THE BANK JOB
R, 110 minutes

The ability to uncover the details and revel in the exotic customs of faraway places and long-passed historical eras is one of cinema’s most prosaic yet essential functions. Director Roger Donaldson’s “The Bank Job” re-creates the true crime of its title and the 1971 London milieu in which it took place with such unrelenting genre-tourist superficiality that it might best be described as the Epcot Center of period cops-and-robbers films.

“The Bank Job” sends heist-flick clichés, stock characters, and impersonations of actual public figures down a convoluted story track. Ex-model turned British Secret Service patsy Martine (Saffron Burrows) entices her old neighborhood buddies, led by reformed yob Terry (button-down action hero Jason Statham, putting off the bone-crunching to the last reel), into a can’t-fail assault on a safe-deposit box vault below the Baker Street sidewalks of Central London. But the robbery does fail, sort of. The compromising photos of a certain royal personage that compelled MI-5 to blackmail Martine into criminal activity in the first place threaten to return to the villainous hands that clicked the shutter. At the same time, Terry and the lads run afoul of the implacable and homicidal gangster moralist “porn king of SoHo,” Mr. Vogel (David Suchet).

Post-caper, “The Bank Job” groans under the weight of more than a dozen underworld and Whitehall conspirators who crowd out logic, suspense, and fun with growling Cockney threats and purring Tory mendacity. “The Bank Job” shuffles history, coincidence, and predictable plot twists into an unappealing narrative dog’s dinner in which the facts and ironies of the real Baker Street “Walkie-Talkie Robbery” (the British government has kept the crime shrouded in a “D-notice” national security blackout for 37 years) seem as farfetched as the made-up bits.

Bruce Bennett

FIGHTING FOR LIFE
Unrated, 89 minutes

Rarely does a documentary pack enough punch to incite an audience to collectively gasp, sniffle, or laugh. But “Fighting for Life,” Terry Sanders’s new film about members of the American military medical corps, will leave few unmoved.

The sight of all those open wounds, amputated limbs, and emotional interviewees who describe the unenviable task of relating bad news to the loved ones of wounded or deceased servicemen is simply devastating. The film, by turns gut-wrenching and awe-inspiring, tracks the career arcs of military medics, who begin as sleep-deprived freshmen at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. Aside from dissecting cadavers in an anatomy lab, they must also run obstacle courses with stretchers on their shoulders and toy with prosthetics that appear to have been procured from a horror movie set.

It doesn’t take long for reality to sink in, though, nor for the gleaming idealists in graduation portraits to become weathered seen-it-alls at U.S. Army medical outposts in Iraq and Germany, as well as the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Whether inside a fully equipped hospital or under a field tent with few resources at their disposal, the doctors dedicate themselves to repairing broken bodies and mending shattered spirits.

Mr. Sanders, who won Academy Awards for 1954’s “A Time Out of War” and 1994’s “Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision,” has constructed a coherent portrait from a vast collection of interviews with the medics, injured servicemen, and USU students and faculty members in various parts of the globe. His urgent hand-held camerawork often makes all the injuries captured on film even tougher for viewers to stomach. But this isn’t “M*A*S*H,” and no one has time for martinis.

Martin Tsai

PARANOID PARK
R, 85 minutes

Gus Van Sant is his own boss again. The director who went from making scrappy indie films like “Drugstore Cowboy” (1989) and “My Own Private Idaho” (1991) to feel-good mainstream fare like “Good Will Hunting” (1997) and “Finding Forrester” (2000) has, in recent years, forfeited a healthy portion of his audience in pursuit of something less conventional. The results have been mixed, but they’ve been more interesting than Mr. Van Sant’s attempts at traditional Hollywood storytelling.

“Gerry” (2002), “Elephant” (2003), and “Last Days” (2005) formed a loose trilogy of cinematic experiments. Each was an entropic countdown to death observed with unnerving detachment, especially “Elephant,” Mr. Van Sant’s coolly aestheticized re-enactment of a high school massacre.

Depending on your point of view, those films were groundbreaking or pretentious, provocatively ambiguous, or annoyingly noncommittal. Even if Mr. Van Sant didn’t manage to coax a point from his careful compositions, he kept a grim focus on his subjects. That’s not the case in “Paranoid Park,” a skateboarding tone-poem with an awkward, underdeveloped element of film noir. Mr. Van Sant’s latest work gets its teenage milieu right, but, like its withdrawn protagonist, withholds too much to resonate very deeply.

Here the director is clearly more interested in sketching a portrait of modern adolescence than in fleshing out the dark drama at the film’s center. A sizable portion of “Paranoid Park,” which made its premiere at last year’s New York Film Festival, is filmed in slow motion, with skater home videos shot in grainy Super 8 mm serving as a kind of visual refrain. Boys on boards glide and soar through the film’s eponymous skate park, a graffiti-scrawled playground of ramps and half pipes in Mr. Van Sant’s home city, Portland, Ore. Getting airborne, the slow-motion sequences suggest, is how disaffected teens transcend the hormone-addled grind of quotidian life, and one senses that Mr. Van Sant could watch their graceful takeoffs and landings all day.

Darrell Hartman

CJ7
PG, 88 minutes

You’ve got to give it to Stephen Chow: He certainly knows how to defy expectations.

Following the smashing international success of 2001’s “Shaolin Soccer” and 2004’s “Kung Fu Hustle,” the Chinese filmmaker’s new project, “CJ7,” is essentially a children’s film about the magic of toys, the loyalty of pets, and the power of one young, unhinged imagination.

Ti (Mr. Chow) and his young son Dicky (Xu Jiao, in actuality a girl) are two poor souls struggling to get by. Their faces are perpetually obscured by a coat of dirt and their crumbling apartment building appears to have been recently bombed. Unsurprisingly, Dicky’s spotty hygiene is making his life at school an utter misery. But all this changes one night when Ti finds a small green orb in the junk heap that mysteriously shape-shifts into a cuddly puppy, with a shaggy white head atop a truncated, bright green body. As it coos and struts, the creature, later dubbed CJ7, resembles a mix between Gizmo from “Gremlins” and Puss in Boots, from the “Shrek” franchise.

In a delightful fantasy sequence, young Dicky dreams that his new furry friend will improve everything about his life. But when he awakes, he realizes that his small computer-generated comrade isn’t a cure-all, just a loyal sidekick with little more than friendship to offer.

For a filmmaker such as Mr. Chow, who has seemed so inspired in the past by the thrill of the thundering spectacle, “CJ7” is a reserved and comfortable departure. Unlike other friends-from-space adventures, such as Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.,” in which the interstellar visitor sparks a national security crisis, “CJ7” sticks to the intimate roots of its premise, telling the relatively simple story of a lonely child who finds solace in his disappointing life while playing with his new magical puppy. The fiery Ms. Jiao is well suited to Mr. Chow’s first family film, a yelling, sprinting, raring-to-go ball of energy. But once the conceit has been established and Dicky’s imagination takes flight, there isn’t a whole lot for “CJ7” to do. Boy meets dog, likes dog, takes dog along for a fun day on the town, and realizes that, even with the dog in tow, life’s problems persist. If anything, the film’s commentary about class disparities in rural China and its sober recognition that no new high-tech toy possesses the power to create true happiness is a bit of a downer.

S.J.S.