The movie is a fun but at times uneven take on modern relationships. It stars Drew Barrymore as Erin, a late-blooming wanabee journalist in New York for a summer internship, and Justin Long as Garrett, a frustrated music A&R guy who has just gotten out of a relationship. The two meet in New York over the summer, just six weeks before Erin has to return to school in California. Though initially they assume that her departure will be their relationship’s demise, they decide to try to make it work long-distance, despite all the jealousies and dramas that entails.

Erin is a new character for Barrymore, who trades in her usual romcom flower-child optimist for somebody who actually talks like a real, flawed-but-loveable woman. At times it’s almost confusing to see her playing someone so honest and ribald, because her usual personal onscreen is so big a part of the romcom genre.

The title “The Winning Season” is a misnomer in so many ways it’s hard to keep count. It’s such a dreary, listless, disjointed affair, nobody wins, especially the audience. Sam Rockwell plays Bill, a divorced loser with a raging alcohol problem who has a rancorous relationship with his teenage daughter — just the guy you’d want to spend time with your kids. So he’s inexplicably tapped to coach a ragtag girls’ basketball team in a gray Indiana town. Forced bonding, naturally, ensues.

The girls are a clique of clichés (the sassy black girl, the pretty girl, the lesbian girl, the girl who dates older guys, the misfit girl, the immigrant girl), and, though some films can juggle a diverse ensemble, deftly giving each of them depth and character, this touches on one aspect of each girl, then does nothing with them. And it’s not just the basketball team that is designated to under-writing and pointlessness.

Having met “Flea” Virostko in sixth grade, then filming and aiding the fame of the Santa Cruz surf scene by producing “The Kill” cult surf action videos, Joshua Pomer provides a true insider’s perspective on the surf gang that ruled “Steamer Lane” and the Santa Cruz waves.

In an apt point of irony, surfing was brought to Santa Cruz by three Hawaiian princes in 1885. That those waves would become ruled by warriors lacking in nobility and known as “The Godfather,” “Ratboy,” “Barney” and “Flea” brings the esteem of the sport back to the working classes.

“Bra Boys,” the successful tale of the surf gangs at Maroubra Beach on Australia’s east coast, boasted Russell Crowe as the narrator. With a much more soothing timbre, “The Westsiders” has Rosanna Arquette, whose utterance of “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” heralds the opening of the story.

A sublime thriller, “The American” opens quietly among the snow-covered forests of Sweden. Jack, a bearded, salt-and-pepper-haired George Clooney, and his lover Ingrid (beautiful Finnish actress Irina Björklund) enjoyed an idyllic existence, broken by the appearance of assassins.
 
Following Ingrid's death, Jack, a killer-for-hire himself as well as a master weapons maker, flees to Italy and accepts one final assignment from his contact Larry: the construction of a special rifle for the mysterious Belgian woman Mathilde (Thekla Reuten). While holed up in a small town, Jack surprises himself by seeking out the friendship of local priest Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli) and pursuing romance with a local prostitute Clara (Violante Placido).
 
Rife with predictable plot elements, director Anton Corbijn (“Control”) smartly relies on fantastic acting to drive the low-key film. The understated Clooney expertly creates an air of gravitas. Veteran character actor Bonacelli (“Mission: Impossible III”) successfully elevates the clichéd role of Father Benedetto.

A romantic-comedy at its core, “How to Make Love to a Woman” is masked at the surface as a vulgar sex-comedy. With 1990s-style ongoing sex/relationship conversations mixed with well-known who’s-that-guy-he-was-in-that-one-thing cast members spattered throughout, the film is a semi-impressive debut for its director, Scott Culver (for his control as well as for taking the risk to debut with a comedy, a well-known no-no). However, the film has some irritating set-backs, notably a sharply darting script spiced with pay-attention-to-me overacting from a few of the cast and cameos.

The film opens with Andy (Josh Myers, brother of “Saturday Night Live” star Seth Myers), an up-and-coming record producer searching for the next great musical talent. His relationship is going strong with his girlfriend Lauren (Krysten Ritter) until the night their one-year anniversary hits. After a romantic embrace, Lauren tells Andy she loves him — and Andy says nothing, which sparks friction in their relationship.

Before the film actually starts, three factors affected the general impressions of “The Last Exorcism”: its rating, release date and subject material. In regards to exorcism, Hollywood consistently produces inferior products centered on the topic, with the three notable exceptions of “The Exorcist,” often cited as the scariest movie of all time; the terrifying “Poltergeist”; and the Tim Burton-helmed comedy “Beetlejuice.” Studios typically reserve the post-summer blockbuster season period of late August for lesser genre offerings. A PG-13 immediately saddles the project with lower expectations among fans. As legendary horror film actor Bruce Cambell (“Evil Dead” films) puts it in an interview with wwwfilmschoolrejects, “You show me a PG-13 horror movie, and I’ll show you a sell-out.” Directed by German filmmaker Daniel Stamm (“A Necessary Death”), “The Last Exorcism” fails to overcome these perceptions and actually further perpetuates them thanks to a ludicrous script, mediocre acting and the worst kind of clichéd Hollywood horror ending.

“Louis” is a silent picture in the true 1920s sense of the term. And that is perhaps its greatest detriment. The combination of vintage camerawork and muted tones create a definite sense of nostalgia. But it’s nostalgia for something there’s little or no demand for these days — why would anyone turn the contrast and volume all the way down on their TV set when they’ve got stereo surround and enough HD to split blades of grass?

The reality is we live in a different world now with different people: people who prefer dialogue to title cards and quick cuts to rolling shots — shots where the camera acts as narrator, guiding the audience through each scene in much the same way a chariot guides people through a dark ride. It’s cinematography that requires a certain type of brilliance, reminiscent of a time when directors didn’t have the budget or resources necessary to shoot a single scene from several different angles.

A quiet film from Peru, “The Milk of Sorrow” is not without a sense of urgency. Fausta (Magaly Solier) suffers from the titular disease transmitted to her in infancy by her mother, who experienced horrific trauma at the hands of terrorists. Fausta lives in constant fear: She won’t walk through the city alone, she flinches at the touch of a man and she has inserted a potato into her vagina to repel rapists.

When her elderly mother dies, Fausta is determined to bury her in their village, but she can’t afford either a coffin or transportation. Fausta’s uncle, with whom she lives, is anxious to have the body removed by the time his bridezilla daughter gets married, so Fausta takes a job as a night housekeeper for an angst-ridden pianist, singing sweet melodies for comfort. There she meets a gentle gardener who helps her blossom. A timid girl, Fausta emerges through music.

Quentin Lee’s fourth feature brings a multicultural, Asian-centric sensibility to the dating-while-pregnant romcom. Like Katherine Heigl’s character in “Knocked Up,” Angela (Karin Anna Cheung) discovers that she’s expecting after a one-night stand. Unlike the Judd Apatow hit, however, Angela is a self-described slut. She has slept with so many people, in fact, that she makes baseball cards for all her lovers, complete with photos and stats. In her quest to determine the father of her baby, she narrows down paternity to four candidates — 5-Second-Guy, Mystery Man, Nice-but-Boring Guy and Mr. Hottie — and sets out to collect their DNA in covert and creative ways.

Koji Steven Sakai writes and Cheung performs Angela — and, more broadly, female sexuality — without judgment. She’s a likable character who behaves like a man in the bedroom. If that makes her a slut, well, she’ll embrace it. Meanwhile, Angela’s gay BFF Gabriel (Wilson Cruz) has his own relationship issues.

“Killer Instinct” is the first in a two-part biopic of notorious French gangster Jacques Mesrine. The film charts the self-invention of a bank robber, kidnapper and murderer who captured the imagination of the public in the 1960s and 1970s. As suave and stylish as its subject, the film directed by Jean-François Richet (“Assault on Precinct 13”) is a tour de force of craft and performance, a portrait that captures the spirit of Mesrine in every frame.

Home from the Algerian War, where his rebellion against authority and his vicious streak first surface, Mesrine quickly champs at the boredom of life at his parents’ house — he particularly resents his “doormat” father whom he accuses of working for the Nazis — and falls in with gangsters. He’s a natural thief, swiftly graduating from home invasion to bank robbery, baldly exiting one vault only to enter another one across the street. Caught eventually, he adds high-profile jailbreaks to his skill set.