Mini-Review: Retro mountain film, set evocatively in the place and time of the bergfilme heyday, Germany in the Thirties. Though the fact-based events don't escape the sameness of mountain-climbing movies, they are smoothly laid out in palm-dampening detail, and torturously stretched to an operatic agony.

Mini-Review: Light sport made of a great figure, Tolstoy in his "eccentric" later years of anti-materialism, nonresistance, celibacy, vegetarianism, or, in short, Tolstoyanism. It remains for the most part a spectacle of disinterested amusement, although something deeper develops around the deathbed. Expertly, if theatrically, acted by Plummer and Mirren, and archive footage of the real personages during the closing credits affirms the studiousness of the project.

Mini-Review: Bridges is pretty much the whole show, and a generous show it is. To outward appearances, he's approximately one-third Kris Kristofferson (the constipated voice and the wheezy wince to produce it) and two-thirds Waylon Jennings (the greasy stringy hair, the bedraggled beard, the shades, the leather vest, the paunch), in no part original but in every part authentic.

Mini-Review: By-the-book buddy comedy. This is director Smith's first time out as a hired gun, strapped with somebody else's script, a script sufficiently potty-mouthed by most standards but perhaps not by Smith's. After the likes of Clerks II and Zack and Miri Make a Porno, no one but the clinically delusional could feel disappointed in him.

Mini-Review: Wartime romance beginning in the spring of 2001 (you know what's coming) and stretching up to the present, staggeringly basic and banal in its specifics, turning on a senseless withholding of information for the sole purpose of contrived misunderstanding and revealed nobility. It issues from a novel by Sparks, always a harbinger of goopy absurdity, and the chief function of Hallstrom, at one time a halfway serious filmmaker, is to pour sunlight, moonlight, and firelight over it like syrup.