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So awarding a prize to "Going the Distance" in this context is a little like giving an A for effort to the only student in your class who isn't dropping out to take a job at Chick-Fil-A. It's the only romantic comedy to emerge from Hollywood this year that doesn't feel completely defensive and cynical. It doesn't condescend to its audience or shamelessly yank the emotional chains of middle-aged female viewers. It isn't set in Romcom USA, that mysterious alternate universe where the clothes and cars look convincing but everyone's apartment is three times too large and the conversations and situations all seemingly belong to the Mary Tyler Moore era.

Most impressively, Burstein and screenwriter Geoff LaTulippe do not seem to share the widespread assumption that romantic comedy is a contemptible if economically necessary phenomenon, based entirely on feeding over-35 women a steady drip of the dumbest possible clichés about guys and gals and that joyous-yet-painful thing that happens between them. (Besides home mortgages, I mean. And pubic lice.) "Going the Distance" doesn't always click but has a distinctive, sardonic voice and vision. It at least tries to capture the social world of Erin (Barrymore) and Garrett (Long), a couple of smart but underemployed post-collegiate types who meet over the Centipede machine in a New York bar, smack dab in the middle of a shrinking economy.

Now, am I claiming that "Going the Distance" is a Zeitgeist-capturing yarn of love in our hookup culture, one that may capture the mood of an entire generation? I am not. It has a little of that ambition, which is admirable and all. In bringing together a documentary filmmaker (Burstein made the docs "American Teen" and "The Kid Stays in the Picture") with an unknown screenwriter, this film's producers seem to be splitting the difference between conventional rom-com and more "alt" fare, like the films of indie auteurs Joe Swanberg or Andrew Bujalski. But I strongly suspect the skeptics are right. Of course romantic comedy could come back, and it undoubtedly will. But at the moment it's a moribund genre, with little appeal to the "Twilight" generation of girls and young women. All a pleasant, offbeat movie like "Going the Distance" can hope to do is swim halfheartedly against the ebbing tide.

I spent a little while after watching "Going the Distance" trying to puzzle out its flaws and limitations -- the directing is better than the writing, the actors rise above a pedestrian plot, etc. -- before arriving at the perfect summary: It's kind of good, but not all that great! (Hear that sound? That's the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, whooshin' toward me.) Thing is, Barrymore is so terrific as Erin, a ballsy, physical, foulmouthed guys' gal who's universes away from your average neurotic rom-com heroine, that you keep thinking a movie built around her ought to be awesome. So the fact that is isn't is continually surprising.

When Erin and Garrett go home together after their little contretemps at the Centipede machine -- she was about to hit a high score before he screwed it up -- neither one of them is exactly thinking about a great romance. He broke up with somebody else quite recently (OK, minutes earlier). They do bong hits and make out. She pretends to be outraged that Garrett's hopeless roommate Dan (comedian Charlie Day) is "DJ'ing the hookup," i.e., playing the "Top Gun" score through the flimsy apartment walls while they get it on. They actually have breakfast together the next morning, complete with sincere conversation -- but when Garrett calls Erin later, she still doesn't know his name.

This whole sequence of scenes around the couple's first meeting is so charged with tenderness, toughness and combative, outrageous humor -- and that brash, braying Barrymore laugh -- that one can only wish the rest of "Going the Distance" lived up to it even halfway. But as Garrett and Erin fall in love, Burstein almost immediately resorts to a montage of, God help me, the couple frolicking on the beach or strolling Manhattan's streets hand in hand. See, their idyll is to be short-lived: Erin's a summer intern at a New York newspaper who's heading back to grad school in California, while Garrett works at a record label that used to be hip and is now hoping to survive by finding the next Jonas Brothers.

Yes, the fact that they both work in crippled or dying industries is meant to be significant, but like a lot of other things in LaTulippe's script it comes off as intriguing but a little half-baked. Why is Garrett and Dan's other buddy, Box (Jason Sudeikis), so interested in finding a girlfriend over 45 who will, in some epistemological sense, not be a cougar? Why must we learn strange but irrelevant details about the sex life of Erin's unhinged married sister (played by Christina Applegate, who is very funny)? I think the only reason is that screenplays in the post-Tarantino, late-Apatow era must garnish their supporting characters with all kinds of potentially symbolic eccentricities.

Inescapably, "Going the Distance" gets more flaccid and ordinary as it manages the highly predictable yuks emerging from Garrett and Erin's efforts to keep their relationship going across 3,000 miles of low-budget separation. I never lost interest in this couple, who have a relaxed and natural chemistry together (as I guess they should). If Long's no match for Barrymore, he's still a genial comic performer, and even the most ordinary parts of the film deliver plenty of laughs. You never have the feeling that "Going the Distance" got made because of econometric projections; the people involved actually like it, and that counts for a lot. Can it save the rom-com? Definitely not, but I'm not sure anything can.

Thompson's previous film, released in the United States as "Avenue Montaigne," was a modest art-house hit in 2007, and her new "Change of Plans" feels like a potential early-fall crowd pleaser. It assembles a large group of old friends (along with a few wild cards and newcomers) for one of those volatile, incestuous dinner parties that represents a turning point for every one of the guests, mostly in unanticipated fashion. Then Thompson skips forward to the night of the reunion dinner exactly a year later, when we find out whose marriage has crumbled and whose has unexpectedly gotten stronger, who has become a bestselling author or opened a tapas bar, who has wound up in a wheelchair or has seen her cancer go into remission, etc.

There's nothing even a little bit original about any of this, but in a way that's the point. Thompson's specialty lies in the superlative execution of a French light-comic style inherited as much from Beaumarchais and Molière as from Jean Renoir. "Change of Plans" may not be earth-shattering cinema, but it's masterfully structured and edited (by Sylvie Landra) with a first-rate cast. We begin with a scene of awkwardness and discomfort — specifically, with pit-bull lawyer and dinner hostess M.L. (Karin Viard) in the gynecological stirrups while her doctor, Mélanie (Marina Foïs) gossips on the phone with her lover. We end, of course, with redemption, in the form of an impromptu flamenco dance party for all concerned.

Gallic comedy superstar Dany Boon plays Piotr, M.L.'s hapless but lovable househusband, who is blissfully unaware of the affair she's trying to cut short with roguish contractor Jean-Louis (Laurent Stocker). Then we have guilt-stricken Jewish oncologist Alain (Patrick Bruel), whose ultra-Catholic wife is the above-mentioned cheatin' gynecologist. (She's sleeping with a jockey she met at Mass.) M.L.'s neurotic sister, Juliette (Marina Hands), is eager to avoid her estranged dad, Henri (Pierre Arditi), who bears a suspicious resemblance to her older sea-dog boyfriend, Erwann (Patrick Chesnais).

But the dramatic centerpiece in "Change of Plans" is the handsomest, most conventional and unhappiest marriage on display, that between hotshot lawyer Lucas (Christopher Thompson, the director's son and co-writer) and desperate housewife Sarah (Emmanuelle Seignier, aka Mme Roman Polanski). There's a nice rhythmic and tonal balance at work here: Everybody else in the movie is trending toward some version of comic resolution, of forgiving their own sins and those of others. There's no joyous exit door available for these gorgeous but doomed aggro-yuppies.

It may seem like damning with faint praise to praise Thompson for the precision and pace of her scenes, or her actors for their exquisite comic timing: the sharp-edged, sexy Viard, with her litany of double-takes; the dreamy, directionless Boon, sleepwalking into and then out of an implausible romance; Arditi and Chesnais, dancing together to '50s rock 'n' roll. But after a while technique adds up to emotional substance, in a funny way. As soon as I forgot to be irritated by the characters in "Change of Plans," they made me laugh and then they made me cry.

"Change of Plans" is now playing at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York, with wider release to follow. It's also available on demand from IFC and from many cable and satellite providers.

Something comparable probably happened to the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the Egyptians, but British writer-director Neil Marshall's intense period action flick "Centurion" captures the Roman Empire's second-century frontier, in what we'd now call Scotland, as a cautionary example. This is such a well-rehearsed kind of movie — the bloody, filthy, sword-and-sandal epic, customarily starring Russell Crowe or Mel Gibson or some other handsome dude with 'tude — that it's startling to discover how compelling a good example can still be. "Centurion" has its moments of manly cornpone camaraderie and certainly isn't blazingly original, but it offers riveting storytelling, gorgeous cinematography and scenery, loads of gore, and a politically complicated history lesson.

Best known so far for his 2005 gals-versus-troglodytes horror film "The Descent," Marshall belongs to an intriguing new generation of British directors who combine a pop sensibility with a traditional level of craftsmanship. "Centurion" brings him together with Irish actor Michael Fassbender (of "Hunger" and "Fish Tank"), a tremendously good-looking rogue who's going to become a huge star if his intelligence and good taste don't get in the way. Fassbender fills the Crowe-Gibson role here as Quintus Dias, a Roman centurion who leads a small group of comrades deep into the Scottish wilderness after their legion has been ambushed and shredded by a band of bloodthirsty Pictish barbarians.

Except that Marshall never allows us, or even Quintus, to feel anywhere near that comfortable about who the good guys and bad guys are. Like most other soldiers, Quintus is fighting for his personal honor, for his comrades, for a commander he loves and respects. He doesn't care one way or the other about the abstract ideal of the "pax Romana" — bringing order and civilization to a distant, violent land — and he comes face to face with the fact that the Picts, the native Celts of northern and western Britain, don't want any part of it.

Of course we're rooting for Quintus and his men to get out of their ancient-world Big Muddy and come home again. They are decent and honorable soldiers (with one notable exception), and in the grand tradition of war movies, they come from all over the multiracial and multiethnic Roman Empire: There's a Greek, an African, a Middle Eastern tribesman, a Roman street tough and a guy who dreams about buying a farm in the Tuscan countryside if he ever gets out of this shithole.

But as "Centurion" progresses, it's tough to avoid the sensation that these guys are in the wrong place at the wrong time. If we believe the lurid stories told by Pictish king Gorlacon (Ulrich Thomsen), his people have suffered from Rome's rape-and-pillage policies for years, and let's say that as the story unfolds his desire for vengeance becomes highly understandable. He sends his most fearsome warriors after Quintus and his men, led by the Mata Hari-like Étain (Olga Kurylenko), a mute and bloodthirsty female warrior. (Women sometimes did go to war among the Celts, but I don't know how many of them had two-toned hair and Cleopatra-style eye makeup.)

If "Centurion" is a blend of old-school action movie, historical fable and outright fantasy, Marshall handles all those elements ably. Fassbender gives a tremendously demanding physical performance and makes a charismatic hero who is faced little by little with the realization that all the moral certainties of his world have melted away in the British mud and blood and snow. (Quintus is supposed to speak Pictish, but unless my ears deceive me, Fassbender is speaking the Irish Gaelic he most likely learned in school. The Picts presumably spoke a language closer to Welsh or Breton.)

Into the fantasy category falls Quintus' liaison with an exiled Pictish witch named Arianne, played by the gorgeous English actress Imogen Poots (and I really hope she can become a star with that name). It's a lovely but not entirely convincing interlude, suggesting that individuals — Quintus, you, me, Conrad's Mr. Kurtz — have the option of escaping from history. Part of Marshall's genius lies in the fact that you're free to enjoy "Centurion" as a rousing, high-integrity B movie. But I'm afraid he's also preaching an inescapable historical gospel on how the vanity and corruption of powerful empires lead them to learn the same painful lessons, over and over again.

"Centurion" opens Aug. 27 in Boston, Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Seattle. It opens Sept. 3 in Atlanta; Denver; New Haven, Conn.; St. Louis; San Diego; Santa Cruz, Calif.; and Washington, with more cities to follow.

Like all modern nations, France always represented a confluence of different peoples, but for many years the official republican ideal prevented much public discussion of ethnic differences, and enabled a quasi-official racism and anti-Semitism. In the very first scene of "Army of Crime," Guédigian -- himself a native-born French citizen of Armenian ancestry -- calls this dramatically into question. As a busload of wartime prisoners is transported to an unknown destination by their Nazi-collaborator jailers, we hear an unseen narrator reciting an honor roll of names, each one followed by the phrase "mort pour la France" ("died for France"). The surnames are Polish or Hungarian or Armenian or Jewish or Russian or Italian -- hardly any would have been recognized by a nationalistic Frenchman of those years as "truly French."

There's a lot of historical truth to that, especially because the Resistance in Nazi-occupied France was closely tied to international socialism, a movement that attracted many people from Eastern Europe, the southern Mediterranean and the Jewish diaspora. Guédigian is of course making the point that the French-identified majority population largely capitulated to Nazi rule and raised no strong objections to ethnic cleansing -- whatever they may have wanted to claim later -- while newcomers risked their lives for the supposed ideals of "liberté, égalité et fraternité."

You've got to stick with "Army of Crime" for a bit until its characters and plot start to cohere, but it tells the largely true story of a daring, ragtag Resistance unit led by Armenian poet Missak Manouchian (Simon Abkarian) and his wife, Mélinée (gorgeous French starlet Virginie Ledoyen). Others in the group include Marcel Rayman (Robinson Stévenin), a handsome young French Jew who carries out a reckless series of public assassinations of German soldiers, a Hungarian family who host clandestine gatherings in their Parisian bar, and a swaggering, streetwise Polish Communist named Henri Krasucki (Adrien Jolivet) -- who would actually survive the war and become a player in French left-wing politics.

It's entirely possible that Tarantino had the Manouchian group in mind when inventing his fictional Resistance cell for "Inglourious Basterds." They had no training, few resources and were not especially well organized, but they flew so close to the ground -- and got such good leaks from sympathetic French authorities -- that they bedeviled and embarrassed the Nazis for years, finally staging a big attack that Berlin could not ignore. No, they didn't assassinate Hitler and prevent the worst crimes of the Holocaust. But as "Army of Crime" demonstrates, they did lay down their lives courageously, on behalf of a nation that wasn't entirely sure it wanted them to.

"Army of Crime" is now playing in New York and San Francisco, with more cities to follow. 

On the other hand, Tillman's story remains poorly understood and has little social resonance. As a colleague of mine recently put it, Tillman didn't fit, either as a living human being or a posthumous symbol into the governing political narratives of our polarized national conversation. That's true whether you're on the right or the left. If he struck many people at first as a macho, hyper-patriotic caricature -- the small-town football hero who went to war without asking questions -- it eventually became clear that was nowhere near accurate. Yet Tillman was also more idiosyncratic than the equally stereotypical '60s-style combat vet turned longhair peacenik.

Mind you, Tillman might well have become a left-wing activist, had he lived longer. He had read Noam Chomsky's critiques of U.S. foreign policy, and hoped to meet Chomsky in person. But as Amir Bar-Lev's haunting and addictive documentary "The Tillman Story" demonstrates, Tillman was such an unusual blend of personal ingredients that he could have become almost anything. It's a fascinating film, full of drama, intrigue, tragedy and righteous indignation, but maybe its greatest accomplishment is to make you feel the death of one young man -- a truly independent thinker who hewed his own way through the world, in the finest American tradition -- as a great loss.

"The Tillman Story" was made with the close cooperation of Tillman's parents and siblings, who have worked tirelessly over the past six years to expose the circumstances of Tillman's death and the extensive military coverup that followed it. The film is also meant, to some extent, as an antidote to journalist Jon Krakauer's 2009 book "Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman," which the family strongly disliked. (Tillman's widow, Marie, allowed Krakauer to read Tillman's journals, a decision other family members apparently regret.) Bar-Lev's dual goals are to document the family's long crusade to pry the grisly truth about Tillman's death and the ensuing campaign of lies from the military bureaucracy, and, perhaps more important, to capture the unconventional background that produced someone as unusual as Pat Tillman in the first place.

To use the Shakespearean cliché, Tillman was a man of many parts, and that goes back to his childhood in a rural California valley south of San Jose, where his parents, Pat Sr. and Mary, encouraged an almost libertarian blend of self-reliance and free thinking in their sons. (The Tillmans are now divorced, but have worked closely together on the campaign to unpack the military's deceitful behavior.) He emerged as a mixture of qualities that seem simultaneously liberal and conservative, all-American and heterodox. He was a football star and avid outdoorsman who read Emerson; an agnostic or atheist who read the Bible, the Quran and the Book of Mormon out of intellectual curiosity; a man who relished the high-testosterone simulated combat of sports, and excelled at it, while also maintaining an introspective personal journal he allowed no one to read.

As a friend of mine recently observed, many of Tillman's characteristics would seem completely normal among the metropolitan educated classes: He never went anywhere without a book, and typically rode his bike rather than driving a car. But Tillman wasn't a bearded, chai-drinking grad student riding that bike to yoga class in Brooklyn or Silverlake or Ann Arbor. He was the starting strong safety for the Arizona Cardinals, and parked his bike next to his teammates' Porsches and tricked-out Escalades. Bar-Lev's film is a bit light on Tillman's football career, and doesn't include any interviews with teammates. You have to wonder how much they liked or understood him.

Now you're asking the obvious question: If Pat Tillman was such a smart and interesting fellow, why did he walk away from an easy life of fame and money and volunteer for combat on the other side of the world, where he wound up standing on an Afghan hillside and shouting, "I'm Pat fucking Tillman!" at somebody who was shooting him in the head with a machine gun? There's no easy answer, and in making his film with the Tillmans, Bar-Lev has agreed not to go too far in trying to answer it directly. The Tillman brothers and parents want to respect Pat's refusal to discuss his reasons in public, so the film never quotes from the journals that Krakauer read.

Nonetheless I think "The Tillman Story" and Krakauer's book paint roughly the same picture, in that Tillman's decision to go to war was more personal and philosophical than ideological. He believed that the U.S. was at war after 9/11 -- with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, not Iraq or Afghanistan or Muslims in general, Krakauer says -- and decided he had a moral responsibility to take part. He believed in an old-fashioned code of masculine honor and valor, but he had also begun wondering whether his life as a professional athlete was shallow and meaningless. You could almost say he joined the Army in a search for personal meaning and moral purpose.

After serving a tour of duty in Iraq, Tillman returned home with grave doubts about the morality and efficacy of that conflict, and began to make contact with people who opposed the war. (This is the Chomsky-reading period.) Bar-Lev makes clear that Tillman could have asked for a discharge at that point to resume his football career; the owner of the Seattle Seahawks was eager to sign him, and the NFL would no doubt have made a big show of welcoming a returning hero. Again that old-fashioned moral code intervened: Tillman disliked military life and thought the war was wrong, but he wouldn't use his fame to avoid fulfilling his three-year commitment. (He had joined up as an ordinary enlisted man, although he would almost certainly have been given an officer's commission had he requested one.)

I'm only guessing here, but one of the things the Tillman family hated about Jon Krakauer's book was probably the author's tendency to view Pat Tillman's death as a case study in the evils of war and the limits of idealism. I might incline toward that view myself, but the Tillmans don't. Right-wing propagandists quickly learned that the Tillman family wasn't going to stick to the pious, patriotic script. (Pat's drunken younger brother, Rich, at the nationally televised funeral: "Pat isn't with God. He's fucking dead.") But the Tillmans aren't interested in starring in an antiwar morality play either. As they see it, Pat Tillman died as he lived, as an American who thought for himself, hewed to his own course and kept his word. It's the rest of us who have betrayed him.

"The Tillman Story" opens Aug. 20 in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities, with wider national release to follow.

If O'Reilly seems less hot than he used to because he isn't quite crazy enough for today's right-wingers (and who'd have thought we'd ever be saying that?), Jennifer Aniston faces a crueler but more familiar predicament. She's a well-liked female star who's just north of 40 but is not named Julia or Nicole and lacks a celebrity spouse. Her more serious problem is that she lacks a clear métier: Aniston is a gifted comedienne best suited for screwballish character roles, but she seems compelled by career forces -- managers, money, vanity; who knows? -- to play the romantic lead in a series of unremittingly mediocre love stories.

I don't know whether the Aniston-O'Reilly cage match can pump up much consumer appetite for "The Switch," which is not just an orphaned film from an orphaned studio (Miramax, which Disney is unloading to a private investment group) that's being dumped in the doldrums of late August, but also the second movie of the year to star a formerly huge actress named Jennifer as a turkey-baster mom. But here comes the surprise: It's peculiar, and pretty good! OK, compared to "The Back-up Plan" (Jennifer Lopez's unhappy comeback vehicle), "The Switch" is the collected works of Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch, but that's not a fair standard of comparison. Taken on its own terms, it's a light, sweet, curiously enjoyable misfit romance, whose real star is not Aniston but her magnificently awkward Lothario, Jason Bateman.

I rather suspect that Bateman's intensely neurotic, sweater-vest-wearing finance professional, Wally, is the cause of the film's marketing difficulties -- but he's also what makes "The Switch" more interesting than your average rom-com. This kind of movie is normally expected to focus on the female character's traumas and travails, but Aniston's Kassie is more like the sidekick or enabler for Wally's long and angst-ridden voyage of self-discovery, which begins with him exiling himself to the role of her gay best friend.

No, wait. I don't mean that Wally is really supposed to be gay or bi or closeted -- that never comes up even as a possibility. But this movie's weird gender politics are never quite resolved, and Wally sure behaves a lot like a gay best friend, or at least a gay best friend in a movie made 30 years ago. When Wally tells his other best friend and boss, Leonard (Jeff Goldblum, hilarious in every scene), that Kassie has rejected his offer to be her sperm donor, Leonard snorts, "What does she take you for, a eunuch?" As well she might. It seems as if something unexplained happened between Kassie and Wally years ago, and ever since he's buried his true emotions under layers of bitterness, alcoholism and hypochondria. His efforts to date other women are total disasters. He's deeply in the closet, you could say, about the fact that Kassie is the love of his life, and he lacks the courage and confidence and self-knowledge to man up and tell her so.

As you can see, Wally isn't exactly the rugged manly-man demanded by conventional romantic comedy, nor is he the lovable doofus from the more boy-friendly Judd Apatow version. Instead, he's a decent, nice-looking fellow whose self-loathing and emotional paralysis are externalized in his gruesome wardrobe choices. Bateman, a longtime TV actor best known for his lengthy run on "Arrested Development," captures this guy with startling and delicate precision, but Wally is not a character likely to fill women's hearts with desire and men's with admiration. Indeed, it's never exactly clear what bland, pleasant TV producer Kassie gets out of their friendship, especially since Wally turns out to be the kind of guy who would swap his own spoodge for that of her handsome rock-climber sperm donor (Patrick Wilson), partway through a hitting-bottom alcoholic blackout.

Given the title of the movie, I don't think that qualifies as a spoiler. Anyway, most of "The Switch" takes place years after that event, when Kassie returns to New York with a precocious and maddeningly compulsive 6-year-old named Sebastian (the delightful Thomas Robinson) who is self-evidently Wally's son, although nobody involved wants to face that fact. "The Switch," which is directed by "Blades of Glory" duo Josh Gordon and Will Speck, and adapted by Allan Loeb from a Jeffrey Eugenides short story, mostly isn't the zany farce its premise suggests. It's funny in bits and pieces, and around the edges, and the chemistry between its stars is sweet but very slow getting out of the bottle, like maple syrup from the freezer.

Gordon and Speck pour a little too much of that icy syrup over this movie's resolution, as if trying to cover up the acrid, strange, eunuch-y aftertaste that Bateman lends to the whole affair. All love stories have to have a scene now where the main character is all alone and introspective while some emo-indie-guitar-type person drones dolefully on the soundtrack, and I really hate those scenes. Who doesn't hate those scenes? If you like those scenes I don't want to be your friend. But "The Switch" comes back strong, with not one but two of the better marriage-proposal scenes in rom-com history. Can this odd but likable little movie turn Jennifer Aniston's career around? Not that likely, but at least it isn't doing Bill O'Reilly any favors either.