THE OVERTURE
unrated, 103 minutes

Alfred Hitchcock once said that movies are life with all the boring parts left out, but the latest wave of films “based on a true story” feels like nothing but the boring parts. With the exception of a few moments, “The Overture” falls into this category. Thailand’s entry for the 2004 best foreign film Oscar, “The Overture” gives audiences the by-the-numbers life story of Sorn (Anuchit Sapanpong), Thailand’s greatest classical musician.

Sorn learned music from his dad, and his mastery of the ranad, a bamboo xylophone on steroids, led him to fame, fortune, and, ultimately, made him a national treasure. The movie jumps around its timeline like a marimba player; first it’s back in his striving youth, then he’s an old man trying to keep traditions alive in the face of a government ban on classical music. For the most part, the movie passes by in a restrained “Masterpiece Theater” mode, barely registering a pulse.

Lulled into this stupor, audiences will be surprised by the first ranad battle, which is shot like a martial-arts duel. The camera races down the madly vibrating bamboo bars as the sweat streams off the faces of the players and blood pounds through their hearts. They wail on their recalcitrant instruments with mighty wooden mallets. The movie gets so carried away in these sequences that giant flames shoot up behind the players’ heads as they use the pentatonic scale to batter one another into submission. But when the all-out ranad assault ends, the movie feels like a radio with the volume turned all the way down, and you sit there drumming your fingers, waiting for the next massive ranad attack.

– Grady Hendrix

DANDELION
unrated, 94 minutes

Films like “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” and “George Washington” make it easy to forget that the vast majority of debut films by independent directors are utterly forgettable. The good thing about “Dandelion” is that in very short order, no one will remember they’ve seen it.

Written and directed by Mark Milgard, “Dandelion” is the story of Mason Mullich (Vincent Kartheiser), an unusual adolescent of the sort all too commonly found in movies. Quiet, shoe-gazing, and emotionally delicate, Mason couldn’t be more out of place in his town of amphetamine addled sociopaths. Life at home is equally dismal. Arliss Howard plays his father, a small-time politician with a hilariously short temper. Mason’s mom is ineffectual and desperate, relying on anti-depressants to cope with her awful family.

Mason’s life takes an upturn when he meets a free-spirited girl named Danny (Taryn Manning). They hit it off with conversations about love and death – ah, young love! – until Mason’s dad accidentally kills a man while driving through the rain. Mason winds up taking the blame, landing him in juvenile detention for two years. Upon his return, he finds that things have changed: Danny has developed a drug addiction and is dating the town’s head loser. But Mason and Danny get together long enough for things to end tragically.

“Dandelion” strives for poignancy and Tim Orr’s cinematography features some beautiful Midwestern landscapes, but the film ends up seeming hopelessly contrived. Rather than capturing the reality of rural adolescence, “Dandelion” is happy to ape a derivative vision of independent cinema.

– Kevin Lam

WAITING
R, 93 minutes

“Waiting” is a comedy for purposes of categorization only, first at video stores in two months, and then, in about a year, on late-night cable television.

The film satirizes the fun-eatery, a target as easy as it is redundant. Characters blithely pass the movie’s hour and a half at a restaurant called ShenaniganZ, contaminating their patrons’ orders with body fluids, exposing themselves, and making remarks that are offensive mainly because they are so unfunny.

Justin Long plays Dean, the film’s protagonist, who yearns for something more. Ryan Reynolds, playing the impossibly annoying Monty, maintains his devotion to beer, drugs, underage girls, and the status quo of ShenaniganZ. Along the way they find time to remind the audience, a few times too many, just how crazy and perverted they can be. The film’s only saving grace is an all-too-short appearance by Wendie Malick, who seems frighteningly good at dispensing barbs. But why not just watch her on “Just Shoot Me” reruns? The three-minute scene here hardly merits the price of admission.

– Kevin Lam

THE GOSPEL
PG, 103 minutes

If the left is upset about the subversive marketing of films such as “Cinderella Man,” “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” and “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” to Christians, they should be apoplectic with rage over “The Gospel,” Rob Hardy’s retelling of the parable of the prodigal son.

Boris Kodjoe plays David Taylor, the son of a bishop of an energetic midsize Southern church. When his mother dies, he runs away to become a successful R &B singer who partakes of Bacardi and babes instead of finishing seminary and taking over the congregation. Fifteen years later, the bishop is stricken with colon cancer and an egotistic Frank (Idris Elba), formerly David’s best friend, is in line to take over the congregation. When David returns to his father’s dying side, a power struggle ensues.

No character in this story is without blame: Relationships dissolve over pride, laziness, envy, and selfishness. But the good news of Christianity is not that people who believe in Jesus are good, but that they are forgiven for their sins. Many read his parable about the boy who squanders his wealth as a lesson that a lost sheep can return to the flock at any point. Jesus’s more subtle and important point is to admonish the son who is upset by his delinquent brother’s welcome return.

Thankfully, “The Gospel” gets this point and tells it through mind-blowing music, though director Rob Hardy squanders a few opportunities to shed light on more nuanced theological issues, to tackle some of the ethics of the Gospel music industry, or even to tighten up the cinematic or screenwriting efforts. There will be no Oscar nods for performances here, but Yolanda Adams might deserve a Grammy for “Victory,” an inspirational song that sums up the Jesus angle of the film.

– Mollie Ziegler

NEVER BEEN THAWED
unrated, 87 minutes

Inspired, one assumes, by the films of Christopher Guest, “Never Been Thawed” is a mockumentary that follows a group of eccentrics who collect, of all things, TV dinners, and attempt to put on a successful Frozen Entree convention. The society includes a clown barber, a Christian punk singer, and a foul mouthed, deaf alcoholic who has habitually one-sided phone sex conversations.

Writer-director Sean Anders (with writers Chuck LeVinus and John Morris) uses a wide spectrum of jokes, ranging from vulgar to offbeat to satirical, and throws a gag a minute at the audience in hopes that some will stick. For the most part, this formula works. Several of the cracks fall flat, and the Bill Clinton Abstinence Center is probably funnier on paper than it is in the execution. The punchlines that do connect (members of the club eat at a cafe that caters exclusively to on-scene abortion protesters) are often laugh-out-loud funny.

– Edward Goldberger

BEFORE THE FALL
unrated, 110 minutes

“Before the Fall” introduces us to Friedrich Weimer (Max Reimelt), a boxing prodigy who runs away from home to join a Nazi prep school in the summer of 1942, only to find that his fellow Aryans aren’t such nice people after all (surprise!). He’s taken under the wing of a show-no-mercy boxing trainer, and develops a homoerotic relationship with his best friend, Albrecht (Tom Schilling), the timid and philosophical son of the region’s governor. And for good measure, not one but two of his four roommates commit suicide before the film’s end.

Dennis Gansel’s film in German with English subtitles contains a trio of fight scenes with a raw and frenetic feel, but the screenplay (written by Maggie Peren and Mr. Gansel) resembles a soap opera too closely to carry any dramatic weight. The Nazis themselves never come off as anything more than immaturely aggressive, and ultimately the film buckles under the weight of its own predictability.

– Edward Goldberger

THE AGGRESSIVES
unrated, 75 minutes

With barely enough footage to fill 70 minutes, “The Aggressives” is a thin and ultimately boring look at a group of six heavily masculine New York City lesbians: Kisha, a Latina model; Flo, an inner-city Asian; Rjai, who has appeared on “Ricki Lake”; Marquise, who decides to enlist in the army; and Tiffany, who technically is not a lesbian, as she chooses to date pre-op transsexual men. While the documentary, directed by Daniel Peddle, looks into a world seldom seen in film, most of the subjects are not very interesting. Once the taboo is breached, there’s not much to care about. Only Marquise – forced to make drastic changes in order to stay in the armed forces – makes much of a dent. Otherwise, the film comes off as merely a gimmick.

– Edward Goldberger

A TALE OF TWO PIZZAS
unrated, 90 minutes

Ex-Soprano Vincent Pastore stars in “A Tale of Two Pizzas,” a slight but cute take on “Romeo and Juliet.” Mr. Pastore stars as Vito Rossi, whose pizzas are known for their sweet sauce, while his rival Frank Bianco (veteran character actor Frank Vincent) has a famous crust. They’ve been fighting for years, and now they’ve involved their children in the feud. Vito gets his daughter Angela (Robin Paul) to come up with a successful marketing campaign to ruin their rivals, and Frank gets his son Tony (Conor Dubin) to do the same. When Tony and Angela finally meet, they find themselves interested in a lot more than just pizza. No surprises here, but as rainy-day rentals go, “Two Pizzas” works just fine.

– Edward Goldberger