While sitting through a screening of Certified Copy, the latest film from Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry), I was, at one point, tempted to groan aloud in response to a line of dialogue. The groan would have been less a ploy for attention than an involuntary response. I was in a physical state of discomfort that only a slight groan might have served to ameliorate. During one of their rambling, freshman thesis-level discussions on the nature of the reproduction vs.

Despite both a title tailor-made for late-night cable viewers and filmmaker Christopher Smith’s pedigree in the horror genre, Black Death actually falls closer in spirit to Andrey Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev than Dominic Sena’s Season of the Witch, the recent Middle Ages-set horror/action/Nicolas Cage amalgam that features a nearly identical plot.

As soon as the credits came up, the woman sitting in front of me stood and said to her husband, “That was torturous.” And she didn’t mean it in a good way. I often take for granted my own motivations for watching films, but why do we watch films, generally? What do we expect of them? As I said, these aren’t questions I’m accustomed to addressing directly. (By way of explanation: I recently watched and loved Into Great Silence, which I recommend to anyone with a penchant for long meditations on light, silence, and stillness.)

To describe a film like the Western-themed animated feature Rango as “family entertainment” would be somewhat misleading. Toy Story has proved to be the gold standard for Gen Y family films, because it is accessible to nearly every member of a given family and for the same reasons: parents and children alike will be terrified of the sadistic toy-torturer Sid, empathize with space ranger Buzz Lightyear, and leap for joy when at long last cowboy Woody is restored to his rightful owner.

For a lot of critics, what defines a film as “mumblecore,” besides an ultra low budget and even moreso than supposedly shaky camerawork and inaudible dialogue, is an exploration of limbo: directionless characters, ambiguous relationships, speech filled with missteps and false starts. These and similar descriptors usually aren’t meant flatteringly: if the characters don’t know what they want to say, the argument goes, how can the film itself?

Filmmakers that play with or comment on the nature of filmmaking by actually making a film about making a film are always going to run the risk of producing overly self-aware and boring ruminations on how time-consuming and frustrating/rewarding it is to make a movie. While these types of films are of great interest to those in the audience who want to make movies themselves, they often lack the kind of depth or context that would make their hyper-real aesthetics less a neat quirk and more a necessary element of a cohesive vision.

The title of Mexican director Jorge Michel Grau’s debut film We Are What We Are suggests a series of existential quandaries, the type you might find in the daily life of a family of cannibals living in squalor. How can these illicit desires be controlled in service of a larger community? How can you be friends with someone you secretly want to eat? A good horror movie takes what’s recognizably human and obfuscates it, slowly but surely. If we can believe it, we’ll feel it; in other words, the devil is in the details.

The most important characters in Putty Hill never appear onscreen. The film centers around the death of a young man, Cody, in the fictional Baltimore suburb of Putty Hill, but all you ever see of him is a photograph near the end. Even more glaring is the invisibility of the anonymous man behind the camera, who frequently questions the characters as though he were a documentary filmmaker and they were his subjects.

“The good thing about the green economy, the clean energy economy, the low carbon economy — it’s a labor-intensive economy. It will create an infinite amount of jobs.” With that unequivocal and completely straight-faced statement by Van Jones, Carbon Nation stopped being an interesting if a bit heavy-handed documentary about climate change and gleefully launched itself into the realm of utopian baby-boomer wish-fulfillment.