Split between two settings, two time periods, and two casts, it’s no wonder that John Madden’s The Debt divides so easily into two levels of quality. There’s one part that I like to call a classy, sexy Cold War spy thriller. There’s another part that I like to call “the ending.” Three Mossad agents share an apartment in East Berlin in 1966; two men and a young woman. The cramped quarters in a hostile land breeds danger and romantic tension.

Dying to Do Letterman, the documentary directed by married couple Joke Fincioen and Biagio Messina, chronicles five tumultuous years in the life of Steve Mazan, an average-Joe comedian whose lifelong dream is to perform on Late Show with David Letterman. That goal was expedited once Mazan was diagnosed with liver cancer and told, in early 2005, that he may have just five years to live.

Phnom Penh Lullaby is a John Cassavetes-style documentary—about a bickering couple, no less—but one will not find amusingly rambling scenes of middle-class drunkards quaintly skirting their troubles. Here, the handheld, jerky camera lingers on sad babies, sad prostitutes, trash-strewn streets and some of the saddest domestic squabbles ever recorded on film. Depending on your personal taste, you will either be riveted or exhausted—even bored

The most poignant scene in Miss Representation, Jennifer Siebel Newsom's documentary on the sorry state of female imagery in popular culture, is where Newsom reveals that she made the film for her newborn daughter. A teenage athlete molested by her coach, Newsom developed a severe eating disorder and inferiority complex about her looks. She excelled at Stanford University, but when she later turned to acting

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If we were loading cultural items onto a deep space vessel headed beyond the Milky Way and you wanted a prime example of the horror movie with a disturbed little girl (Bailee Madison) moves in with her father and stepmother in a threatening old mansion, a crazy secret murder in the basement, a grumpy groundskeeper who knows all the secrets, an oblivious father (Guy Pearce)

The first Ip Man was released theatrically in Hong Kong in the winter of 2008, with much success. The film grossed over $21M worldwide, despite not being released in North America and most of Europe. Following its success, the film was nominated for 12 Hong Kong Film Awards, best film and best action choreography, among others. The second one was released in Hong Kong in the spring of 2010. In all, Ip Man 2