Both departure and summa, My Winnipeg is Maddin’s funniest and most Canadian film to date, a tribute to the hometown that has inspired and irritated him—in more or less equal measure—since he began making movies. A documentary of sorts, but primarily of the reality that is Maddin’s mind, the film has a ludicrous through line: the director (or his surrogate, actor Darcy Fehr, who also played “Guy Maddin” in Cowards Bend the Knee) rides a nighttime train, desperately trying to escape the city and its ghosts—and his mother, “a force as strong as all the trains in Winnipeg.”

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Pixar is not a studio to compromise on quality, at least as far as visuals are concerned. Their new WALL-E is expertly rendered; the CGI animation is breathtakingly realistic, arguably beyond anything we’ve ever seen from them, or anyone else. And to begin with, WALL-E presents a concept to match. The eponymous robot is a remnant among remnants. Some time in the future he was created to compact garbage; in the far future in which this film is set, humans have long since abandoned earth for a flotilla of corporatized life-support systems in outer space. WALL-E still goes about the task he has been programmed for on earth, however. He wheels between obelisks of trash, forever building, and goes home at night to a lonely bunker, where he watches the same scene from Hello, Dolly! over and over again on a beat-up television. It seems WALL-E, in addition to his industriousness, is an archivist, and an incurable romantic.

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Few directors could get away with making a film like Encounters at the End of the World, and Werner Herzog is one of them. The documentary is a lot like his others: a cinematic logbook, this time about his journey to Antarctica. It rests on Herzog’s cultivated Teutonic persona, expressed in a voice-over narration that makes everything he presents seem both fallacious and fascinating.

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For all Expelled’s asinine tautologies, one must concede a few things to its creator and smothering presence, anti-Darwinist Ben Stein. First, Stein is right to imply that scientists are not philosophers; to look to science for existential solace is, for most, a cold comfort. This is the primary oversight of Stein’s bête noire, Richard Dawkins, who, with his intellectual sanguinity, wants everyone to be capable of abandoning the irrational fear and hope that ties them to religion in favour of science’s perpetually unfolding world of facts. Second, Stein is not completely off in pointing to an ideological lineage connecting Darwin to eugenics and Nazism. The Nazis perverted the evolutionist’s ideas (they did the same to Nietzsche, Wagner and many others), but to completely divorce the two, as reactionary critics of Expelled have done, is inaccurate. It’s like saying Betty Friedan had nothing to do with Madonna.

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Before the Rains’ Henry Moores (Linus Roache) is a British developer in late-colonial India with ambitious plans to construct a road through the mountains. T.K. (Rahul Bose) is his indispensable assistant, and also a prominent member of a local Nayar community, which is just beginning to become swept up in the independence movement. T.K.’s flip-flopping is strained as he discovers an affair between Moores and Sajani, Moores’ maid, who is married to a brutish Hindu traditionalist. Then Moores’ wife arrives with their child, Peter, at the same time as Sajani’s husband begins to accuse her of infidelity, and a clash of wills and cultures follows.

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The Incredible Hulk washes away Ang Lee’s eccentric and despised Hulk (2003) and puts in its place a competent franchise. Audiences who enjoy blockbuster superhero films—the predictable yet engrossing plot arcs, the populist tropes of heroism and individualism—will connect with this reworking, which takes no risks yet gets the job done without any major guffaws. And comic book aficionados (who no doubt already know this) will be thrilled by The Incredible Hulk’s teasers, which tie its narrative to that of the recent Iron Man, predicting in-development Marvel Studios projects about Thor, Captain America and, eventually, The Avengers (the writer for which is slated to be Zak Penn, who wrote The Incredible Hulk along with lead Ed Norton).

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M. Night Shyamalan is the critics’ favourite whipping boy because his films represent everything that’s wrong with auteurism. His idol is Hitchcock, yet Hitchcock was an auteur of another era—one who worked with ideas and scripts he did not conceive himself, and hired actors who could contribute their own considerable charisma to his films. Conversely, Shyamalan’s execrable new The Happening falls apart because it is in its director’s fist; nothing escapes his smothering purview.

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Maggie, a.k.a. Irina Palm, the heroine of Sam Garbarski’s latest film, is a poor, 50-something widow who gets a job jerking men off at a London sex club in order to pay for her ill grandson’s operation. She is played by legendary singer and hard-liver Marianne Faithfull. Despite this—and against all logical principles of storytelling and moviemaking—Irina Palm is basically dull and humourless. It trusts the authenticity of its conceit, and squanders the talents of its lead, a woman famous for her wryness.

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Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol—nominated for an Oscar as this year’s Best Foreign Language Film—is being marketed in North America as a jolty, gory war epic à la 300 (2007), which isn’t quite accurate. The film is violent, as any recounting of Genghis Khan’s early career must be, but its commitment to stylization owes more to precedent than to contemporary video games (though it does indulge in the obnoxious recent trend of filming fights at high speeds, so that every drop of blood is discernible). Bodrov, who is Russian, seems sympathetic to the graphic inroads made by Soviet cinema: many choppy sequences echo Eisenstein or Bondarchuk; depictions of ancient ritual bring to mind those in Sergei Parajanov’s cult classic Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964).

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Planet B-Boy is a well-made look at the culture of B-boying, popularly known as breakdancing, across the world. The thesis of director Benson Lee’s (Miss Monday) film is that B-boying is a craft, a way of life—not a retro fad that just happens to have lingered on 30 years after its inception. The focus of the documentary is a recent Battle of the Year, full of enthusiastic international athletes who in many cases have given up a lot, or have overcome some kind of socio-economic adversity in pursuit of their dreams.

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