Children's author and artist Beatrix Potter led a fascinating life, but you'd never really know it from Chris Noonan's biopic, which turns one of English literature's more intriguing figures into a twee romantic heroine with standard-issue family problems. The film begins with the thirtysomething, unmarried Beatrix (Renee Zellweger) attempting to find someone to publish her charming children's stories, then trudges dutifully through her secret engagement to her eventual publisher Norman Warne (Ewan McGregor), a romance frowned upon by her stiff-upper-lip parents, who deplore the idea of her marrying a tradesman. There's a lot of familiar Victorian-era misogyny afoot here, and the film's presentation of Potter as an early icon of women's lib is actually fairly accurate.

But it's hard not to feel like there's something missing. The cast is likable enough, and the Lake District locations of the film's final act look marvelous. Noonan, the talented director behind the original Babe, adds some animated grace notes to scenes of Beatrix talking to her animal creations; if anyone is going to turn the cuteness quotient up to 11, it might as well be him. In classic Hollywood fashion, there's a general sense that our heroine has retained her child's-eye view of the world. Certainly, Zellweger plays her so, speaking haltingly and narrowing her eyes and scrunching her face together whenever attempting a smile. But the central paradox of Potter's life -- her struggle to be recognized for her remarkable adult accomplishments yet preserve that aforementioned childlike wonder -- feels underdeveloped, like a passing notion subsumed by the need to make a kid-friendly film for the holiday marketplace. There's more to Miss Potter than what's in Miss Potter. The film's excisions might not qualify as a crime, but they sure feel like a waste. -- Bilge Ebiri

Thirty years after the celebrated first entry and half that time after the fifth -- one of the single worst sequels in history -- a sixth Rocky has come to theaters to redeem Sylvester Stallone, his character, and unbelievably, his franchise. Rocky Balboa, like Rocky himself, is clumsy. Its story lurches from scene to scene, the compulsory training montage is downright distracting, and Stallone makes some absurd choices. It's a tie as to which is worse, bringing in Talia Shire's ghost in the first ten minutes, or dressing Rocky's dog "Punchy" in a grey sweat-suit so he can tag along for Rocky's last jog up the museum steps. Ignore these stumbles. Rocky Balboa is a very good movie, and a testament to how a great character can endure twenty years as a pop-culture punchline and still retain its potency and power.

Balboa's strength comes from quiet and reflection. In the opening scenes, we find Rocky waking in his small South Philly house looking not a little haggard and, yes, old. He goes about his morning routine wearing the same porkpie hat and leather jacket he did thirty years ago. In moments like these, Stallone taps into the same melancholy, awkward tone that made Rocky and Rocky II so memorable and enduring. Rocky Balboa evokes those films in well-written dialogue between Rocky and the characters surrounding him, particularly his estranged son Rocky Jr. (Milo Ventimiglia of Heroes channeling Stallone to an eerie extent) and Geraldine Hughes' Marie, Rocky's would-be adopted daughter. Aside from the unfortunate bits mentioned above, no time is wasted; returning characters like Rocky's old trainer Duke appear without fanfare or undue focus. For a franchise most remembered for its outlandish excess (Rocky did, after all, defeat communism in Rocky IV), Balboa is impressively restrained. Sylvester Stallone made himself a star with his story of a nobody finding glory. It's fairly incredible that three decades later he has recaptured that success by finishing that same story. — John Constantine

Generations of country-western and blues singers have laid out the protocol for what a man ought to do about his cheatin' wife, with recommended remedies involving a tall bottle of Jack Daniels at one extreme and a loaded shotgun at the other. But The Painted Veil, adapted from the novel by W. Somerset Maugham, takes place in the mid-1920s, and thus its uptight prig of a hero, bacteriologist Walter Fane (Edward Norton), lacks their wise counsel. Having rescued vain, shallow socialite Kitty (Naomi Watts) from her stifling home with his offer of a loveless marriage, he'd expected gratitude and respect, if not passion. So when it becomes clear that his bride, with whom he's recently traveled to Shanghai, has cuckolded him with the local vice consul (Liev Schreiber), Walter seizes upon a rather unique solution. He will volunteer to bring his Western medical know-how to a tiny, distant Chinese village suffering from a cholera epidemic. He will almost surely die trying to help. And Kitty, of course, will accompany him.

Even by today's standards, this is a singularly perverse romantic scenario -- indeed, it's probably more perverse to a contemporary audience, since a modern-day Kitty would just flip Walter the bird and go find a lanky pop singer. Director John Curran (We Don't Live Here Anymore, which also pivoted on a faithless Watts) and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia) lend a slightly jagged edge to Maugham's air of vicious civility, mostly by eliding key scenes -- we neither see the affair begin nor witness Walter's discovery of it, and spend much of the potentially expository first act playing catch-up. By the time the story veers in a more conventional and sentimental direction, with Kitty discovering her inner Florence Nightingale as well as Walter's more admirable qualities, you may be too engrossed to object. If only Norton, who also produced, had rejected himself in favor of a more naturally diffident actor -- preferably an actual Brit. Even when Walter is ostensibly at his most feeble and remote, you can still detect the fierce undercurrent of self-determination peculiar to American movie stars. He may surprise Kitty, but he never surprises us. — Mike D'Angelo

Given the advance press, both intentional and unintentional, one is tempted to try and stare really hard at Mel Gibson's millennial Mayan epic, trying to tease out some grand idea — either the film's stated theme about the death of civilization, or the kind of stuff its creator would rather you not think about, whether he's some kind of loony bigot or not. But Apocalypto, which devotes practically one half of its running time to an elaborate chase, probably owes more to the stuff Young Mel likely watched as a kid — Cornel Wilde's 1966 classic The Naked Prey comes to mind — and to the movies Fresh-faced Actor Mel starred in at the beginning of his career. Think what the Mad Max movies would be like with loincloths and no cars, and you get the idea. That said, you might also, at a few points, be reminded of Scott of the Antarctic, the infamous Monty Python sketch where an excited blockbuster producer keeps exclaiming, "And the blood just goes Phhoosshh!"

Apocalypto also feels at home next to Braveheart and Passion of the Christ. Not because of the litany of physical cruelties inflicted on its characters, but because, just as Passion was an extension of the worst parts of Braveheart — its painfully earnest, over-directed bookends — Apocalypto is an extension of the best — that fuck–you middle two hours where Gibson let loose some of the most brutally kinetic filmmaking this side of Eisenstein. For much of its running time, Apocalypto is a nastily effective and exciting action movie. Bloated? Certainly. A bit too in love with its own gratuitous bloodletting? Probably. A product of a twisted mind? Perhaps. Profound? Hell, no. — Bilge Ebiri

The press-kit for Edward Zwick's conscientious adventure Blood Diamond quotes the director as saying that a serious film with a higher moral purpose can also be an entertaining action film. And we're with him on that. In theory. But in practice, such hybrids tend to fail, because Hollywood's understanding of "serious" is so painfully shallow and childish that most right-thinking adults roll their eyes. Case in point: Zwick's own Grand Guignol chase flick with a heart, which works pretty well when it's mainly about running away from a bunch of bloodthirsty guerrillas, but drowns in its own self-importance whenever it reaches toward something more ennobling.

I guess I should have said this first, though: the diamond trade in Africa, especially until recently, was a disgusting business mired in murderous corruption, and any film that draws attention to that fact is worthwhile to some extent. Blood Diamond begins in Sierra Leone, with Mende fisherman Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou, bringing his usual, welcome intensity) taken from his village in a bloody raid and enslaved by guerrillas. Laboring in the diamond fields, Solomon finds a giant pink diamond and hides it. Later, in prison, he attracts the attention of South African soldier of fortune Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio, trying very, very hard), who, realizing this tortured, kind-hearted fisherman might be his chance for a big score, tries to convince Solomon to lead him back to the diamond fields. Along the way, we're treated to scenes of Solomon's young son, who has forced into the guerilla army and brainwashed, being trained to kill everything that moves. Add to the mix a spunky, crusading American journalist (Jennifer Connelly, wasted), and you've got yourself a journey towards redemption, Hollywood-style.

And that's the problem. If it were a straight action movie, Blood Diamond's one-dimensional preachiness wouldn't be so distracting. But as the film progresses, even as it offers us a few breathtaking chase scenes, it becomes clear that this film wants to move us, to impassion us, to make us care. Unfortunately, its methods — from Connelly's one-note journalist to, no joke, the standing ovation at the end — come from a playbook so laughably insincere that the film winds up making us groan instead. — Bilge Ebiri

"A Woman in Trouble." That's the only descriptive text we get on the promotional poster for David Lynch's latest, the sublimely unhinged — from narrative, from celluloid, from everything — Inland Empire. And I wouldn't want it any other way. Lynch has taken another synapse-tickling turn for the engagingly inexplicable, using three hours of muddy digital video to further indulge his fascination with the pristine underworld labyrinths of Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. Intimate and globe-spanning, ugly and poetic, banal and profound, Inland Empire reaffirms that there's no other filmmaker we'd willingly follow so far down the rabbit hole.

Our woman in trouble is Nikki Grace/Susan Blue (Laura Dern), an actress who accepts a starring role in a Sirkian infidelity melodrama called "On High in Blue Tomorrows," alongside a womanizing, leather-jacketed neo-Brando type named Devon Berk (Justin Theroux). That they will fall in love seems a fait accompli — especially since, as in Mulholland Dr., the line between actor and character is rendered nonexistent. The conceit initially seems banal (and Lynch isn't above the dumb gotcha of pulling back from a particularly emotional scene to show us a rolling camera), but Lynch has complicated the idea by shooting on DV. As a result, the film-within-the-film sometimes looks like real life, and "real life" often looks like a film. In the words of our heroine, "it's kinda laid a mindfuck on me."

Dern's character, whatever her identity, is clearly on a quest, one she understands about as much as the audience does. So we follow. We follow to early-twentieth-century Poland, to the makeshift skid row of Hollywood and Vine, to a room of buxom beauties doing the "Loco-Motion." We follow the spray-painted letters A-X-X-O-N-N. We watch a Beckettian bunny sitcom. A watch becomes a totem. Repeated phrases gain significance. Recognizable performers make periodic intrusions. Lynch has decided to release this unmarketable project on his own dime, in order to launch an awards-campaign for Laura Dern. Good move. This is clearly the performance of the year. At times, the entire narrative seems like a shrine constructed to Dern's courage, to her propulsive willingness to open Lynch's doors. It's the type of performance that haunts your dreams. And as Inland Empire makes perfectly clear, this performance will likely haunt the actress as well. — Akiva Gottlieb