THE DESCENT
R, 99 minutes

If you’re taking a horror buff, psychopath, or someone who is too sedated to care, “The Descent” is an ideal date movie. The work of Neil Marshall, a British director best known for 2002’s “Dog Soldiers,” “The Descent” (a UK hit last year) is a cut, slash, and a gouge above Mr. Marshall’s earlier effort — a dank, dreadful, and weirdly popular werewolf movie that, tellingly, seems to have a found a regular berth on the Sci-Fi channel.

A savage drama of spelunking gone awry, Mr. Marshall’s new film covers some of the same underground as 2005’s “The Cave,” but with far more style, chills, thrills, panache, and gore. Admittedly that’s no great challenge, but there are times, notably in its tense and claustrophobic first half, when “The Descent” ascends to the level of classic horror.

There’s nothing particularly unusual about the story line. Six yuppie women — spunky but too headstrong to learn very much from “Deliverance,” “Wrong Turn,” “Pumpkinhead,” or any number of other cautionary tales set in Appalachia — decide to bond with a caving trip to that peculiarly dangerous part of the world. Making matters worse, the not-so divine Juno (nicely played by Natalie Mendoza), the rather problematic leader of the group, secretly decides to change the destination to a remote cave complex that has never been explored before. Or so she thinks.

The descent itself, deep into the caves and deeper into trouble, is brilliantly and grippingly filmed. You’ll feel that you’re there. You’ll wish you didn’t. Then it gets even worse for our six luckless ladies as they discover that uncooperative geology and one really nastily broken leg are the least of their problems. They have company down there, bad company, a tribe of feral Golems, descendants of cavemen too idle to leave the cave, who have evolved in a thoroughly violent direction.

Eventually so does the movie, as it swaps suspense for splatter, slaughter, cannibal snacking, and some of the most satisfying images of human-on-monster combat since that bus ride in the remake of “Dawn of the Dead.” Adding to the merriment, Mr. Marshall throws in a few film geek moments with references to “Aliens,” “Pitch Black,” and, less predictably, “Carrie.” For my part, I couldn’t help thinking of the cave-dwelling Morlocks preying on the Eloi in George Pal’s version of “The Time Machine.” On this occasion, however, the Eloi are smart, in great shape, and have clearly studied “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” They know how to fight back.

– Andrew Stuttaford

JAILBAIT
R, 90 minutes

Pretty boy Randy has a ponytail, a dopey squint, and corn silk hair. Big Daddy Jake has an iron potbelly, tattoos, and wears little half-glasses when he reads. The second Randy gets thrown in Jake’s prison cell to serve out his 25-year sentence, you know nothing good is going to come of it. Jake talks up a storm about hookers in Tijuana, women with hairy breasts in San Jose, and the powers of reading, and it slowly dawns on the viewer that by the time morning rolls around, someone is going to be someone else’s punk.

Trapped almost entirely in a single prison cell with just two actors to carry the movie, “Jailbait” feels more like a claustrophobic theater experience than a film, which makes sense when you learn that Randy is played by Stephen Andy Guirgis, the author of “Jesus Hopped the A Train,” and that the director is the author of “Guinea Pig Solo,” which ran for a while at the Public Theater. Michael Pitt (Jake) is from the movies, however, and his resume reaches from Bertolucci (“The Dreamers”) to Van Sant (“Finding Forrester”) and it shows in the way he casually owns the screen, turning in great close-up acting work.

There’s nothing wrong with movies that should be plays and, even though it’s two years old at this point, “Jailbait” is more interesting than most. But there’s something about prisons that make people who’ve never been there get all “Brokeback Cellmate,” and as the flowery verbal pyrotechnics explodes in mid-air and the inner souls of the two prisoners were illuminated by their red glare, I kind of wished for a little bit of story to go with this mostly welldone exploration of the human soul.

– Grady Hendrix

SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM
R, 91 minutes

Albany, New York: A young gay man is found dead, apparently the victim of a lethal cocktail of Xanex and bourbon. The cops rule it a suicide, but gay private eye Donald Strachey (Chad Allen) doesn’t buy it. Neither does the victim’s lover, or Strachey’s gay secretary. Same goes for Strachey’s partner. Ditto that flirty hunk who plays basketball without a shirt on. And who can blame them? The local straight community, a prejudiced and evasive lot, seems to have organized a major cover-up.

But the soft-boiled whodunit “Shock to the System” is in no real hurry to solve this mystery. The film, which revolves around the shady goings-on at a “reparative center” where gays are counseled on how to turn straight, is more interested in a different crime: the misguided belief that homosexuality is a “lifestyle choice” that its practitioners can be talked or bullied out of. The heterosexual characters, a coterie of waxy middleaged bigots (among them Morgan Fairchild) who seem to have wandered off a soap opera set, are in agreement on this point, and “Shock to the System” makes a mission of, er, setting them straight.

The script is the soggy, didactic stuff of after-school specials. But Mr. Allen, an openly gay actor who made headlines (well, a few) earlier this year for his starring role in the evangelical biopic “The End of the Spear,” capably spreads the film’s gospel of gay rights with an earnest sense of purpose. He plays the detective, a former soldier discharged because of his sexual orientation, with an appealing mix of pluck and pathos; when Strachey narrates his outing and the tragic consequences it engendered, he strikes the film’s most moving chord.

But it’s hard not to see Mr. Allen’s bright performance as a wasted effort. The ensemble alone — buff, persecuted young men and nefarious females — suggests this homespun sermon was written strictly with the choir in mind.

– Darrell Hartman

MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY
Unrated, 90 minutes

In Iraq, even low points can make for nostalgia a few bloody months later, a fact illustrated by a documentary opening today at Cinema Village. Laura Poitras’s “My Country, My Country” recounts the mood in the run-up to Iraq’s historic first elections in January 2005. Eloquent and keenly observant, the film captures a period of palpable anxiety over the fledgling nation’s potential that still seems preferable to today’s ravaged reality.

Ms. Poitras builds her melancholy film around Dr. Riyadh, a Baghdad doctor, family man, and respected community leader. Seen in his office and at home with his wife and nervy children, he’s a quiet, deeply sympathetic figure. But he’s also a firm voice of patriotism and self-determination, pressing his Sunni comrades to vote or be ignored. His own decision to run for office is a risky one, balanced against concerns about retaliation from the mafia-like insurgency.

The entire cast of Iraq’s many foreign visitors also pass before the camera to flesh out the portrait of a delicate democracy in the making. We see American Army reps giving PowerPoint presentations, Australian security contractors buying guns in hotel rooms, a U.N. election overseer who has seen far worse, and even a bushy-tailed newspaper reporter.

One recurring theme in the film is the American tendency to emphasize the election as a media moment (a grand “show,” as one U.S. Army rep puts it), but Ms. Poitras isn’t interested in polemics. Her focus on Dr. Riyadh casts Iraq as an ailing nation that needs to heal itself.

“My Country, My Country” lacks much of the onscreen violence of most Iraq War docs (except for a horrifying cell phone conversation with kidnappers of a relative of Dr. Riyadh’s). But Ms. Poitras’s accomplishment lands with just as much emotional force.

– Nicolas Rapold

VACATIONLAND
Unrated, 104 minutes

Set in Maine, Todd Verow’s gay coming-of-age film takes its title from the state’s nickname as a picturesque tourist destination, but there’s nothing pretty about “Vacationland.” Mr. Verow has shot a glassy-looking, clunkily edited piece of digital cinema. That’s not necessarily the problem. The trouble comes as he dispenses with basic storytelling, workable dialogue, acting, character development, and even a sense of locale.

Somewhere in Bangor, cutie Joe (Brad Hallowell) secretly lusts after his closeted jock friend Andrew (Gregory J. Lucas). They’re high school students, which bears mentioning because a lot of people in this movie look much older or younger than the characters they play. The pair hook up eventually and, seemingly overnight, Andrew is hitting the club scene hard with Joe. (In Bangor, that means one club.)

Explosive and absurd revelations from the past soon follow, to no great effect. Additional barely integrated events include grand theft (courtesy of Joe’s sister) and Joe’s lukewarm seduction of his French teacher to procure a recommendation. The busy young man also takes care of an ailing older artist, who lets him live in his cluttered house. This promising and delicate relationship is left unexplored.

The early work of gay cinema auteur Gregg Araki would seem to be the precedent — or excuse — for the movie’s unlovely aesthetic. But the acting here, instead of ironically playing with camp, is just bad. The actors resourcefully find awkward intonation in even the most mundane exchanges. To be fair, they are also blindsided by hands-off direction and railroaded by a preposterous finale.

It’s not pleasant to dump on a semiautobiographical movie, but “Vacationland” probably fails precisely because of a belief in self-evidence that’s not uncommon for personal movies. Maybe Mr. Verow can take a cue from Mr. Araki, who tried a more polished approach and ended up with last year’s highly acclaimed “Mysterious Skin.”

– N.R.