The gay people in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry are nothing more than wallpaper; and who could possibly be afraid of that? In this film, it’s only the heteros—Chuck and his bimbos—who seem the least bit interested in sex. I really can’t fathom why the gay community would get behind this film. Worse yet, the film’s incredibly ill-humored comedy takes potshots at other minority groups such as Japanese, women, fat people, and narrow-minded evangelicals. It’s as if star Adam Sandler wanted to offend everyone except gay people, without featuring a single three-dimensional gay character—or any three-dimensional character at all besides his own Chuck—and while making it crystal clear that he’s not the slightest bit gay himself.

Series scribe Steve Kloves has his own voice and favorite character—Hermione, in this case—and will take license with the material in a way that makes the most sense to him. The brilliance of giving Hermione some of the best lines in the books and making her a focal point of the actor’s ensemble is that she is a leader and Harry and Ron are not. (In a book, there is time to develop this characteristic. In a movie, time is an enemy that must be manipulated.) By making Hermione the flame to which the rest of the cast is drawn, Harry and Ron are strengthened into implementers—doers, if you will—who accomplish the movement of the plot and successfully achieve hero status for Harry who is, after all, the main character. Newcomer Michael Goldenberg should have done his homework much better and studied the first four movies.

Rescue Dawn is something of an ordeal for the audience—much as Herzog’s other films before it. Think, perhaps, of a Terrence Malick or Carroll Ballard film tied to a bullwhip or a mace. Think of lyric brutality. And then imagine Herzog thinking, rather dispassionately, that any audience which imagines itself as suffering more than his protagonist—or himself, as an artist—is not much worth worrying about. I’d say that the smart money is that you won’t much care for Rescue Dawn. But if you like cinema that demands a great deal of you, that doesn’t let you off the hook with ten-second character development, a half-hour hook, and three dazzling chase sequences, then this film may just be for you.

The real strength of Burtynsky’s photographs (and Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary) is that they refuse to preach. The film’s promotional materials, for instance, claim that Manufactured Landscapes follows “in the spirit of such environmentally enlightening sleeper-hits as An Inconvenient Truth.” But nothing could be further from the truth. Where Al Gore’s film sought to teach and preach, what we see here is pure exposition. A problem is exposed, but no cut-and-dried solutions are proposed. “It’s not a simple ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’” says Burtynsky at one point. “It needs a whole new way of thinking.” He couldn’t be more right, or more objective. If you’re up for a challenge, this film serves up a good one.

Make no mistake: in Broken English, Parker Posey nails a crisis of self-confidence as well as any actress I’ve seen in the last two decades or so. When we meet Nora Wilder, she is so far lost in the wilderness that one bad choice just leads to another—and all of it driven by an inner conviction that she just doesn’t deserve anything better. Director Zoe Cassavetes manages to generate some real narrative tension from what might seem to be just another conventional Drew Barrymore-esque love story. But Cassavetes is more savvy and serious than that, and her work with Posey here is a marvel.

Introducing the Dwights is a dreary, plodding story of dysfunction and letting go. The story arc follows a predictable trajectory: dysfunction and conflict, followed immediately—without transition—by everybody making nice. I remain unsure what the catalyst is. Suffice it to say that the script’s climax tries to make up in speeches what the actors are unable to convey. In the blink of an eye, Jean is transformed into a caring and sensitive mother, ostensibly by the sheer willpower of the film’s director. In the end, the Dwights are not really worth watching. Buried in the sticky carpet of Seattle’s ancient Neptune theater lie the remnants of a once-mediocre screenplay.

In many ways, Order of the Phoenix almost plays more like an exercise in contract stipulations—who gets how much screen time and so forth—than a piece of narrative art. Most of the characters we have spent hours investing ourselves in over the course of the series are virtual cameos this time out. Malfoy, Crabb and Goyle, Hagrid, Professor Trelawney, and the Weasely family all have drastically limited screen time. The close-knit, mystery-solving trio seems to have lost its chemistry (or perhaps their interest), and as a result, the movie feels somehow devoid of the series’ usual emotional and intellectual captivation. The most striking absence for me is the sense of fun and fantasy found in Rowling’s books.

Snow Cake is a quiet, simple, direct, intelligent film with a gentle spirit—and a couple of visceral shocks thrown in. It’s the kind of small film that big stars like to do when pay isn’t a big concern—when the acting (or the message) can be the real point. Having had some exposure to Asperger Syndrome—at the more functional end of the autism spectrum—I suspected that both Sigourney Weaver and the filmmakers had modeled Linda’s character on an “Aspy.” While preparing this review, I found that I was correct on that point. Screenwriter Angela Pell has a nine-year-old son with debilitating autism, and Weaver is helping promote The Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership (GRASP) with Snow Cake.

Joshua actually works best as a portrait of post-partum depression, and what families go through when they’re dealing with more than one problem personality. As Abby, Vera Farmiga delivers a harrowing portrayal of a woman who should be anywhere but cooped up at home, and yet has made choices that preclude the possibility of being anywhere else. The real question here is: why did Abby and Brad go back to the well a second time? And the real horrific answer is: people do this all the time. It’s as if endless optimism crossbreeds with the progenitive urge and a bastard-child death wish—and we all go happily whistling to our graves, one big screwed-up family.

Do all the pieces come together to create an entertaining movie? After a fashion they do indeed. Not all audiences will find Fido to their liking; the mainstream type really isn’t the target here. Fans of zombie movies should appreciate a fresh approach to this horror theme, though, especially if they have a somewhat dark and twisted sense of humor. That’s not to say that laugh-out-loud moments are in abundance, but there is a fairly steady stream of chuckles. As is also considered traditional in zombie movies, there are ample opportunities for social commentary in a scenario that has the living enslaving the dead. Enthusiasts of the genre should give this one a shot.