SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It's better than Marley & Me, but so's a Tasering. At least the title alerts you up front to the presence of a dog in this Lasse Hallström movie--the latest japanaptation, after Shall We Dance, to star serial sentimentalist Richard Gere. As a lifelong mutt owner, I'm unimpressed by stories of fierce canine loyalty and homing instinct. The dog hears your train coming and runs to meet you? That's because he knows you're gonna feed him, you ass. The dog that persists for a whole decade after you're dead, however, could be called obsessive and stupid, not loving and noble. But because it's a G-rated movie based on a Japanese film (Hachiko Monogatari) that was in turn "based on a true story," producer/star Gere demands that your throat tighten. (This even as Hallström shoots Hachiko's POV in an alienating low-angle Cujovision.) Our famous Buddhist reluctantly adopts a lost akita pup at his commuter railway station, unaware that this particular hound was whelped and shipped direct from a Nippon monastery, fated to shadow him through his earthly turn on the karmic wheel and beyond. That's the judgment of Gere's wise Japanese co-worker (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), who doubles as his kanji interpreter and kendo partner. (Offscreen, he no doubt instructs his friend in the tea ceremony, shiatsu, and how to make those cool ninja smoke bombs.) The dog must be magic: it arrives in Gere's Northeastern hamlet of "Bedridge" (you're shitting me) while the Christmas lights are hanging, just in time for the 1996 World Series. This film does for continuity what my dogs do for my lawn, it doesn't care enough about its supporting characters to name them aloud, and it even misidentifies Hachiko's breed. Gere's music professor composes the kind of faux-Vivaldi piano twinkles (courtesy Jan A.P. Kaczmarek) that grace the soundtracks of...well, of Lasse Hallström films; his work is so crucial that he ignores loyal Hachi's warning to stay home on the day he's bound to die. Not that it would've helped--if he can't be saved upon collapsing in a crowded university lecture hall, what are the odds he'd ride out a stroke reading NEWSWEEK on his own crapper? Too bad Hachi's owner showed so little concern in kind, letting him wander for years, leashless and untagged, through the town's busiest streets. Hachiko is the perfect illustration of George Lucas' alleged rule of cinematic emotionalism: if you want your audience to cry, kill a cute animal. It's instructive, in light of Hachiko, to revisit Hallström's 1985 breakthrough My Life As A Dog. In each, a grown man engages in barking to get into his wife's knickers. Also? Both films suck, and Hallström hasn't improved one lick since the first dog he murdered to make us cry.

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The word "zombie" is never uttered in Deadgirl, but the movie belongs to that genre, both in its plot device and in the way it uses the animate dead to probe a particular neurosis of our culture. In this way, it does the best job of its ilk since 28 Days Later..., and it resembles that movie in its question of women as currency or possessions in a world gone feral. Drinking and breaking shit in an abandoned mental hospital, two sexually-frustrated high-school slackers stumble upon a hidden prize: a beautiful, incoherent girl, chained naked to a gurney, apparently for years. She can't be killed (although she doesn't heal from injury, either), and her alienness makes her little more than a blow-up doll in the eyes of young punk JT (Noah Segan, channelling Christian Slater c. 1988). His pal Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) struggles with his conscience, torn between objectification of the Deadgirl and idealization of his still-living longtime crush (Candice Accola). A small cabal of rapists slowly grows around this sexually-available figment, and the lycanthropic JT gets trapped in the latter half of his madonna/whore complex, a prisoner-prince of his own personal sex dungeon. The young men of Deadgirl have no visible family life (scenes meant to give Rickie some stereotypically lower-class domestic grounding feel like afterthoughts) and fail whenever a chance at a healthy relationship presents itself. By instinct, they favour the pliable--with a hint of filth and barely restrained danger--over the real. Porn is easier than love, after all, and the same immature fantasy construct that allows JT to rape lets Rickie see himself as a white knight. Fernandez, the more classically handsome of the male leads, seems overwhelmed by the film's need to make Rickie both sympathetic and culpable. A reversal of roles, with Segan resisting Fernandez's call to prurience, might have held more surprise, while a single line of post-dubbed dialogue adds too much justification to Rickie's final choice. As the dead girl in question, Jenny Spain has no lines, but her portrayal is brave for rising to all its other strenuous demands--and her eyes leave us in doubt as to how mindless this creature truly is. It must be a good horror movie: I've been thinking about it ever since.

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You're watching the wrong guy if you keep your eye on Martin McGartland (Jim Sturgess), a Special Branch mole in the Belfast IRA circa 1988. The one to mark in Fifty Dead Men Walking is his handler, codenamed "Fergus" and played by Ben Kingsley under a hairpiece that makes him look astonishingly like Ben Gazzara. As he transitions from mere manipulation of his charge to fatherly love, Fergus reveals himself to be the only character made valid by the script and fully fleshed out by the performer. Inspired by, but not based on, McGartland's memoir of the same name, Kari Skogland's film packs a history lesson on the Troubles into its opening act, then expects us to bond with a hero whose only personality trait is a lack of political conviction. Sturgess' McGartland is a Catholic hood with no love for the IRA, the Ulster Unionists, or the British peacekeepers in his divided city; "I don't have opinions" is his only self-disclosing line of dialogue. Fergus keys in on that alienation and grooms McGartland as an infiltrator, but the latter's turn towards informant is unbelievable, despite his stated desire to save lives. And who can tell why he rises so easily in the IRA hierarchy, treated as he is like a foster son by a high-ranking commander (Tom Collins)? He gets asked a few times if he's bucking for sainthood, and it's the only reasonable answer. (Consider his rebuff of flame-haired Volunteer captain Grace (Rose McGowan), who's strictly there to give family man Martin some temptation to deny.) Music-wise, any film that starts off with a blast of Stiff Little Fingers' "Alternative Ulster" is jockeying for my respect, but Ben Mink's score is The Edge minus the atmosphere. Skogland has some effective visual tricks--note how often characters are separated by ancient, broken walls--but her ace is Kingsley, who can carry off the clunkiest dialogue ("The hunters become the hunted," "The price of a conscience is death") and finds leeway in small moments that make his Fergus a human rather than a type. We thought we'd lost you, Sir Ben, somewhere between BloodRayne and The Love Guru. Well met. Nice hair.

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The metaphors that Doug Pray's subjects arrive at to describe their chosen medium--advertising, in all its forms--are atmospheric. "It's like air and water," says Jeff Goodby, creator of the "Got milk?" campaign. "It's around you. It's gonna happen to you." Art director and ad legend George Lois ("I want my MTV") is perhaps more honest: "I think advertising's a poison gas." Pray's documentary does a great job of illustrating where we are now in our relationship with our ads. Where it doesn't succeed is as a history lesson, save for opening nods to the era familiar to fans of "Mad Men". It was ad pioneers like Bill Bernbach who paired artists with writers beginning in 1949, sparking the "creative revolution" that put paid to Don Draper's business model. But in one sentence, I just told you more about that era, including its relevant date, than all of Art & Copy does. The personalities of DDB and other groundbreaking agencies aren't much explored; understandably, as a filmmaker, Pray is far more interested in the ads themselves, particularly TV ads. Moreover, he's only interested in the successful campaigns, not the stinkers. His earliest hero on that front is Mary Wells, a DDB veteran who later ran a campaign for Braniff Airlines that turned its ads (and planes) into theatrical productions. (In 1977, Wells taught us how to ♥NY.) Pray's talking heads display an unexpected philosophical bent (save Goodby's partner Rich Silverstein, an epic douche who thought "Got milk?" was a stupid idea). The late Hal Riney, who sold wine coolers and Ronald Reagan's second term with the same sepia tinge, admits to an unhappy childhood that fed into his advertising style. The best advertisers, all agree, are less artists than antennae--they capture what's already in the air, and spur their clients to strive for quality. "If the product isn't any good, I'll put it out of business," the wonderful Lois roars, "because people'll run and buy it and find out it's a piece o' shit!" Despite the theme they spell out for him, Pray can't successfully tie these amazing characters to his advertising-infrastructure factoids, and he seems to imply that we've been creating and consuming advertising ever since we made the first rock carvings. I'd prefer to think my ancestors had larger souls than mine.

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When last we saw Michael Jai White, it was in the biggest movie of 2008, getting a shiv in the uvula from Heath Ledger. The veteran action performer (Spawn, Universal Soldier) wants to shrug that one off with a joke of his own. The pre-credits scenes in Scott Sanders' Black Dynamite, a vehicle created specifically for White, make you fear another I'm Gonna Git You Sucka or Undercover Brother--a satire on '70s blaxploitation tropes that uses actual, professional camera setups, editing, and continuity. That doesn't last long. Black Dynamite finds its ground once Sanders appropriates the which-end-of-the-camera aesthetic of the worst/best black grindhouse cinema. (Rudy Ray Moore's Dolemite is uppermost on the creators' minds.) The titular hero is all that Shaft and Black Belt Jones wish they could be: Vietnam vet, ex-CIA assassin, martial arts master, and urban avenger, capable of sexually sating five ethnically-diverse ladies at once. (Understandably, he's prone to a lot of flashbacks.) There's a "new smack on the streets," flooding the ghetto in tandem with a plot to sexually disempower American black men. When his brother is killed in the crossfire, B.D. roundhouse kicks his way through a passel of thugs, mafiosi, government operatives, and dangling boom mics--pointing out, with the up-trending body count, that the heroes of these things are seldom better than cackling psychopaths. White turns out to be adept at kicking ass while cracking jokes; someone should have given him an action-comedy years ago. It would be nice if romantic interest Gloria (Salli Richardson-Whitfield, a crackerjack straightwoman) had followed in Pam Grier's footsteps by proving Black Dynamite's female equal, but the character amounts to mere bed candy. Too, the filler is evident, though these points are great excuses to go get another beer. Ultimately, Black Dynamite achieves that confrontation with American political power that so much cinema of the 1970s--grindhouse or otherwise, overtly or in subtext--seemed to demand.

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I was genetically engineered to like this movie, a Hammer Films riff with dollops of Evil Dead slapstick and EC Comics creep-out--so I guess I have to blame the filmmakers for fumbling the experiment. It's rare that a gothic-guignol seems to drag, but at 84 minutes Glenn McQuaid's graverobbing comedy I Sell the Dead could still be shorter, some bits of business dropped without harm. Then you've got a great hour of television with a fuckton of feature-film pedigree. Producer Larry Fessenden roleplays gleefully as resurrectionist Willie Grimes, framed for murder and ultimately beheaded. Awaiting his own execution, Grimes' partner Arthur Blake (Dominic Monaghan) unspools his story to a confessor priest (Ron Perlman), detailing how the pair moved from simply digging up the deceased for mad Dr. Quint (Angus Scrimm, who really should play Scrooge sometime) to exhuming the undead for added profit. The cast is game, but the movie can't seem to narrow its focus. McQuaid even injects a note of modern science-fiction to no real effect and introduces a third-act love interest (Brenda Cooney) who gets no real arc, though some redemption is granted when one completely predictable reversal is followed by an unforeseen second. In sum, it's a lightweight Halloween rental, a close cousin to Bubba Ho-Tep--although it lacks the heft of that film's meditation on aging and death.

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We have much to praise and condemn Charlie Kaufman for, and popularizing science-fiction and meta-fictional elements to eyeball modern emotional displacement could count in both columns. In her first feature, writer-director Sophie Barthes deploys an amazing cast in an effort that will, for better or worse, be invariably compared to Kaufman's Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Paul Giamatti (Paul Giamatti) is in theatrical rehearsals for "Uncle Vanya", and all that Russian ennui is weighing on his soul. So why not have his soul removed and placed in cold storage, in a lab run by Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn)? "If you'd rather avoid sales tax, it can be shipped to our New Jersey warehouse," Flintstein assures him. In a machine that looks like an MRI from Woody Allen's Sleeper, Giamatti as Giamatti gets his chickpea-shaped spirit (or at least 95% of it) siphoned out, complete with the sound effect of a toilet flushing. But Flintstein also deals in "transplants" and contracts with unscrupulous Russian mobsters, represented by soul-mule Nina (Dina Korzun), who hauls the raw materials in her own head through transatlantic customs...so Giamatti's valuable anima isn't in the most trustworthy hands. Korzun is moving as a woman whose heart is contaminated with the pain of others, but Giamatti is the hinge for this relatively flimsy contraption. Still, what a hinge: bored and detached after the removal of his soul, he runs on fumes from his lizard hindbrain, and his "Vanya" goes from troubled to comically inauthentic. No one wears embarrassment, frustration, or self-doubt better, and an agitated Giamatti is so twitchy he actually blurs. Without him, a bedroom confession to his wife (Emily Watson, squandered) is a worthless moment. With him, it's Chekhovian. A Russian-lit scholar could probably unearth levels in Cold Souls that are hidden to me, though the film is valuable in two unexpected ways: it contemplates the way Russian oligarchs commodify the lives of their countrymen for their own enrichment; and it makes me hungry to see Giamatti as Philip K. Dick in the much-discussed biopic The Owl in the Daylight. If we're going to talk about misplaced selves and implanted experiences, let's talk with a master, played by a masterful actor.

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It's broad-strokes storytelling set in Toronto's Jamaican expatriate community, in which each character and situation is understood immediately, almost subconsciously. Night-shift nurse Jude (Karen LeBlanc) is herself a patient, suffering from a potentially fatal sickle-cell disorder. It's her son Ciel (Daniel J. Gordon) who keeps her going, both figuratively and metaphysically--he's a magical thinker, reaching back to Caribbean incantation and rootwork, crafting charms to preserve his mother's life. Then washed-up boxer Silence (Clark Johnson), a closed book, drifts into their sphere; manipulated by sharks into underground pit-fighting and treated by Jude for a head wound, he leaves behind a red kerchief, like a fairytale token. Silence is en route to redemption in a new career as a boxing coach for youth, but no one in Nurse.Fighter.Boy can make it alone. Small elements of the film suffer, as when a sexual affair is disposed of too easily--a risk in this kind of dialogue-light approach. But the way these characters fall into each other's orbit (Jude is drawn to the gorgeous reggae and R&B coming from Silence's window, without knowing who he is) illustrates how the strongest families are sometimes created by chance rather than by design. Director Charles Officer and cinematographer Steve Cosens paint in reds, blues, and golds but seem to recognize that few textures are more beautiful than a black woman's skin.

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It's either a shame or a blessing for Kathryn Bigelow's tense Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker to emerge now rather than in 2004, the year of its setting. Back then, war fury was all the rage and might have doomed the movie--we had to believe that invading Iraq was the right thing to do, or why else had we buried 1,100 soldiers by the time George W. Bush won reelection? But just the same, we could have used this reminder of the casualties who were still walking and drawing breath. Seldom squeamish about sharing tight spaces with sweaty males, Bigelow climbs into the Humvee with the "Blasters" of the Bravo Company bomb squad as they defuse IEDs in occupied Baghdad. Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) is rotated into an existing bomb unit to replace a technician pulped by a shockwave (Guy Pearce, first unrecognizable, then dead); James keeps his captured bomb triggers in a crate under his bunk--the locker of the title, though so could Iraq as a whole be. For their part, his new teammates are sorting through guilt over their fellow's demise (Brian Geraghty's Specialist Own Eldridge) or clinging to safety measures and protocols (Anthony Mackie's Sgt. J.T. Sanborn) that James knows can't possibly save him every time. Each disabled bomb is a sexual rush, calling for a cigarette afterward. He can't not accept the challenge, even that of a bomb stitched into a child's dead body. For all three men, the homefront--where James has an estranged wife (Evangeline Lilly) and a baby--is at best an abstraction, at worst a distraction from their own hovering doom. In their life in the camp, they are in death, with practically every interior (even the auto pool) a stark, institutional white, like Heaven's crappy waiting room. Bigelow, getting claustrophobically close with her camera and working from Mark Boal's eloquent but unflashy script, maintains a grenade-pin tension in the bombwork scenes but, surprisingly, lets out too much slack as James tries to take the fight to the hidden triggermen who detonate their payloads from afar. Ralph Fiennes cameos as a British merc who gets the Blasters tangled up in a sniper duel, leading to Bigelow's most effective image: while the gunmen lie in wait for the enemy to slip from cover, flies nestle on their faces, as if these men who rushed to embrace war are already dead.

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SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The difference in intimacy between male friendship and married companionship gets laid bare in the opening minutes of Humpday. There's the comfortable, cuddled body contact shared by young Seattle office drone Ben (Mark Duplass) and his wife, Anna (Alycia Delmore). And then there's the bellowing, clenching reunion of Ben and free-spirited old buddy Andrew (Joshua Leonard), who, not seen in a decade, arrives unannounced on the redeye from Mexico. "I respect the FUCK outta you, man!" Andrew declares, and it's both mutual and palpable--even though Ben bunks Andrew down in his storeroom, along with all his other old memories. The two chums pick up where they left off, when Ben was young and irresponsible, leaving Anna no point of entry into their fraternal duprass. Soon a mix of inebriation, macho brinkmanship, and terror of growing old with no lasting accomplishment drives the two straight friends to plan a video in which they will have sex with each other--for the sake of art. (Ben at first wants to title it "Tender Is the Butt.") They subsequently spend much of the movie papering over, debating, and justifying their pledge. Lynn Shelton's film--and the director appears in a supporting role, prodding Ben and Andrew towards commitment--is at its best in these easygoing, naturalistic, very funny scenes; she airs the discomfort of straight male friendship rituals, already heavy on grappling and the slapping of flesh, that suddenly become engorged with sexual threat or promise. A shame, then, that Humpday is heavy on foreplay but refrains, as do its lead characters, from consummation. After laughing so long at the mere discussion of straight male-on-male sex, imagine the cleansing indictment of the audience if we'd gotten beyond the second base of hotel-room rationalizations and bare-chested hugs. Shelton does offer us an extratextual happy ending, though: the sight of Joshua Leonard, terrorized on tape for The Blair Witch Project all those years ago, at last finding something to love in a camcorder's viewscreen.

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It's the Downing Street Memo actualized as comedy. Spun off from director Armando Iannucci's own 2005 BBC series "The Thick Of It", In the Loop broadens its scope from the backroom foibles of clueless, self-interested British MPs to encompass the American policy vultures, partisan hacks, and PTSD generals who devise, or are victimized by, war policy. Ported over wholesale from "The Thick Of It" is Peter Capaldi's bloodthirsty Malcolm Tucker, chief enforcer for the Prime Minister and an architect of profanity in the service of intimidation. (He builds heroic ziggurats of oaths, then bounces luckless junior officials down their jagged steps.) Tucker uses the gaffes of international development minister Simon Foster (Tom Hollander)--who publicly declares that war is "unforeseeable" on the eve of an Anglo-American military push in the Mideast--for political leverage, as do the warring forces inside the U.S. Pentagon itself. This pits the British contingent against their equally self-absorbed Beltway counterparts, including policy analyst Liza Weld (Anna Chlumsky--yes, that Anna Chlumsky), whose paper exposing the maladjusted intelligence feeding the war fever is itself being maladjusted by hawkish defense undersecretary Linton Barwick (David Rasche), and General George Miller (James Gandolfini), who fears the casualty projections for the oncoming clash. ("At the end of a war, you need some soldiers left, really," he pronounces, "or it looks like you've lost.") In the Loop works both as a Stateside showcase for Iannucci's floating-camera satire of ego-powered bureaucracy and as a marker for how British power must view itself today: a mere client state. Even the most powerful UK players are blown about by the Yank whirlwind, whether they're sexually buffaloed (Chris Addison's ministerial aide Toby, enamoured of wonkette Liza) or simply checkmated by well-applied Colonial ignorance (Tucker vs. Barwick, who molds Liza's objective pre-war analysis into a casus belli: "Take out all the conditions... Like 'might have found,' make that 'have found'"). By the time Tucker is reduced to nonverbal spluttering in the United Nations' meditation chamber, the course of Empire is clearly set--and not by its own choosing.

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