One of War, Inc.’s clearly identifiable inspirations is Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. This is not shamefully overambitious as much as it is a misstep: do we really need another Strangelove, one of the (forgive the sacrilege) shrillest, most tedious of movie history’s acclaimed political satires?

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There is a long tradition of grit in British narrative art, and even the most provocative and moving examples of this—from Dickens to Orwell to such realist filmmakers as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh—have a whiff of upper-middle-class sensationalism about them. London to Brighton has (unlike, say, the recent Red Road) none of Brit grit’s saving graces and most of its faults: it may be involving in parts, but it always feels smarmy and exploitative. It is just not successful enough as a film to justify the kinds of suffering it so insistently shoves in its audiences’ faces.

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Marjane Satrapi’s acclaimed graphic novel of the same name was a witty and moving account of her childhood and adolescence in the tumultuous Iran of the ’70s and ’80s. In this animated adaptation, Satrapi (and her co-director, comic book artist Vincent Paronnaud) loses none of the wit and emotion and, with the aid of legendary actresses Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux and Chiara Mastrioanni—who voice Satrapi’s mother, grandmother (the film’s most beguiling character) and the protagonist herself, respectively—further amplifies the drama and pathos. The animation, largely in black and white just like the comic, is deft and compelling, shifting from a Peanuts-like simplicity to a more sophisticated style that recalls the Hernandez brothers’ Love and Rockets. At the centre is Satrapi’s self-portrait of a politicized, freethinking girl whose progressive, loving parents have taught her all she needs to know in order to battle an unjust society.

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It’s phenomena like Bella that make critics feel disaffected and icky. How could such a film gain such incredible audience adoration? It was one of the top 10 highest-grossing independent films of last year, and won the People’s Choice Award at TIFF, where it was greeted with teary-eyed standing ovations. Still, at the risk of sounding misanthropic, anyone who adores Bella is a dimwit with horrible taste.

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If only Kenny were a documentary instead of a mockumentary—then it would be a truly astounding film. Even as is, though, this hit Australian comedy about an eponymous Melbourne porta-potty (or porta-loo) installer has its share of authentic, startling moments, owing mostly to its low budget, which forces filmmakers Clayton and Shane Jacobson to go on-location for many of their pivotal scenes.

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David Schwimmer’s big-screen directorial debut, Run, Fat Boy, Run, unquestionably belongs to Simon Pegg, its co-writer and star. Pegg, best known for his partnerships with Nick Frost in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, has a doltish, deer-in-the-headlights expression that belies a clever, cruel sense of humour. As Run, Fat Boy, Run’s Dennis Doyle, he animates a comedic cliché, the loser-underdog—in this case, a London slacker who leaves his fiancée, Libby (Thandie Newton), at the altar only to challenge her new boyfriend, Whit (Hank Azaria), to a marathon in order to win her back. Doyle doesn’t need an overhaul so much as a confidence boost: he’s got the right opinion about Whit (a showboating corporate shark who works in The Gherkin) and his attempts at training—which he does in vintage rock T-shirts and H&M undies—are brash, Cleesian parodies of the sport.

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Cao Hamburger’s The Year My Parents Went on Vacation deals with the primary subject (next, perhaps, to adultery) of foreign films that reach English audiences: coming of age. No one with the slightest interest in seeing the film should be surprised, then, by its positioning of a defining moment in a child’s life against a backdrop of political upheaval. Here, Mauro (Michel Joelsas), a young Brazilian soccer fanatic eagerly anticipating a Pelé-led victory at the 1970 World Cup, is dropped off at his grandfather’s apartment building by his parents. They tell him they’re going on vacation, but they are really trying to escape persecution from the country’s mounting military dictatorship.

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Denys Arcand’s Days of Darkness (L’Âge des ténèbres) is the end of a trilogy that began with The Decline of the American Empire and continued with The Barbarian Invasions. Like those films, it pitches itself as a scathing satire of contemporary Québécois society. Yet this recent outing is mostly about contemporary society in the entire developed world—perhaps about life as it has always been for critical, sensitive people—and is too crude and smug to be terribly scathing.

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Gus Van Sant’s fans, dwindling in number though they may be, like to enthuse about transcendent moments in his cinema—moments that to non-fans come off as plodding, hollow and, if beautiful young men are involved, unnecessarily and uncomfortably lecherous. Paranoid Park, the director’s latest, is patently his—all of his themes and tactics are here in droves, occasionally to the film’s detriment—but it goes a long way toward substantiating his fans’ claims.

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The paint-by-numbers American realism of David Gordon Green’s (George Washington, All the Real Girls) new ensemble piece, Snow Angels is, at first, endurable. Set in small-town Pennsylvania, the film introduces us to a familiar group of suffering white people: sexually awakened teenager Arthur (Michael Angarano), who is coping with the separation of his parents; Arthur’s old babysitter Annie (Kate Beckinsale), who now has a child of her own; her estranged, possibly psychotic, born-again husband, Glen (Sam Rockwell); and Barb (Amy Sedaris), whose husband, Nate (Nicky Katt), is having an affair with Annie. Dime-store literary devices, which are Green’s stock-in-trade, are everywhere—Arthur’s cold, emotionally unavailable father (Griffin Dunne) studies the sex life of plants; Arthur’s new girlfriend (Olivia Thirlby) wears vintage glasses, carries a vintage camera, and sees things for what they really are—but there is a certain momentum created by the characters’ brief, tetchy interactions. A handful of improvised scenes with Annie’s child Tara (Grace Hudson) are particularly noteworthy.

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Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! is such an effective, universal tale that it can be, and has been, spun any which way. Its tale of an elephant’s steadfast, verifiable belief in life on a tiny speck of dust (“A person’s a person, no matter how small” is the book’s famous moral) can be harnessed as allegorical propaganda for right or left, libertarianism or communism, god or science.

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The intended grittiness of Sleepwalking is instantly compromised by opening shots of a dark eyelinered, snakeskin-booted Charlize Theron, whose character’s name is Joleen, freaking out at a police station over her boyfriend’s recent arrest for marijuana possession. Then she gets into a car with her brother James (Nick Stahl), pulls out a cigarette, and begins alternating nicotine puffs with blasts from her asthma inhaler.

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