpentry. More to the point, it's Wells' assumption that the Jack Dolans of the world are necessarily happier than the Bobby Walkers -- and that working-class white men who earn a so-called honest living are somehow exempt from the clammy, nostalgic psychosis that pervades American life from top to bottom -- that seems like magical thinking.

On one level, Jack is just another of the working-class characters Hollywood has fetishized and/or patronized over the years, from Chaplin's "Modern Times" to "Norma Rae" to Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino" -- a representative member of a group the culture-making elite fears, envies and yearns to identify with, all at the same time. But Jack has no idea how lucrative his skill set has become in the age of craft-chic. If his business is failing, it's only because he doesn't yet understand how many earnest college graduates on the other side of Boston (or in Brooklyn or Austin or San Francisco) are aching for his guidance. Maybe, like a famous carpenter of an earlier age, he should give up building houses and gather disciples.

"The Company Men" opens Jan. 21 nationwide.

That's just the first of numerous sight gags in Hans Petter Moland's film "A Somewhat Gentle Man," which I truly and honestly believe is one of the funniest movies I've seen in years. If you suspect that says more about me than about the film, you might be right. I'm exactly the sort of evil bastard who finds disproportionate delight in a Scandinavian black comedy that suggests both the Coen brothers' "Fargo" and the grim fables of Finnish minimalist Aki Kaurismäki. Still, maybe you're the kind of person who grooves to the dark humor of the northlands yourself, and I'm more than happy to defend "A Somewhat Gentle Man" as a pitch-perfect blend of darkness and sweetness, built around a masterful performance by a great actor.

If you don't recognize Skarsgård's name, you'll definitely recognize his face; he's one of those European actors who's a superstar in his home country (which is actually Sweden, not Norway) but has made a terrific living playing villainous and/or comic roles in Hollywood. Maybe you've seen him on "Entourage," or in "Mamma Mia!" or as Bootstrap Bill in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise. He's been a regular in Lars von Trier's films, played Matt Damon's professor in "Good Will Hunting" and played both anti-Nazi hero Raoul Wallenberg and Nazi sympathizer Wilhelm Furtwängler (not in the same film). I won't pretend to have seen even half his film roles, which encompass at least five languages and six countries, but if the brooding, baffled Ulrik isn't his best performance it's definitely up there.

Moland is more like a director of commercial films than art-house obscurities, at least by Norwegian standards, and while "A Somewhat Gentle Man" has the look and feel of downscale, kitchen-sink realism, it's a lot warmer and nuttier than it seems at first. (Moland has directed Skarsgård twice before, in the thrillers "Zero Kelvin" and "Aberdeen.") We know almost nothing about Ulrik or his life as he takes his first steps into freedom, except that he has an ex-wife and an adult son who both claim they want nothing to do with him (although their actions suggest otherwise). He owes some kind of debt -- financial or moral or tribal -- to a paunchy mob boss named Jensen (Bjørn Floberg), who presides over a dismal suburban diner and bosses around a moronic flunky named Rolf (Gard B. Eidsvold), but whose imperial power seems seriously diminished.

Ulrik apparently exudes some serious prison-house pheromones, because womenfolk can't keep their mitts off him. Not his seriously scary landlady (Jorunn Kjellsby, in what may be the greatest of several scene-stealing deadpan performances) -- who makes a delicious fish pudding and expects payment for it, if you know what I mean and I think you do -- not his bitter ex-wife (Kjersti Holman) and not Merete (Jannike Kruse), the blond German girlfriend of his boss who serves as this movie's low-budget femme fatale. "A Somewhat Gentle Man" contains several of the most hilarious sex scenes ever committed to film, and through it all Ulrik is simultaneously wide-eyed and stone-faced. (He seems to enjoy eating while in flagrante delicto.) Somehow Skarsgård manages to convey the fact that this man, raised in a culture that devalues emotion and then hardened by crime, is going through an internal transformation he can neither understand nor express.

Ulrik's droll odyssey through downwardly mobile suburban Oslo also involves a foulmouthed Lappish arms dealer (with a smartass dwarf underling), a Norwegian salsa cover band and our eventual realization that his past misdeeds -- and present-day debt to Jensen -- are much worse than we thought. Still, this is the kind of movie where things are always darkest before the dawn, and a chance meeting with his son's hostile but very pregnant girlfriend (Julia Bache-Wiig) offers Ulrik a totally unexpected chance for redemption.

Everything about "A Somewhat Gentle Man" is so subdued and precise, from Philip Øgaard's cinematography to the brilliant score by Danish composer Halfdan E (constructed around half-buried bits of rock, pop and country hits) to the performance by Skarsgård that tells us nothing but shows us everything to the easily misremembered title (this isn't "A Serious Man" or "A Single Man" or "A Man for All Seasons"), that I don't really expect American audiences to cotton onto how rich and funny it is. Still, Moland and screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson's ruthless treatment of their country's frozen landscape and repressed people can only be rooted in love, and by the end of the film that prison guard's advice (along with his bottle of aquavit) definitely comes in handy.

"A Somewhat Gentle Man" opens Jan. 14 at the IFC Center in New York and Jan. 28 at the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles, with other cities to follow.

The Green Hornet, after all, is a masked crime-fighter whose career began on Depression-era radio, at the very dawn of American superhero drama. He predates both Superman and Batman, and unlike them belongs largely to the past. Since the short-lived TV series of the mid-'60s, which starred a young Bruce Lee as Kato, the Hornet's Asian sidekick, the character has made only sporadic appearances in niche-oriented comic books, and none at all in mainstream pop culture. Who better than Gondry, a filmmaker fascinated with obsolete technology, handmade special effects and the trappings of early modernism, to bring this three-quarters-forgotten vigilante into the 21st century?

Well, nobody, which is why Gondry has been attached to "The Green Hornet," on and off, since the movie was first conceived (as a George Clooney project!) in the late '90s. (Along the way, Kevin Smith and Stephen Chow also took turns not directing it.) But that evades several important questions, including whether it was worth rescuing the Hornet from the dustbin of cultural history in the first place, whether Gondry's talents are in any way suited to making expensive 3-D studio flicks, and how much you really want to watch Seth Rogen as the hero of an action movie. Yes, once upon a time the Green Hornet was going to be Clooney and now it is Rogen. That really says it all, good and bad, and I can just stop here.

OK, I won't. Since you said please. Given the general air of doom surrounding "The Green Hornet" -- including the fact that it was once planned as one of last summer's big releases, and here it is in the frozen junkyard of January -- I'm pleased to report that the movie is entirely watchable and often pretty fun, in a mishmashed, patchy kind of way. Put that on your poster, Columbia Pictures!  Furthermore, it's too facile to suggest that the problem is too much Rogen and not enough Gondry, because "The Green Hornet" is weird, half-baked and not entirely satisfactory in ways that belong to both of them. Still, I'm going to say it anyway. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in feeling that Rogen can be hilarious in modest doses, but having him play the meathead party boy who inherits his dad's newspaper and then goes, I quote, "balls-deep into shit-kickin' dudes" and having him co-write the screenplay (with Evan Goldberg) is a whole lot of not-quite-self-mocking-enough dudealicious humor for one motion picture.

Rogen's Britt Reid is an unrepentant booze-swigging, hottie-shagging degenerate who abruptly decides, after the unexpected demise of his upright but standoffish dad (Tom Wilkinson), to pair up with Pop's ace mechanic, chauffeur and barista and bring down the crime lords of L.A. by pretending to be one of them. No, really -- this decision takes about a minute, and seems predicated on the sudden-blooming bromance between Britt and Kato (Taiwanese actor and pop star Jay Chou), a slender lad who favors form-fitting designer threads and an early-'90s boy-band haircut. At least the homoerotic undertones of "The Green Hornet" are played for laughs. Gondry and Rogen never successfully deal with the inescapable fact that Kato is Britt's servant, and that the Hornet gets all the credit for Kato's considerable ass-kicking skills. The two of them spar halfheartedly for the affections of Lenore (a likable but irrelevant Cameron Diaz), but like a lot of unraveled threads in Rogen and Goldberg's script, that goes nowhere.

Most of the way "The Green Hornet" is an unstable and largely nonsensical mixture of juvenile guy humor and indiscriminate violence, dominated by Rogen as a cuddly, overconfident idiot who's just this side -- or maybe just the other side -- of being an unredeemable douchebag. Gondry and his production design team contribute a bunch of awesome-looking gizmos and gadgets, including Kato's Black Beauty, an elegant, 1950s-style street rod outfitted with machine guns, missiles, bulletproof glass and a chameleon-like ability to change color. Christoph Waltz, the German actor who won an Oscar last year for "Inglourious Basterds," pretty nearly steals the whole movie by radically underplaying as Chudnofsky, an insecure supervillain concerned that he no longer scares anyone. (Waltz's introductory scene, in which he terrifies an uncredited James Franco, is worth the price of admission all by itself.)

I'm pretty well convinced that Gondry is damaging his immortal soul by using 3-D (unless he can convince himself that it's actually 1950s, "Dial M for Murder"-style 3-D), but I'm damned if he hasn't gone ahead and made one of the better 3-D pictures of the post-"Avatar" wave. Cinematographer John Schwartzman's images of nighttime Los Angeles are crisp and clear, and Gondry creates two marvelous ultra-slo-mo fight sequences for Chou's Kato, along with a couple of imaginative montages that challenge anyone's use of the medium. In one of them, the crime-movie convention of a citywide manhunt becomes a delightful mosaic of rapidly multiplying tiled images, each at a different position in our field of vision.

But the special effects and action sequences in "The Green Hornet" are run-of-the-mill Hollywood fare; there are only snatches, here and there, of the DIY, handmade aesthetic that dominated Gondry's films from "Human Nature" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" through "Be Kind Rewind." I'm pretty sure that a terrific Gondry "Green Hornet" was possible, and let's assume, if purely for the sake of argument, that a Rogen "Hornet" could have been really good too. But they shouldn't have tried to make one together, and the general impression you get is that they bored the living crap out of each other. I'm guessing that Rogen had no interest in Gondry's odd and specific design aesthetic, and Gondry made no effort to tone down Rogen's anarchic and asinine combination of yucks and violence. The result is perfectly fine as midwinter time-wasters go, but will go down in movie history with all the pathos and resonance of yesterday's newspaper.

I'm not being willful or contrarian or anything -- it's just true. Of course Eisenstein was a fervent supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, who hoped his story about a fabled 1905 uprising by sailors in the Tsarist navy would inspire the oppressed of the earth to throw off their chains and hoist the red flag (hand-tinted in this version, as at the Moscow premiere). But that context was a lot less important than he assumed at the time, and "Potemkin's" immense cultural impact has almost nothing to do with its purported politics. (The young Joseph Goebbels, whose ideology ran in a different direction, praised the film extravagantly.)

Like other Marxist thinkers and artists of his time, Eisenstein believed that political revolution demanded a revolutionary aesthetics and a revolutionary cinema. He thought his radical innovations in camerawork, composition and (most of all) the quick-cut editing he called "montage" were part of a global shift in mass consciousness, and he was right about that part. Presumably he never imagined that his aesthetic revolution would conquer the world, divorced from the ideology that had inspired it, while the Soviet experiment in social reinvention would become a cruel and miserable failure.

According to film historian Bruce Bennett, "Battleship Potemkin" was personally imported to the United States by silent star Douglas Fairbanks and screened privately for film-industry luminaries on both coasts during the summer and fall of 1926, beginning with a bedsheet projection at Gloria Swanson's house in New York. "Nobody went Bolshevik," quipped a columnist for Photoplay magazine at the time, "but a lot of people left with some revolutionary ideas of filmmaking." It's safe to say this was one of those collisions that changed the course of cultural history. Has there been a year since the late '20s when Hollywood didn't produce multiple imitations of "Battleship Potemkin"?

I'm not so much talking about the most obvious kinds of film-school homage or quotation or rip-off, although the terrifying massacre staged by Eisenstein on the seafront steps of Odessa has been repurposed any number of times, from Brian De Palma's "The Untouchables" to George Lucas' "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" to "Naked Gun 33 1/3." It's more that "Potemkin" pioneered what became a staple Hollywood genre, the heavily fictionalized, inspirational retelling of historical events, built around easily recognizable archetypes of good and evil. Even more than that, Eisenstein's montage technique, which builds both tension and momentum through the rapid counterpoint of different images, different camera angles and different points of view, became the model for all future action and suspense cinema.

Any rerelease of an influential classic always raises at least two questions: Can we still see, through the scrim of history, what originally made the movie seem important? And is it still capable of engaging or entertaining us on its own terms? "Battleship Potemkin" may face some of the same problems with viewers as, say, "Citizen Kane" or Godard's "Breathless" or Bergman's "Persona," in that what was once revolutionary about it now seems part of our universal vocabulary. I expected this newly restored version of Eisenstein's 1925 Russian cut (never seen outside the Soviet Union), the result of almost 20 years of work by film scholars Enno Patalas and Anna Bohn, to be visually impressive, and it certainly is. But I was startled to find myself spellbound by it from beginning to end.

With Eisenstein's 146 text intertitles -- which he conceived as musical or percussive elements -- carefully restored and a newly recorded version of composer Edmund Meisel's score, "Potemkin" no longer seems like a faded relic of Soviet agitprop but becomes a gripping anti-authoritarian melodrama. There's not much acting or characterization in the modern sense; beefy Bolshevik sailor Vakulinchuk (Aleksandr Antonov) strikes heroic poses, while villainous officer Giliarovsky (Grigori Aleksandrov) snickers through his mustache. (Arguably Hollywood's principal improvement on Eisenstein's model was the addition of the star system.)

But the brilliantly mounted early scene in which the ship's commander orders the mutinous sailors -- who have refused to eat borscht made with maggot-infested meat -- to be covered in canvas and then shot had me on the edge of my seat. A crazy-haired Orthodox priest, emerging from the shadows like a crucifix-carrying ogre, calls out for the rebels to accept God's punishment, and some of the condemned men drop to their knees in terror, shrouded by the immense sheet of sailcloth. Exuding the smug, self-satisfied sadism of power, Giliarovsky orders the ship's guards to raise their weapons and prepare to shoot: "Fire into the canvas." And then, at the last possible moment, Vakulinchuk steps forward to strike a blow for proletarian consciousness: "Brothers! Who are you shooting at?"

Eisenstein's mournful, haunting shots of the Odessa waterfront after Vakulinchuk's death, which is the only section where the film engages a contemplative mode, lead us into the Odessa Steps sequence. I felt as if I were seeing that for the first time. Freed from all the imitation and parody, it's both a breathtaking technical exercise and a wrenching glimpse of human suffering set against the cruelty of history. The mother with her dying toddler, the old woman shot in the face, the runaway baby carriage -- Eisenstein could never have believed that the revolutionary regime he supported would itself commit crimes like these, and worse.

But the tragic historical irony surrounding "Battleship Potemkin" does almost nothing to undercut its power, and like all good political art it cannot be contained by politics. Eisenstein used all the tools at his disposal, inventing new ones as he went along, to engage our passions and emotions first and foremost. He was an artist and a showman more than he realized, and perhaps more than he wanted to be. The young David O. Selznick, who would make "Gone With the Wind" 13 years later, urged his MGM colleagues to study "Battleship Potemkin" as "a group of artists might study a Rubens or a Raphael." And anybody who thinks that either Eisenstein or Selznick would be horrified by contemporary Hollywood is kidding themselves. If 3-D had been feasible in 1925, I guarantee that baby carriage would be whizzing off the screen right at your head.

The new 35mm restoration of "Battleship Potemkin" opens Jan. 14 at Film Forum in New York, with other cities to follow. This version is also available on DVD and Blu-ray from Kino International.

 

Elia Suleiman's beautiful film "The Time That Remains" is both a musical construction and a work more concerned with form, light, sound and music than with what its characters say or do. In other memorable scenes, we witness a major character dying (or falling asleep; it's not entirely clear) in the passenger seat of a car while an Arab pop song plays on the radio, and hear a heartbreaking karaoke version of "My Heart Will Go On," sung by a Filipina healthcare worker to an unconscious old lady and a cop. Stuff like this may frustrate viewers who expect an autobiographical movie from a Palestinian director (or an Arab Israeli director; pick your terms) to strike an ideological stance -- to express rage over the expulsion of Arab villagers, or contrition for terrorist attacks, or whatever.

Suleiman is not remotely interested in those kinds of positions, but as the scene I've just described should make clear, that doesn't mean he has nothing to say about the relationship between Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land. Arguably the whole movie is about that subject, as experienced by one middle-class Arab Christian family in Nazareth -- the hometown of That Guy, today a predominantly Arab city inside Israel -- but stripped bare of the vitriol or rhetoric that we've all heard a million times and that has lost the ability to convince anyone of anything.

While "The Time That Remains" is a narrative film, not a documentary, it is closely patterned on Suleiman's family history and is largely shot in the actual houses and apartments where his family lived. The director even plays himself, late in the film -- or at least a version of himself as a bug-eyed, Buster Keaton-style silent observer, a returned exile who views his country with a mixture of wonder and disbelief. (Suleiman himself has lived outside Israel for three decades, and now teaches at Birzeit University on the West Bank.) The character called Elia never speaks, either as a child, a teenager or an adult, and I'd be lying if I said that absolutely never feels gimmicky. But it's right in line with the film's premise that language is inadequate to convey the ambiguity and pathos of this family's situation.

In cool, elegant compositions that take full advantage of the fabulous light of the eastern Mediterranean, Suleiman and cinematographer Marc-André Batigne capture the family's life from the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 through the present as a deadpan farce, one in which all parties repeat the same gestures over and over again to the point of meaninglessness. Elia's handsome father, Fuad (Saleh Bakri), the mayor of Nazareth's son and a one-time gunsmith for the Arab militias, goes fishing on the beach every week, and gets hassled every time by the same semi-genial Israeli patrol. A depressed neighbor periodically pours gasoline over his head and tries to set himself on fire, until the bored Fuad comes and takes the matches away. (The neighbor's hilarious anti-Israeli diatribes are too profane even to transcribe on Salon.)

Elia's mother (Samar Tanus) writes wistful letters to her cousin in Jordan, thereby imparting most of the film's narrative. We brush past most of the so-called major events of Arab-Israeli history without even noticing; the wars of 1967 and 1973 and the two intifadas are never mentioned, although the death of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970 marks a major episode. Young Elia is periodically pulled out of class in his all-Arab, Hebrew-language school and hectored by the principal: "Who told you that America is imperialist? You can't say that in school!" (I can feel you out there hankering for editorial comment: "We were second-class citizens in an apartheid system!" Or maybe "Citizens of Arab countries have far fewer rights than Arab citizens of Israel!" Sorry, there isn't any of that.)

Suleiman might or might not appreciate me saying this, but his movie (officially a French-Belgian-Italian coproduction) falls very much into the rueful, ironic tradition of recent Israeli cinema, from Amos Gitai's "Free Zone" to Eran Riklis' "The Syrian Bride" to Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani's "Ajami." Suleiman isn't trying to score political points, and his depictions of Jewish Israeli characters are studiously neutral or even sympathetic. (He uses a Tel Aviv cab driver lost in the fog as a mysterious but effective framing device). He reserves mockery for his own side, depicting the Arab fighters of 1948 as disorganized and cowardly (his dad excepted), and the Arab community of Nazareth as a bunch of sentimental blowhards and wiseass louts. Like the best Israeli filmmakers -- or the best filmmakers, period -- Suleiman is also trying to look through the conflict to human reality, and to find in the story of his own family's disintegration the universal pathos and tragedy of the parent-child relationship.

If the old showbiz cliché holds that comedy is tragedy plus time, Suleiman seems devoted to the idea that it's tragedy plus space. Time and again in "The Time That Remains," Batigne's camera retreats from the action, whether that's a man being beaten by Israeli soldiers (almost the only act of violence in the entire movie) or an old woman watching fireworks from her balcony. It's as if he's reminding us that the geometry and light, the gorgeous days and clear nights, will be the same in this beautiful country no matter who lives and who dies, or whichever tribe is in control. There are a dozen shots in this movie, maybe two dozen, that will stick with me for the rest of my moviegoing life, and if you have the patience for the semi-abstract musicality of this tragic family odyssey, the eventual emotional payoff is tremendous. The soldiers and the club kids getting down, together yet apart. It's a hell of a film to start the year with.

"The Time That Remains" opens Jan. 7 at the IFC Center in New York, with more cities to follow. It is also available on-demand, via IFC In Theaters, from many cable and satellite providers.

I'll update at least once a week. New additions are always marked accordingly.

1. A Somewhat Gentle Man new!

   Director: Hans Petter Moland
   Starring: Stellan Skarsgård, Jorunn Kjellsby, Bjørn Floberg, Jannike Kruse

2. The Time That Remains

   Director: Elia Suleiman
   Starring: Saleh Bakri, Samar Tamus, Elia Suleiman, Isabelle Ramadan

3. Barney's Version new!

   Director: Richard J. Lewis
   Starring: Paul Giamatti, Rosamund Pike, Dustin Hoffman, Minnie Driver, Scott Speedman

4. If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle

   Director: Florin Serban
   Starring: George Pistereanu, Ada Condeescu, Clara Voda

5. The Company Men new!

   Director: John Wells
   Starring: Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Costner, Chris Cooper, Rosemarie DeWitt

6. The Green Hornet new!

   Director: Michel Gondry
   Starring: Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Christoph Waltz, Cameron Diaz

7. The Dilemma new!

   Director: Ron Howard
   Starring: Vince Vaughn, Kevin James, Winona Ryder, Jennifer Connelly

8. Season of the Witch

   Director: Dominic Sena
   Starring: Nicolas Cage, Ron Perlman, Stephen Campbell Moore, Claire Foy