As the fourth instalment of one of the most successful franchises in movie history, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is intrinsically unsatisfactory. It tacks itself on to an internally sound trilogy that began and ended in the ’80s, one that spoke fluently and dynamically to a generation of filmgoers. That said, Crystal Skull has shrewdly anticipated its own awkwardness; it is a consciously strange entity, one as desolate and esoteric in concept as it is entertaining in construct.

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Local stage director Ed Gass-Donnelly has set his take on urban alienation and desperation in Queen West West, a decision that makes the mercurial neighbourhood a pivotal sixth character in this bleak five-person story. The characters’ worlds collide when Carol (Caroline Cave), a downtrodden architect’s wife, plunges from her condo’s balcony to the alley below, drawing coke-addled prostitute Pretty (Kristin Booth, who also stars in Young People Fucking), her boyfriend, Johnny (Aaron Poole), and cop Peter (Stuart Hughes) to the scene. Fast-forward three months later and Carol has survived, but now she must deal with her crumbling marriage to Harry (Noam Jenkins), who is consumed by the fact that he doesn’t know if she leaped or fell from their home.

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Matt Wolf’s new documentary on cult musician Arthur Russell, Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, comes on the heels of a wave of reissues and endorsements by Jens Lekman, Victoria Bergsman, and Joel Gibb of the Hidden Cameras. Thankfully, Wolf is not out to position Russell as seminal or hip, but to use the events of his short life (ended by AIDS, in 1992) as a testament to his subject’s quiet, unflagging dedication to his art.

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Those under the impression that vulgarity is the exclusive domain of the right wing need only watch the first few minutes of Morgan Spurlock’s new documentary, Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, during which a computer-generated Osama bops across the screen to the tune of MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.” Much more than Michael Moore, Spurlock is the left’s shock jock. He’ll do anything to get you to notice him and to prove a vague political point (such as stuffing himself with McDonald’s for a month, as he did in Super Size Me)—but once he’s got you looking, all he can think to do is another trick.

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Kari Skogland’s The Stone Angel resembles Sarah Polley’s Away From Her, and not just because it’s a film about dying and death. Both are based on acclaimed Canadian literary works, by Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro, respectively. Both are directed by women. Both use the woeful Can-film vernacular style: bland, conventional editing, lighting and shot composition; intrusive, homely sound design and scoring that is virtually indistinguishable from that of a television drama. And both have a veteran, non-Canadian lead who gives a tremendously moving and hard-won performance, but whose efforts cannot save her film from the mediocrity it courts.

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Son of Rambow is writer-director Garth Jennings’ cartoonish coming-of-age tale set in the 1980s, based loosely on his own forays as a youngster into amateur video filmmaking. His subject is little Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner), an odd one for the ’80s as Will is a member of the Plymouth Brethren—a cloistered evangelical sect that rejects the excesses of mainstream secular society and its popular culture. Presumably because of this enforced detachment, Will is a prolific daydreamer and creator; one day, while waiting outside class while other students watch a movie, he encounters troublemaker Lee Carter (Will Poulter). Lee rapidly immerses Will in heresy, among other things introducing him to First Blood, in which Will sees an inspiring, outsized male prototype to replace his recently deceased father. Lee soon recruits Will to help him finish one of his videos—a project that takes Will, and in turn his family, further away from the community in which they have found shelter.

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It doesn’t seem fair to give too much away about The Unknown Woman (La Sconosciuta), the new outing by Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore. Despite its flaws, the film depends so much on mystifying and terrifying its viewers that even the slightest spoiler could eradicate its considerable potency.

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When critics scoffed at Wong Kar-Wai’s English language debut My Blueberry Nights at Cannes last year, it was as much a pronouncement on the film itself as a troubled look inward. Could it be that the acclaimed director of such contemporary art house classics as Chungking Express, Happy Together and In the Mood for Love had finally revealed himself to Western cinephiles as a vapid stylist whose deliberately loose handling of plot, character and dialogue was sloppy, rather than inspired?

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One of the most interesting things about Standard Operating Procedure is how much it fails as an Errol Morris film. Morris is best at investigating situations, his superior works—the previous The Fog of War, and his breakthrough, The Thin Blue Line—building up tension and suspense like a John Frankenheimer thriller. Morris calls Standard Operating Procedure investigative, but in most respects it is not: there seems little mystery to what happened at Abu Ghraib. Indeed, the dread that comes from contemplating the phenomenon stems in part from its chilling familiarity; anyone who follows U.S. politics or, for that matter, has worked within a government bureaucracy or corporate hierarchy, can (in part) understand how this shameful horror might have transpired.

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“The best thing about Vegas,” says Kate Bosworth’s Jill near the beginning of 21, “is that you can become anything you want.” Such tacky jingoism may befit a young MIT whiz making millions at blackjack along with her professor and a crack team of student card-counters, but it can’t fuel a very good film about them. There is, indeed, little demystification of Vegas in 21. Main protagonist Ben (Across the Universe’s Jim Sturgess) has stars in his eyes pretty much from start to finish, and director Robert Luketic actually seems to think the place is glamorous. (Decadent, yes; sexy, maybe; but glamorous? Hell no.)

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As a film about a woman on the brink of 40—and as one directed by and starring a woman around that age, Helen Hunt—Then She Found Me can seem, by sheer virtue of its existence, unique, compassionate and smart. This is by no means unfamiliar territory, however. One finds it abundantly in popular contemporary fiction (Then She Found Me is loosely based on a novel by Elinor Lipman, using more clichés than even she would dare to). Its compassion is limited to its whiny subject; its smartness is for the most part hollow and quippy.

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