The Bank Job delivers all the pleasures expected from a crime-heist picture. Dense with duplicity and colored in many shades of gray, The Bank Job concerns a motley gang tunneling into a bank vault. They work with an elaborate plan they won’t be able to fully execute because criminal masterminds are scarce. Moreover, the crooks are pawns in a larger scheme whose purposes they discover only after the final turnoff has been passed. The road they are on will lead to a pileup.

You don’t have to seek out classic films at museums or small cinemas anymore. Nowadays they are accessible to anyone whose cable package includes the movie channel TCM. And many great and not-great older movies have been issued on DVD. With the easy availability of old film, why would anyone launch a vintage film series at a public venue in 2008? “It’s for the shared experience,” explains Dan Guenzel, co-founder of the Focus Film Society. “If you watch a Harold Lloyd comedy by yourself on DVD, you smile. If you see it in a theater with other people, you are shaking with laughter. It’s an entirely different experience.”

A good teenage comedy should nail the particulars of high school life, a purgatory period that remains rife with satirical potential generation after generation. It should also satirize the society that promulgated the purgatory. By those measures, Charlie Bartlett is a success. The adult problems it spoofs are magnified and distorted in the funhouse mirror of teen life. In Charlie Bartlett, everyone is troubled and seeking medication, whether

In 1920s Germany there emerged a genre called “mountain films.” They were fictional mountain-climbing adventure stories that strained the limits of cinematic technology and the endurance of actors as they ventured to places where movies had never gone, in the snowy wilderness on the roof of the world. Many scenes from the documentary Steep rekindle the cobalt blue aura of those old German films. Steep concerns the origin and growth of big mountain skiing (or “extreme skiing” to use the current cliché), a sport that involves climbing beyond the well-manicured hills of the ski resorts and onto the craggier summits.

Ray (Colin Farrell) casts a wary eye on the picture-book surroundings of the Belgian city of Bruges, keeps his head down and scrunches his face behind the upturned collar of his wool overcoat. Along with his partner Ken (Brendan Gleeson), Ray is a British hitman who was sent there on holiday in order to make himself scarce for a few weeks.

Sergei Parajanov was less interested in telling stories than plunging the viewer into the world, the consciousness, of his protagonists. The Soviet Armenian director paid a high price for the persistence of his vision. Hounded by censors and jailed repeatedly, Parajanov managed nonetheless to complete nearly a dozen films before his death in 1990. The international acclaim he earned on the film festival circuit in the 1960s and ’70s prevented the Communist authorities from doing their worst.

Filmed through a video camera carried around by participants in the catastrophe it depicts, Cloverfield has drawn understandable comparisons to The Blair Witch Project. But where the earlier movie was an interesting experiment, Cloverfield works as a full-blown feature film. Where Blair Witch meandered . . .

More and more children are faced with parents lingering on in the dimming half-life of dementia. Unable to care for themselves or sometimes even remember who they are, the parents are a burden, a flashpoint of guilt, an opportunity for unselfish love. The problem is compounded when the parent is . . .

If the Shah of Iran ever enjoyed popular support, it had evaporated across large stretches of the population by the time of his overthrow in 1979. But what followed after a short, disorderly and heady intermezzo was a symphony of horror darker than any the Shah could have composed . . .

Paris in spring is a place for romance, but what of the City of Light in the dark of winter? Coeurs (Private Fears in Public Places) is a bittersweet romance of overlapping couples and couplings, a drama flecked with humor. Snow is always falling outside and everyone’s overcoat is powdered in white. The action . . .