The strongest recommendation I have regarding Spurlock’s latest film is: beware the bait-and-switch. If you come into this film expecting to learn a dang thing about the actual living-and-breathing man named “Osama Bin Laden,” you’re going to the wrong movie… and you might leave pretty ticked at how you’ve been fleeced of your ten or twelve bucks (plus refreshments). If, however, you go in properly prepared to witness a goofily gentle travelogue—think, maybe, of something like Michael Palin crossed with Michael Moore, or Rick Steves crossed with Mike Rowe—that only pays lip service to searching for the Big Baddie, then you might do all right with this lighter-than-cheese-puffs com-e-doc.

What a dark, dark film is Street Kings… and, for its type, pretty entertaining too. Yes, this is yet another tale of police corruption—one that finds a certain loveliness in the battle between evil and less evil. So when an argument arises between “good can come from bad” and “bad breeds more bad,” the latter can’t help but win. Even when it seems that director David Ayer’s imagery is telling us that an innocent man’s death will somehow result in the betterment of the country, we’re still left with an abiding conviction at film’s end that one character’s assessment is ultimately accurate: “You hate me, but you need me.” Surely someone out there is protecting and serving without being dirty. Surely.

Bob Cilman, musical director of the Young @ Heart chorus, is pleased that the film named after his group is bringing the talents of these post-retirement-age singers to a new audience. While the singers are in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, Cilman has observed that the audiences tend to be on the “younger” side. Courtesy of a local publicist, I had the chance to talk with Cilman over the phone about the group, the film, and his own background. Neither a musical documentary nor a film about music itself, Young @ Heart, is about the people making the music, about the sacrifices they make, about living and dying with pride and hope, and about connecting with others. Says Cilman, “It’s all about uniting people.”

With Lawrence and Vanessa being sympathetic characters only in who they become but not who they are, all of their scenes come off as oddly slack because they aren’t three-dimensional. By only allowing them a third dimension under Chuck’s influence, the film often feels like a parade of cut-out paper smart-dolls. Worse, by playing all the smartness for smugness, even the smartness is robbed of its wit. A movie called “Smart People” ought to remind us of All About Eve. A movie that merely reminds us of smart people we resent ought to be called “Smug People.” The effort here is competent enough; but the film simply should have been called something else.

Like Teeth a few months ago, Sex and Death 101 has enough demographic-targeting salacious content to leave non-demographics squirming in their seats; and yet, like Teeth, this film also seems intent on being a cautionary tale. It’s an intriguing but oddly unsatisfying and off-putting mix. Basically, there are two ways to approach this movie. If you prefer a rather interesting look at death-with-dignity that espouses marital monogamy (with a lot of bouncing boobs and hip thrusts thrown in), you might just find these two hours amusing. If, on the other hand, the bouncing and thrusting are your idea of a good main course, you’ll probably be disappointed to be left with quality-of-life musinga over haute cuisine and true (but fully-clothed) love.

In The Visitor, long-time character actor Richard Jenkins plays Walter Vale, an emotionally-repressed professor and widower who discovers life and love through a chance encounter with illegal Syrian immigrants in Manhattan. The film is about numerous things: music, change, the ways in which “home” can become an alien place; and how being a visitor allows you to see things in a new light. Courtesy of a local publicist, I spent about twenty minutes in a downtown Seattle hotel suite chatting with Jenkins about a wide variety of topics, from his favorite experience on stage to his two-scene role in Silverado. It was a fun talk, as Jenkins has had a long and colorful career on the stage and screen.

“On a movie, everybody knows how to make a script better,” says Expelled screenwriter Kevin Miller. “But nobody can tell a director how to make a movie better. You’re definitely on the bottom of a dogpile. That’s the life of it. I used to tell writers, ‘That’s not you on the page, so if they’re criticizing what you’ve written, don’t take it personally; it’s just words.’ But in the last couple of years, I’ve really changed my tune. I’ve gone through probably my two most difficult years as a writer; and I say now that if it doesn’t hurt, you haven’t put enough of yourself into it.”

“I think it’s incredibly difficult to make a movie, period, because you have so many different opinions in the mix,” articulates screenwriter Kevin Miller. “Getting money is probably the most difficult part. So I always go back to that line from Young Guns, Billy the Kid saying, ‘There’s many a slip between the cup and the lip.’ To me, that describes the whole process. So any time you get a good movie, you know, it’s just short of a miracle… It’s a long journey from the initial impulse to the finished film; and protecting your original vision is nearly impossible for a beginning filmmaker or screenwriter. So as soon as I can, I want to become a writer-producer and have a lot more control over every stage of the process.”

It takes cojones grandes to make a serious heist film and title it Flawless. Even if you wind up with a diamond in the rough, you’re still asking—begging, even—for ridicule. I agree that it all sounded like a great setup and a hoot of a yarn; but the rock itself just couldn’t support all the facets they tried to grind into it. In the end, this is a diamond that got botched during the final stages of shaping. It’s an old-fashioned heist movie, not something like Mission Impossible or the remade Ocean’s Tweens. And when old-fashioned doesn’t work, there’s not much to distract you from that fact.

Michael Jacob’s highly entertaining feature documentary Audience of One has been on the mainstream festival circuit for more than a year now, garnering rave reviews and awards—and yet failing to snare a distribution deal. The film traces the efforts of San Francisco pastor Richard Gazowsky to fulfill his calling from God: to write, produce, and direct a $200 million sci-fi Bible epic called Gravity, and thereby establish a film studio that will crank out forty-seven feature films a year. I screened the film on DVD recently, courtesy of the film’s producer, and found it to be engaging, witty, and cautionary—enough so that I felt you ought to know about it despite its unavailability. To help Audience of One get more exposure, I arranged to speak with the film’s director, Michael Jacobs, over the phone.