Whether in the wilds of Frankford or sleepy Lancaster, the educators in Pressure Cooker and The Sitting Machine are constantly negotiating between the goals of the classroom and the exigencies of the outside world, and sometimes the best they can do is a tenuous compromise.

There's material here for a fine dark comedy, but Jeffs glosses over the surface. The movie is neat, which is the last thing a movie about cleaning up human waste should be.

"Can you imagine if I said the way I met Paul Rudd was he was walking down the street, and I told him I liked his slacks, and the next thing I knew we were having brunch?"

Zack Snyder approaches Watchmen on bended knee, replicating its camera angles and color scheme with the devotion of a true acolyte. Fans of the comic will find few nits to pick; the details have been carefully rendered, perhaps as much out of fear as fidelity.

Even the greatest of celluloid treasures can't measure up, spec-wise, to a hi-def episode of CSI: Miami.

The film's pristine black and white — represented in a new print struck by the tiny, discerning outfit The Film Desk — subliminally embodies the certainties Itard attempts to pass on to his unsocialized subject.

It's no accident that the film's French title, Entre les Murs (Within the Walls), could as easily apply to a prison as a school.

Perhaps unexpectedly, McKenzie doesn't make much, at least explicitly, of his protagonists' background. Apart from a prologue which uses still photos and native chants to the story of the Indians' migration from reservations to the city, he lets their environment do the talking.

One automatically associates eye-popping effects with digital technology, but the vast majority of Coraline's wonders were created by hand. It would have been easier to create effects with a computer, but had they compromised, Selick says, "There wouldn't have been anything valuable in those scenes."

Given the shark-tank clusterfuck that Sundance can sometimes seem, it's fitting that the best movie at this year's festival was a scabrous, foul-mouthed satire about midlevel functionaries scrumming for political power.