As a thriller, "The Debt" performs many if not all the right moves. Where the John Madden-directed film gets into trouble is in wanting to deal with the Holocaust without being entirely a period film.

Colin Firth, following up on his Oscar-nominated role in "A Single Man," now can claim a place among Britain's finest film actors with his performance as the man who became King George VI.

The satire lands softly in "El Superstar: The Unlikely Rise of Juan Frances," a mockumentary about the music-biz rise and fall of a white guy raised as a Chicano.

Carlo Mazzacurati attempts to blend a folksy comedy about small-town misfits with a filmmaker's dramatic mid-life/career crisis and the Passion of Christ -- and ends up doing none of the above in "The Passion."

Roberta Torre returns to the Sicilian camp of her earlier work in a comedy drama that goes everywhere and nowhere.

Lean and meticulously acted, "Gorbaciof" is a throwback to sober 1970s cinema about lone wolves and small lives on the fringes of the underworld.

"Mr. & Mrs. Smith" relocate to ancient China in the dazzling martial-arts epic "Reign of Assassins," in which Asian superstars Michelle Yeoh and Jung Woo-Sung play an ordinary married couple, each unaware the spouse is a world-class assassin.

Australia may finally have a homegrown blockbuster on its hands with the terrifically engaging "Tomorrow, When the War Began," an action-packed war film for and about teenagers.