From there, Sigismondi -- who also wrote the screenplay, partly adapted from Currie's candid and entertaining memoir "Neon Angel" -- traces the band's rise and inevitable implosion, including a scene in which the young Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) totes her guitar to see the school music teacher (played by Robert Romanus, Damone in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High"). After unsuccessfully trying to get her to strum a few chords of "On Top of Old Smokey," he informs her that girls don't play electric guitar, and you can imagine how well that goes over. Jett, obviously, persists, but the members of the band -- including lead guitarist Lita Ford (Scout Taylor-Compton) and Sandy West (Stella Maeve); a fifth character named Robin (Alia Shawkat) was invented for the movie, as a way around legal restrictions surrounding the portrayal of the band's real-life bassist, Jackie Fox -- find their way to one another only with the help of skeezeball genius Fowley. As Michael Shannon plays him -- almost too well -- Fowley is a greasy, lizardlike operator whose single facial expression is a half-sneer, half-scowl. He rules the band by abuse: He calls the girls his "dogs" and sends them out on grueling tours without giving them enough money for food, let alone paying them an actual wage.

But even though Sigismondi doesn't exactly gloss over Fowley's creepitude -- and even though it goes without saying that in real life, the Runaways made far too little money off their brief but blazing run, which included a deal with Mercury Records -- she recognizes that focusing too much on Fowley's exploitation of the girls would turn the movie into his story instead of theirs, focusing on their victimhood rather than their triumph. "The Runaways" is, as you'd expect, a portrait of excess, including lots of sex, drugs and rampaging groupies. But its bigger focus is on the transformative powers of rock 'n' roll. When Fowley strides up to Cherie in a L.A. club and croons, "I like your style," he's picking up on the exact out-of-sight radio signal she's striving to send: Cherie looks great in her satiny outfit and homemade shag haircut, but it's her attitude -- her half-bored, half-expectant pout -- that pushes the look into the stratosphere. Fanning's Cherie has a "don't mess with me" aura, but with a great deal of softness around the edges. Sigismondi is extremely conscious of the line between dewy teenage innocence and the hard-edged, used-up look that can take its place seemingly overnight.

Sigismondi -- who has directed music videos for the White Stripes and Marilyn Manson -- elides some parts of the band's story and compresses others, but she keeps deft control of the picture's overall tone: She doesn't downplay young Cherie's suffering, caused partly by family problems and partly by just growing up too fast, but she doesn't waste time playing junior shrink, either. Benoît Debie's cinematography is L.A.-tawdry when it needs to be and exuberantly glossy when the story calls for it. It is also, in places, beautifully moody and tender, particularly in the affectionate sex scene between Currie and Jett. In her book, Currie writes very simply, and with great protectiveness, about her relationship with Jett: "It ran deep, and at times she was the only one that kept me sane ... How do I explain about a person that was my best friend, someone I would confide in like a sister, someone who to me became a strong, sexual attraction? Well, it's easy ... I can leave it by saying that I had moments with a friend that quake me to this day." In the film, there's no explicit seduction scene, not even a muted one: Sigismondi instead shows Jett and Currie almost literally drifting toward each other, bathed in low light. The sequence is brushed with tenderness and a druggy, blissed-out eroticism. Sigismondi doesn't infantilize her subjects by making it look as if they're merely cuddling, like coy schoolgirls. And the fact that Currie is wearing roller skates makes the moment even more touching: They're one last vestige of little-girl innocence.

My hunch is that a lot of viewers who have watched Fanning grow up in the movies -- many, but probably not all, of them men -- are going to feel uncomfortable seeing her in a role that eroticizes her so frankly. But I think that discomfort speaks to the noisy shout of freedom that the Runaways sounded themselves: At what point is a little girl allowed to be not just a young woman, but her own person? Someday she's going to demand the keys to the car, and not just literally.

That unspoken restlessness is everywhere in "The Runaways," in the way Stewart captures Jett's slightly hunched, long-legged stride, and in the way Fanning's Cherie takes the stage during a show in Japan, wearing a creamy satin bustier and stockings, to sing the band's jailbait-heartbreaker anthem "Cherry Bomb." As the real Cherie Currie did, Fanning (who does her own singing in the film) wraps the microphone cord around her leg, only to unwrap it and whip it around again, a snake-charmer routine that's also an obvious challenge: You think you want this, but can you handle it? That challenge isn't just a sexual come-on: It's a basic question about how to move forward the business of living. Teenagers aren't ready for life, which is exactly why they want to jump in and get on with things. "The Runaways" is all about taking that leap -- and being OK with the bruises after the inevitable fall.

Very early in the picture we get a sense of just how skilled and licensed these technicians are: First, Remy locates one of these poor deadbeat schmoes, who is then tasered and sliced open with a gleaming stainless-steel blade. After the company's property is retrieved -- which might take a bit of rooting around in the offender's gooey insides -- it's popped into a baggie, nice as pie, and returned to company headquarters.

Remy knows this isn't a particularly savory way to make a living, and he's trying to find a way to transfer into the much tidier sales division: His wife (Carice van Houten, of Paul Verhoeven's "Black Book," in a small, thankless role) disapproves of his vocation and wants him to set a better example for the couple's young son. But after a series of setbacks, Remy finds himself beholden to the Union himself. He also tumbles into an unlikely partnership with a drug-addled torch singer, Beth (Alice Braga), and the two join forces to fight back against, you know, the man.

The first third or so of "Repo Men" is good-natured, albeit in a sick way, and the movie works so hard at having a style that you might be momentarily distracted from the fact that there's no real story here -- at least not one worth following. The script, by Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner (adapted from Garcia's novel "The Repossession Mambo"), devolves into a ho-hum narrative of deception and betrayal, with a handy surprise twist at the end. If you squint hard enough, "Repo Men" might be read as a treatise on the ruthlessness of the American healthcare system -- but that's a stretch. Mostly, Sapochnik borrows gimmicky editing techniques from movies like "Trainspotting" (he was, incidentally, a member of that movie's art department) and in general betrays a fanboyish enthusiasm for pictures like "Fight Club" and anything made by Guy Ritchie.

But "Repo Men" isn't even flashy enough to be engaging: Its action sequences are disjointed and dimly lit. There's no passion in them -- they clank but never dazzle. Sapochnik tosses in some camp touches for fun, scoring one of Remy's ruthlessly efficient organ-harvesting forays to Rosemary Clooney's "Sway," for example. But he doesn't have the light touch this kind of grisly-funny violence requires. Everything in "Repo Men" feels belabored and overworked, except, perhaps, the performances. Those have been pretty much tossed off: Law squints, scowls and flexes his exceedingly obvious muscles, but he barely seems connected to the story Sapochnik is trying to tell, much less committed to it. And while Schreiber might have made a devilishly slick bad guy, he has so little to do here that his presence barely registers. "Repo Men" could have been a sick little number laced with disreputable thrills. Instead, it's a self-conscious exercise that keeps advertising its stylishness without actually having any. All of its vital organs are missing in action.

And so with "The Bounty Hunter," the Jennifer Aniston mystery deepens -- well, just a little. Aniston plays New York reporter Nicole Hurley, who works for a paper called the Daily News. (You know this movie is pure fiction when you see that the office she works in is actually populated, with busy, productive newspeople who still have jobs.) Nicole is hot on the trail of a big story involving a suicide that may actually be a murder. But she's also facing a felony charge, and she further complicates the situation by missing her court date. The bounty hunter assigned to haul this lawbreaking cutie-pie into jail is none other than her own ex-husband, Milo Boyd (Gerard Butler), a former detective who now shuffles around in a half-shaven state, working hard to be charming in an "Aw, shucks -- who, me?" kind of way.

In their post-divorce state Milo and Nicole can't stand each other, and he really rubs her the wrong way when he chucks her into the trunk of his car. That's how the movie opens, and it's a vaguely promising beginning: You can see that the director and the screenwriter -- respectively, Andy Tennant and Sarah Thorp -- have tried to inject some verve and wit into this thing. The goal, clearly, was to give us an old-fashioned romantic caper-comedy with lots of crackle between the leads and one or two amusing second bananas or bit players. (My heart leaped with joy when the wonderful, diminutive comic actress Carole Kane showed up as a country innkeeper, though her role is barely a smudge.)

But even though Tennant has a few reasonably entertaining pictures to his credit -- among them the 1998 "Ever After," in which Drew Barrymore plays a completely charming Cinderella -- he fails to give "The Bounty Hunter" the energy it needs. The plot is overly tangled and knotty, and its resolution is dealt with in a hasty verbal explication. Those sins might be excusable, if there were at least some chemistry between the two leads. But Butler and Aniston appear to be tolerating each other at best. Their characters go through the motions of conning one another, but their hearts just aren't in it. On two separate occasions, one handcuffs the other to a bed -- whether that's supposed to be a fear-of-commitment metaphor or a feeble effort to add some kinkiness to the proceedings, the gag just feels tired and worn out.

Regardless, Aniston has her game face on. She may be uninspired in "The Bounty Hunter," but she's doing her damnedest to keep the picture's wobbly wheels spinning. I find myself once again unable to come up with anything particularly damning or complimentary to say about Aniston. This performance, like so many others she's given, at least has a perfunctory glow about it. She doesn't just sleepwalk her way through these half-baked roles, she actually works at them, and her gumption, at least, is admirable.

But what's Butler's excuse? I've been told that Butler is a sex symbol, the kind of guy who turns 99 percent of the female population into crazed chicks out of the old Hai Karate ads. But if he's throwing off any heat, it's failing to reach me. Butler's smile isn't cute or sexy; it's just kind of a doughy smirk. There's nothing smoldering behind his exaggerated swagger; at best, it speaks of "You know you want it!" entitlement. I concede that Butler generally looks artfully rumpled, if you like that sort of thing. Still, my ambivalence about Aniston notwithstanding, I think she deserves better. "The Bounty Hunter" is a comedy of remarriage that makes divorce look like a state of grace.

Yet as Stiller plays him he's both repellent and compelling, a wayward, untethered soul who's nonetheless so close to the shore that our impulse is to reach out and pull him in, not push him further away. That unsettling tension between wanting to flee and wanting to help -- or at least comprehend -- is the very center of "Greenberg," Baumbach's fifth movie and, possibly, his most open-hearted and raw. Baumbach kicked off his career with the clever, modern-feeling comedies of manners "Kicking and Screaming" and "Mr. Jealousy"; his next picture, the semi-autobiographical "The Squid and the Whale" was more self-conscious and a little too preening, with its "Don't worry too much about us suffering middle-class intellectuals, we'll be OK" undertones, although it was easy enough to feel some sympathy for the movie's younger characters, kids caught in the current of their parents' bitterness. But the 2007 "Margot at the Wedding" gave us no one to feel sorry for and too many people to revile: Baumbach's portrait of a family of sad, confused little creatures suffering away in their costly-but-comfy coastal New England summer home hit a new low of cluelessness.

In a rough sense, "Greenberg" is of a piece with those two movies: Baumbach is fascinated by the cruelty that's inflicted by people who are suffering themselves. And he's sensitive to people in pain. As much as I disliked "Margot at the Wedding," I can't forget the scene in which Nicole Kidman's character makes cruel, thoughtless comments about her preadolescent son's changing body, and then waves away the damage she's done by saying, "It's OK, though."

The difference, maybe, is that Roger Greenberg as he's written and played isn't a specimen or an experiment -- he has the everyman believability of a person you might have known once, or probably did know. And his story is framed less by the confines of his own neurosis than by his tentative but growing connection to another character, Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig, who's previously appeared in mumblecore features like "LOL" and "Hannah Takes the Stairs"), the young woman who works as Roger's brother's assistant. Her boss -- he's played by Chris Messina -- and his family are on vacation in Viet Nam. Florence is in charge of looking after the house and the dog, although Roger assures her he can manage all that by himself. And essentially, he can. But for one reason or another, he keeps calling Florence. She's at first puzzled by him, and then intrigued. Then she decides she might actually like him, even though he initially paws at her with a sexual fervor that stems less from hunger than from some internal sense of duty. When Florence, over the phone, tells her best friend about the episode, we can hear the woman's amused assessment ringing out like the punchline to a bad joke: "A mental patient just went down on you!"

Florence is almost as physically awkward as Roger is emotionally: She has a tall, beautiful figure, but she doesn't seem to know what kinds of clothes to hang on it. (In one scene, she lounges at home in a pair of tights and a stretchy, too-small top, breezily unselfconscious about how odd this getup looks.) And she comes off, at first, as one of those spacy young women who float through life with seeming innocence, when in reality they're extremely canny about searching out the kinds of guys who will go overboard to take care of them.

Florence may be a little spacy, but she's not manipulative; she's sensitive, but not necessarily fragile. As Gerwig plays her, in this marvelously unstudied and touching performance, her gaze is both drifty and direct. At times she appears to be a woman who can barely take care of herself. When she goes home with a guy she's just met at a party, she stammers, "I just got out of a long relationship," to which he replies, with a voice that carries more than a hint of a smirk, "This isn't a relationship."

Florence gives in to the loser, partly because she simply wants to; still, an air of self-determination hangs about her shoulders like a mantle. Her powers of self-preservation are wrapped up in her essential kindness. She won't be a doormat, but there's something in Roger Greenberg that she refuses to turn away from. As she says to her best friend, again over the phone, "You can tell that a lot of normal stuff is really hard for him," and that about covers it.

Baumbach wrote the screenplay for "Greenberg," adapting it from a story he wrote with Jennifer Jason Leigh (his partner in real life), and the characters seem carefully calibrated to just drive us crazy enough. When I wrote briefly about the picture last month, from the Berlin Film Festival, I said that at first I couldn't decide whether the characters were driving me nuts or if they were affecting me deeply. That was on the first viewing; the second time, Roger and Florence drove me even crazier and affected me more. Roger may be odd, but more often than not, he's onto something. In the old days, he used to be a member of a semi-successful band; it was he who nixed the group's record deal, and the other members still resent him for it, although one of his former bandmates, Ivan (played, wonderfully, by Rhys Ifans), works valiantly to keep his and Roger's friendship alive. At one point Ivan drags Roger to a party where he's wholly out of place. A native Los Angeleno who's spent years in New York, Roger has no idea where he belongs, and he dresses the part: One of his favorite outfits is a puffer vest and sweater, a getup that's as out of place in the toaster-oven light of Los Angeles as he is.

But as Roger surveys the party, a collection of listless semi-grownups draped on couches having meaningless conversations and little kids running around in devil suits, he observes out loud, "All the men out here dress like children and the children dress like superheroes."

And he's not wrong. Later, as he presents Florence with a mix-CD he's made for her (it includes music by Karen Dalton, a '60s folk singer who was a favorite of Bob Dylan's but who suffered through homelessness and drug addiction before her death in 1993), she looks at him and says plainly, "You like old things." This isn't an accusation but an appraisal, a way of coming to grips with who he is. "Greenberg" is an unsettling but ultimately joyous little picture, a movie that's as self-conscious as anything Baumbach has ever made, and yet far more open: It reaches out to the world instead of insisting on hugging its own pain, tight. There are points in "Greenberg" where Roger treats Florence with inexcusable cruelty; he's cruel to her, in fact, right after he proffers that heartfelt mix-CD. But slowly, gradually, he's getting the hang of not hurting people. "Greenberg" is all about that halting, forward movement. Maybe there's no happy ending for Roger Greenberg, but there's no going back, either, and that counts as progress.

But sometimes the very movies that critics aren't supposed to bother with — and act blasé about when they do — tell us more about what's missing from American mainstream movies than about what's in them. "Our Family Wedding" is a breezy, uncomplicated, unapologetically broad comedy that isn't trying to be the next "Knocked Up" or "The Hangover"; that features a number of appealing actors who don't show up in movies as often as they should (chiefly because they're not white); and that shows us a world in which people of color aren't necessarily struggling financially or dealing with drug problems or trying to stay out of jail.

The major point of conflict in "Our Family Wedding" — that the families are wary of each other because of cultural differences and their unshakable awareness of stereotypes — is exaggerated. But then, exaggeration is often a major ingredient of comedy, and "Our Family Wedding" never pretends it's striving for nuance. That means there are elements of slapstick (including a goat who's intended to be part of the wedding feast but who wreaks havoc on the stacked glassware and elegantly laid tables instead) and sequences in which the Latino guy and the black guy circle each other warily. When Whitaker's character begins to boast, "Once you go black...," Mencia's character counters, under his breath, with "your credit goes bad." The joke itself isn't funny; what is interesting is the way each of these guys has so much invested in proving who's lower on the totem pole, not just in terms of color but in terms of class. In fact, "Our Family Wedding" may have more to do with class than it does with color. Marcus is a physician who's about to go to Laos with Doctors Without Borders, and he wants Lucia to go with him — hence the hasty marriage. Lucia has dropped out of Columbia Law School for reasons of her own, although her father, a mechanic who runs a lucrative towing business and garage in Los Angeles and who's also highly skilled at restoring vintage cars, doesn't know that yet. Marcus' dad is a smooth-talking Los Angeles DJ (Whitaker's smooth, purring voice is put to good use here) who's been footloose and fancy-free for so long that he can't see that his longtime best friend, a successful entertainment lawyer played by the charming, sly Regina King, is perfect for him. This isn't a movie about disadvantaged people who want their children to do better than they've done; it's about people who have worked hard and who want their kids to do at least as well as they've done.

But those are just undercurrents: "Our Family Wedding" isn't a social tract but a comedy, and in places it gives in to rampant silliness. There's a food fight involving wedding cake, and a straitlaced grandmother (played by the wonderful comic actress Lupe Ontiveros) who falls to the floor in shock and dismay when she sees her granddaughter walk through the door with a black guy. (When he politely tries to help her up, she slaps at him with the inefficiency of a baby seal.)

There are some weak links in "Our Family Wedding": Mencia is a little stiff with his lines, and the picture (which was written by Wayne Conley, Malcolm Spellman and Famuyiwa) features not just one but two Viagra jokes, which is two too many. And the movie loses steam when, inevitably but of course temporarily, the two lovers are torn apart by their families' differences. But Famuyiwa (who directed the 2002 romantic comedy "Brown Sugar") gets us through that patch quite swiftly, and almost all of the performers here — including Ferrera, who's characteristically appealing and fresh-looking — are completely in tune with the movie's good-natured vibe.

Those words I mentioned earlier, "clichéd" and "formulaic," are often used by critics and moviegoers to describe works that are a variation on things we've seen many times before. But what's the difference between a cliché and a convention? Conventions are ideas — visual, musical, philosophical, whatever — that resurface in culture again and again, for reasons that we can't always explain. Sometimes they're merely convenient shorthand; other times they represent a deeper kind of shared language. And sometimes a convention is simply something that a lot of us can relate to: For example, the silly, frustrating things that can happen when two families are thrown together by a marriage. (Lord knows that never happens in families in which everyone is white.)

At the end of "Our Family Wedding," the mariachi band hired by the bride's family plays Babyface's "Soon as I Get Home." Is it a cliché to show Mexican guys in big embroidered sombreros performing an unlikely song, in this case one that supposedly "belongs" to black people? Maybe. But I think the larger point is that the song belongs to everybody.

The thanks he gets amounts to a blank gaze and a muddy restating of the nonfact in question. But Miller won't be lulled into the becalmed state of believing everything he hears: He presses forward, to the point of disobeying orders, trying to uncover a truth that no one around him much cares about, simply because it threatens to disrupt their own ambitions and plans. His dogged earnestness is what gives "Green Zone" its sense of wayward, zigzaggy momentum: This is a movie that recognizes there's no straight line to the truth, which is part of what makes it vaguely unsatisfying -- though it's also what keeps it honest.

"Green Zone" is fiction, a jittery, idealistic thriller adapted -- by screenwriter Brian Helgeland -- from elements of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's 2006 exposé "Imperial Life in the Emerald City." The director is Paul Greengrass, a filmmaker who has divided his time and attention between "serious" pictures (like the extraordinary "Bloody Sunday," about the 1972 Derry massacre, and the beautifully crafted but excruciating "United 93") and intelligent crowd-pleasers (like "The Bourne Supremacy" and "The Bourne Ultimatum") that, whatever their flaws might be, at least feel like movies made for grown-ups. Similarly, "Green Zone" comes off as a picture made by a person with a brain as well as a conscience, though the movie's big flaw may be its unblinking insistence that we've been lied to -- you don't have to read too much between the lines to see how adamant Greengrass is about that fact, though he isn't telling us anything particularly new.

But I think the value of "Green Zone" lies less in what Greengrass is telling us than in the mood of helpless dread he takes so much care in building. Miller is an honest and good soldier, not a loose cannon: He's completely willing to look for those WMD, even though he's also become a bit ground down by the fact that he hasn't been able to find any. His mistrust of a slippery-eel government lackey (played by Greg Kinnear, in yet another one of those slippery-eel roles he was born to play) leads him to get into bed -- not literally, of course -- with a CIA analyst (Brendan Gleeson) who fears that the United States' plan to outlaw Saddam Hussein's Baath party will lead to a bloody civil war. As he searches for what he hopes will be the truth -- that note of uncertainty is intentional, the eternal question mark around which the whole movie revolves -- he presses an Iraqi citizen, Freddy (Khalid Abdalla), into service. Freddy insists he only wants to help his country; the complication is that no one -- least of all the U.S. military -- knows what his country really needs.

Woven into a plot that's often murkier and more convoluted than it needs to be is a journalist (Amy Ryan) who's something of a stand-in for Judith Miller (except for the fact that this one actually has principles). Greengrass' methods of visual storytelling aren't as sharp as usual: He's chosen to tell this story in faux-documentary style, which means he uses lots of "Bourne"-style shaky cam and jitterbug cutting. Greengrass generally takes extreme care to craft clear action sequences, in which it's always possible to tell who's coming from where. But the action in "Green Zone" is sometimes uncharacteristically wayward and confusing. And while Greengrass may have been, up to this point, one of the most skillful users of the hand-held camera, there's nothing particularly interesting or effective about its use in "Green Zone." Keeping the camera stationary would have been a far more surprising and suitable choice.

Still, "Green Zone" shows an emotional rawness that's likely to hit home for anyone who still feels shafted by the U.S. government's ineptitude in Iraq. This is a movie made up of exposed nerve endings; it never capitulates to the idea that it's OK to smooth out the facts. In his forward to the recent paperback edition of Chandrasekaran's book, Greengrass writes, "Sometime in early 2004, I began work on a film set in Iraq. I wanted it to be a thriller -- urgent, contemporary, filled with intrigue: A movie that would hopefully take some of the huge audience that had enjoyed the Bourne series to a real-world setting and encourage them to consider whether the mistrust and paranoia that characterized Bourne's world was so far-fetched after all." And while I find myself repeatedly asking myself if Matt Damon really is all that good an actor, watching him in "Green Zone" reminded me that there's a particular type of guileless, principled guy that he often plays perfectly. In that respect, his Roy Miller is a lot like Jason Bourne, a man who's been trained to be a tool of the system but who insists on thinking for himself -- not to be contrarian but as a way of staying true to some standard of decency he's set for himself. Near the end of "Green Zone," we see Damon's Miller, weighed down by full combat gear, getting ready to leave the luxury room, located in an appropriated palace, where he's temporarily set up operations. Damon, with his all-American honest-lad good looks -- not to mention his sand-colored fatigues and combat boots -- looks out of place amid all that grandeur. And somehow -- even though his face wears the dutiful blank expression of a good soldier -- he also looks disgusted by it.