INNOCENCE: Let's get this out of the way, right off the bat: This movie is terrible and you should not watch it. Innocence, while promising you sexiness and demons, is missing something fundamental: It has no characters. Sure, there's a plot—girl goes to creepy-sexy prep school in New York, death and ghosts are everywhere, something isn't right, etc.—but there are no characters, just human bodies in fancy outfits moving around and talking. They are made of nothing. As the protagonist, Beckett, Sophie Curtis gives a hollow, dead-eyed performance, managing only a single bored-teen facial expression for virtually the whole film, even in the face of tragedy and terror. No one else is any better—not her dumb boyfriend, or her gothy friend, or her sexy teacher, or her other sexy teacher, or her idiot dad. The film has less emotional depth and character development than a cereal commercial. The only good thing: Because the demons in this movie feed on virgins, you spend about half the movie rooting for Beckett to get laid, which gives you a flicker of something to care about, the way a personal story the announcer tells you about a football player can elicit a tiny desire in you for that player to do well. But it is just not enough. What an awful film! ANNA MINARD

A LETTER TO MOMO: A girl named Momo and her mother move from Tokyo to a rural island community to recover from the death of Momo's father. Momo's grief is represented in the form of an unfinished letter from her dad—it's just a blank page with "Dear Momo" written at the top—and she spends most of her time being friendless and melancholy and lying around doing nothing all day. Because this is anime, Momo soon meets three mysterious goblins—a tiny, beady-eyed creeper who licks our protagonist's thigh playfully, a medium-sized fish-faced fellow, and a ghastly giant whose face is locked in a permanent sense of shock. They're invisible to most people, and they may or may not have fart-related powers. A Letter to Momo is gorgeous—it looks kind of like an Adrian Tomine comic, in terms of how clean and simple the artwork is—but the story is a little too slow for kids and way too straightforward for adults, making it an uncomfortable hybrid in search of an audience. And though Momo evokes My Neighbor Totoro in subject matter and plot, it doesn't come close to matching Totoro's imaginative powers. There's nothing particularly wrong with A Letter to Momo, but there's nothing particularly original about it, either. PAUL CONSTANT

MAY IN THE SUMMER: In 2009, Cherien Dabis made some waves as the director and writer of Amreeka, a film about a middle-aged Palestinian Christian mother who wins a green card in a lottery and moves with her teenage son from the known troubles of the West Bank to the unknown ones in suburban Chicago. Great performances, rather than story or style, made Amreeka a success. Dabis's latest film, however, fails because it lacks great performances or an interesting story. May (played by the director) arrives in Jordan from the US. She has a face that's caught in the twilight of her youth and the dawn of the middle years. She has a family that's Christian and a fiancé who is Muslim, Ziad (Alexander Siddig). Two lively young women are her sisters, and a sad older woman, Nadine (Hiam Abbass), is her mother. Still heavy on Nadine's mind is a divorce from the father of her daughters, an American named Edward (Bill Pullman). He dropped Nadine for a younger but blandly beautiful Indian woman, Anu (Ritu Singh Pande). This is the global class: They speak English fluently, consume and behave like North Americans, and dress in clothes that are sold in malls and department stores in the capitals of the world. The film's setting, for sure, is interesting (the streets, the desert, the Red Sea, the nightclubs, and so on), but the cinematography, story, and all of the performances are not. And the very moment the story comes alive is also close to the moment that it ends. May in the Summer is no Amreeka. CHARLES MUDEDE

DOWN BY LAW: Wait, why have you never seen this 1986 art-house comedy written and directed by white-and-wild-haired independent film director Jim Jarmusch? Now's your chance! You can't really go wrong with a seedy jailbreak film that stars Tom Waits, John Lurie, and a scene-stealing Roberto Benigni; they play two tough-guy Americans and a somewhat goofy Italian tourist who all meet in a cell, the first two framed for crimes they didn't commit and the Italian imprisoned for killing a man. The story, shot in stark black-and-white, also prominently features the landscapes of the strikingly beautiful pre-Katrina New Orleans and the eerie Louisiana bayou, where the three men flee after they escape from prison. The oddball but optimistic character-driven story is probably best summed up by a line by Benigni, delivered in his broken English: "Ees a sad an' beautiful world." KELLY O