There's a slang term in contemporary Germany, "ostalgie," that describes a nostalgia for the good old days of the GDR. It's just this misguided wistfulness that prompted Florian Henckel von Donnersmark to make The Lives of Others, a haunting drama set in East Germany in 1984, which chillingly captures the way the Stasi — the secret police service — oppressed its supposed beneficiaries. The milieu is impeccable; a sense of total surveillance and constant danger pervades and makes the film as thrilling as it is grim.

The excellent Ulrich Mühe plays Gerd Wiesler, a rank-and-file Stasi man sent to spy on the seemingly party-loyal playwright Georg Dreymann. With Wiesler's commanding officer Hempf (a disturbing Thomas Thieme) forcing the playwright's girlfriend into a covert affair, the situation gets complicated — and more complicated still as Wiesler develops feelings of empathy for his unknowing targets.

All of this is keenly observed and extremely well-acted, but you might be troubled by the ending, which is perhaps too eager to redeem its protagonist. Though the final scenes are moving, there must have been a more ambiguous way to end such a carefully balanced and thoughtful rumination on decency and cruelty. I can say no more without compromising the plot, so I'll stop here; see this fascinating film with friends, and you will surely have out the debate for yourself. — Peter Smith

The bizarre little doc Fired! effectively comprises two movies; both are reasonably entertaining, though they don't work so well together. The film centers on star-producer Annabelle Gurwitch, a down-and-out actress who, when fired from a Woody Allen play (he tells her she "looks retarded"), goes into a tailspin and begins to speculate about all the other showbiz folk who've been fired from all sorts of jobs. For its first half, the film basically consists of intercut interviews with various ubiquitous actors and comedians (Jeff Garlin, Illeana Douglas, Tim Allen, Sarah Silverman, etc.) recounting to Gurwitch their horror stories of shitcan woe. So far, so good.

However, at about the midway point, Gurwitch's film gains a belated — and somewhat oddly placed — social conscience and gets all Michael Moore on us, tackling the broader national problem of outsourcing and downsizing. Much of it's centered, in classic Moore fashion, on General Motors and its hypocritical tendency to cut thousands of jobs while giving its CEOs pay raises. The results are, for a while, reasonably interesting and occasionally quite funny — one particular interlude involving a sock puppet recounting of Tate Donovan getting fired from the film version of Torch Song Trilogy is particularly hilarious.

Still, one can't help but feel that this dual conceit, leaping from well-known actors losing work to blue-collar autoworkers getting axed by the thousands, is one driven more by convenience (or, to put it less diplomatically, "padding") than a desire for social justice. The connection doesn't work: There's something fundamentally unseemly about Fred Willard, Harry Shearer and Gurwitch lounging around in a pool talking about their past work woes, when juxtaposed with thousands of working-class families in the Midwest losing their livelihoods. — Bilge Ebiri

Maria Maggenti's low-budget DV feature — produced by the same folks who brought us Tadpole and Pieces of April — could be billed as many things: a revival of old-fashioned screwball comedy, a queer romance, an example of DIY indie filmmaking. But all those descriptors fade when faced with what the film really is: an engagingly harmless sitcom episode. That may sound like a diss, but it isn't meant to be.

Surely, ten or fifteen years ago, the idea of a comedy about a lesbian who winds up inadvertently two-timing her latest girlfriend (with said girlfriend's long-term boyfriend) would have been consigned to the far corners of underground cinema. But nowadays, it just feels pleasantly humdrum. Sensitive writer Allegra (Elizabeth Reaser) gets dumped by her girlfriend due to her lack of passion, then goes to a party, meets Columbia prof Philip (Justin Kirk) and strikes up a brief and meaningless affair with him. Turns out Philip is on his way out of a lengthy relationship with the lovely Grace (Gretchen Mol). By accident, Grace and Allegra meet up, and Allegra is smitten. Pleasantly inoffensive wackiness ensues.

There's opera, nice apartments, upscale parties and a playful score, and even the more conservative members of the Woody Allen club will probably dig it to some extent. It would have helped, certainly, if Maggenti's script had more laugh-out-loud moments, or the occasional whiff of scandal to it; even the sex scenes feel tasteful and tame. As it is, the film is disposably likable, in a good way. Indeed, one could say that Maggenti's transformation of such potentially edgy subject matter into something so middlebrow is in itself an act of daring reinvention. — Bilge Ebiri

Watching the absurd plot of Catch and Release unfold, you keep waiting for the hysterics to kick in. Jennifer Garner's fiancé died the day before her wedding, his supposed best friend is boning the caterer at the funeral, she's being asked to return her engagement ring to her mother-in-law, and oh yeah, almost-hubby was a secret millionaire, but he steadily cheated on her and has a three-year-old son with a Hollywood massage therapist. Let's get nuts! But Erin Brockovich screenwriter Susannah Grant's directorial debut is less interested in tawdry drama — the emotional-rollercoaster plot notwithstanding — than stages of deflected grief. Gray (Garner) forgoes hysterics and genuinely tries to make things work. This is not to say that Catch and Release is anything more than an awkwardly scripted romantic dramedy, but it has its idiosyncratic charms.

The highs and lows of Catch and Release are perhaps best represented by geek-messiah Kevin Smith, who chose the film for his mostly inauspicious debut as a serious actor. He spends his early scenes as a poor man's Jack Black, incessantly stuffing his face and dodging responsibility. Then, halfway through, he halfheartedly attempts suicide, and upon recovery morphs into both a surrogate father and an oracle. (The cutesy script gives him a job as the purveyor of tea-box quotations for Celestial Seasonings.) Unfunny and ridiculous, I know, but somehow Smith is more believable as the sage than as the slacker. Catch and Release eventually submits to genre conventions, with Timothy Olyphant as the caterer-fucker and Gray's improbable love interest, but it's not difficult to pinpoint the outline of a better movie trapped inside a mediocre January rom-com. — Akiva Gottlieb

A peculiar sociological vanity project from a director unrenowned for his political acuity, Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering is the type of film one makes out of guilt for one's own success. The story of a pretty-boy London architect and gentrification expert — played by the ineffably smarmy Jude Law — coming to terms with his own cultural privilege, the film is actually less grating for its pontification on racial boundaries and urban discord than for the outright ineptitude of its storytelling. It's like Cache without a clue.

Minghella, the competent craftsman behind The English Patient and Cold Mountain, has set his sights on a cross-sectioned, Crash-style foray into London's ever-shifting cultural landscape, but his script is riddled with blunt metaphors and a series of preposterous developments. In this social parable, Law's design firm is robbed by a Bosnian-immigrant teenager, and Law chases the boy back to his apartment. In what the film posits as a parallel act of theft, the architect begins an affair with the thief's mother (Juliette Binoche, straining to give credibility to an accent she can't handle), who later, in order to prevent her son's incarceration, decides to blackmail her lover. (It's a plot twist that faintly echoes the far superior, far less serious Notes on a Scandal.)

Like Crash scribe Paul Haggis, Minghella was robbed in real life, and therefore inspired to make a film about haves and have-nots, race and privilege. Far be it from me to deny Hollywood filmmakers the right to a social conscience, but need they tie all our social problems into a neat little box of everything-is-connected abstraction? Breaking and Entering never reckons with the issues it raises, instead escaping into a banal discourse on sin and blackmail where, per the tagline, "love is no ordinary crime." — Akiva Gottlieb