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William Branigin: President says he is troubled by the political storm that forced a Dubai firm to abandon plans to manage operations at six U.S. ports. [Washington Post]

In July 2003, Doug Bruce finds himself on a train in Coney Island with no idea who he is or how he got there. Diagnosed with total amnesia, he is identified by a girl hew as dating, and reunited with his family, friends, and a former lover. He doesn’t remember them. A friend named Rupert Murray makes this documentary about him, which raises unsettling questions. The “new” Bruce is nicer and more focused than the old one, those who knew him say. He begins a new life, gets a new girlfriend, finds himself satisfied with his new collection of memories and not too eager to regain the old ones. Who are we, anyway? The kind of movie that leads to long philosophical conversations.

Tim Allen plays a prosecutor who is trying his daughter’s high school teacher, who torched a lab that was experimenting on animals. Allen is bitten by a 300-year-old dog from a monastery, and periodically turns into a dog himself, which makes both his professional and personal lives much more difficult. Robert Downey, Jr., is the animal experimenter, who in a movie where a man becomes a dog nevertheless manages to play the story’s weirdest character. There is an age above which this movie is unnecessary, and it may be in the low double digits.

In July 2003, Doug Bruce finds himself on a train in Coney Island with no idea who he is or how he got there. Diagnosed with total amnesia, he is identified by a girl hew as dating, and reunited with his family, friends, and a former lover. He doesn’t remember them. A friend named Rupert Murray makes this documentary about him, which raises unsettling questions. The “new” Bruce is nicer and more focused than the old one, those who knew him say. He begins a new life, gets a new girlfriend, finds himself satisfied with his new collection of memories and not too eager to regain the old ones. Who are we, anyway? The kind of movie that leads to long philosophical conversations.

Tim Allen plays a prosecutor who is trying his daughter’s high school teacher, who torched a lab that was experimenting on animals. Allen is bitten by a 300-year-old dog from a monastery, and periodically turns into a dog himself, which makes both his professional and personal lives much more difficult. Robert Downey, Jr., is the animal experimenter, who in a movie where a man becomes a dog nevertheless manages to play the story’s weirdest character. There is an age above which this movie is unnecessary, and it may be in the low double digits.

Tsotsi (the name means “thug”) leads a gang that sets out each morning to steal something, and kills with cocky recklessness. He is young, lives alone in a room built on top of a shack, had a cruel childhood that formed his bitter savagery. One day he finds himself in a stolen car with a baby boy. The infant’s total helplessness touches to the young man. He tries to care for the child, then at gunpoint forces a nursing mother to feed it. But a transformation is taking place. Observant, not sentimental, performances by Presley Chweneyagae and Terry Pheto as Tsotsi and the mother, in another high mark of the South African filmmaking renaissance. Oscar winner.

Ed Harris was a famous novelist and is now a reclusive drunk, living in a shack behind the big house in Michigan. His daughter (Zooey Deschanel) arrives on a wary visit. The house is occupied by Will Ferrell, as a shy, gentle caregiver, and Amelia Warner, as the writer’s former student. These people are hanging on by each other’s fingernails. Harris gradually peers out from behind his gloom, and his daughter learns enough to love him or forgive him, but not both. A sad story told in a cold season about lonely people, with perception and tenderness. Written and directed by the playwright Adam Rapp.

Johnny Depp stars as the Second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), who died at 33 of venereal diseases which ate away his nose, so that he attended Parliament wearing a silver replacement. John Malkovich is Charles II, who is amused by the earl’s impudence, and gives him free rein, up to a point. The earl tirelessly beavers away at wretched excess, is fascinated by the actress Elizabeth Barry (Samantha Morton) because she can out-think him, and is tolerated up to a point by his wife (Rosamund Pike). Depp is brave as the decaying rouge and voluptuary who reaches such an alarming state that it is not a matter of liking or disliking him, but hoping not to catch something from him. Directed by Laurence Dunmore, bared on the play by Stephen Jeffreys.

Tsotsi (the name means “thug”) leads a gang that sets out each morning to steal something, and kills with cocky recklessness. He is young, lives alone in a room built on top of a shack, had a cruel childhood that formed his bitter savagery. One day he finds himself in a stolen car with a baby boy. The infant’s total helplessness touches to the young man. He tries to care for the child, then at gunpoint forces a nursing mother to feed it. But a transformation is taking place. Observant, not sentimental, performances by Presley Chweneyagae and Terry Pheto as Tsotsi and the mother, in another high mark of the South African filmmaking renaissance. Oscar winner.

Ed Harris was a famous novelist and is now a reclusive drunk, living in a shack behind the big house in Michigan. His daughter (Zooey Deschanel) arrives on a wary visit. The house is occupied by Will Ferrell, as a shy, gentle caregiver, and Amelia Warner, as the writer’s former student. These people are hanging on by each other’s fingernails. Harris gradually peers out from behind his gloom, and his daughter learns enough to love him or forgive him, but not both. A sad story told in a cold season about lonely people, with perception and tenderness. Written and directed by the playwright Adam Rapp.

Johnny Depp stars as the Second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), who died at 33 of venereal diseases which ate away his nose, so that he attended Parliament wearing a silver replacement. John Malkovich is Charles II, who is amused by the earl’s impudence, and gives him free rein, up to a point. The earl tirelessly beavers away at wretched excess, is fascinated by the actress Elizabeth Barry (Samantha Morton) because she can out-think him, and is tolerated up to a point by his wife (Rosamund Pike). Depp is brave as the decaying rouge and voluptuary who reaches such an alarming state that it is not a matter of liking or disliking him, but hoping not to catch something from him. Directed by Laurence Dunmore, bared on the play by Stephen Jeffreys.

A family on vacation is touring nuclear test zones when they stop at the only gas station in 200 miles and a slobbering degenerate helpfully suggests a shortcut. That makes them prey for a demented mutant incestuous cannibalistic pickax gang. The family members bravely do one stupid thing after another, and we find out why they were towing an Airstream: They needed passenger space for the movie’s long list of victims. The idea of survivors living in a nuclear wasteland is intriguing, but not if they have survived only to kill and eat, and are great disappointments when it comes to conversation.