Film

David Edelstein's friends all say they just won't see a Mel Gibson movie. But Edelstein says the actor's new film The Beaver, directed by Jodie Foster, might be worth a look -- if only for a certain cameo appearance.

A trio of rousing adventure flicks -- Fast Five, 13 Assassins and Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen -- all opened this past week. David Edelstein says each one is pretty singular, in its own way.

Incendies is a French-Canadian film that was nominated for a 2010 Academy Award. The title translates as "scorched," and the movie tells the brutal story of a woman who lived through her country's civil war. Critic David Edelstein says it's an extraordinary piece of storytelling.

In the splendid documentary Nostalgia for the Light, Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman draws parallels between astronomers searching for stars in the world's driest desert and women searching for the remains of loved ones who were disappeared under the Pinochet regime.

Robert Redford's historical drama focuses on the months after President Lincoln was assassinated — and on Mary Surratt, the woman alleged to have aided the plotters. Critic David Edelstein says it's a dramatized civil-liberties lecture, both transparent and exaggerated.

James Franco and Danny McBride set off on a quest in David Gordon Green's action comedy Your Highness — a sword-and-sorcery spoof that David Edelstein says is fantastic if you're in the right gross-minded juvenile mood.

The less you know about the unnerving thrillers Source Code and Insidious the better, says critic David Edelstein. But only one of the two films "has so much emotional heft that it never loses that exhilarating jitter."

Tom McCarthy's new comedy stars Paul Giamatti as a suburban lawyer who moonlights as a high school wrestling coach. Critic David Edelstein says the film is "a symphony of marvelous voices" reminiscent of Little Miss Sunshine.

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy appears to tell a simple story -- two people, played by Juliette Binoche and William Shimell, are mistaken for a long-married couple. But there are plot twists that will "ping-pong around your mind for days," says critic David Edelstein.

The classic 1957 film about the gossip industry has been remastered and rereleased on DVD and Blu-Ray. Critic John Powers says the movie's Manhattan is a "seamy, deglamorized world in which small men destroy lives to make themselves big."