China’s coming maelstrom of cultural tension is a central theme in Chinese/Canadian filmmaker Lixin Fan’s Last Train Home, a gritty, verite-style documentary about a family struggling to adapt to its country’s evolving, increasingly globalized economy. Lixin fixes his narrative (and inquisitive hand-held camera) on a married couple, Changhua and Suqin Zhang, onetime rural farmers who have worked grueling garment factory jobs far away from home for nearly the whole of their 17-year-old daughter Qin’s life.  

Yet another unique genre hybrid, Cedar Rapids centers itself on the unlikely coming-of-age story of Tim Lippe (Ed Helms, who’s both affecting and hilarious), an alarmingly nave but perpetually goodnatured 34-year-old insurance salesman who’s never been outside his tiny hometown of Brown Valley, Wisc. Lippe’s life is turned upside down when he has to represent his company at an insurance convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he meets a trio of colleagues that will forever alter his once-narrow worldview.  

Ophthalmologist-turned-filmmaker David G. Evans dives into the The Grace Card's big, universal themes of life, death, race, reconciliation, redemption, forgiveness and family with straightforward earnestness, which synchs well with the material. But Howard A. Klausner's screenplay gets bogged down in too many talky theological monologues and plot twists that stretch believability.   

Veteran director D.J. Caruso guides this mildly compelling sci-fi thriller about a high school student (Alex Pettyfer) with secret, still burgeoning supernatural skills and the big, ugly alien enemies who'll do anything to exterminate him.   

“Why has Over-the-Rhine gone to shit as soon as I move here?” I thought to myself one weeknight not so long ago while walking up a barren Main Street looking for a place, any place, to grab a beer. “It’s not fair!” I actually stomped my foot. That was two years ago.  

The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center continues its celebration of Black History Month with a visit from Roland S. Martin, a veteran journalist and author whose latest book, the verbosely titled 'The First: President Barack Obama's Road to the White House as Originally Reported by Roland S. Martin,' was just published. A contributor to CNN, Martin has been a tornado of journalistic activity over his awards-strewn, 20-year career.  

Thomson’s 1,076-page tome is as addictive as ever, bound to keep readers engrossed as they move from entries that have appeared in every edition since the first (in 1975) to new and/or updated capsules on those who’ve emerged since his most recent edition in 2004. His elegant prose, incisive critical skills and encyclopedic grasp of film history remain on display, as does his sometimes perplexing omissions, quirky personality, dry wit and seemingly willful subversions of popular opinion.  

The 2008 economic meltdown is ripe for dramatic interpretation. John Wells, the bigwig TV producer/writer behind 'ER' and 'The West Wing,' steps up with his take on the Death of the American Dream and corporate greed run amok, and does so armed with a righteous indignation that is only sporadically earned. Grade: C.   

Sofia Coppola’s first film since 2006's underrated 'Marie Antoinette' is laden with the writer/director's now firmly established concerns: attractive (often young) people yearning to connect and find some sort of deeper meaning in their privileged lives, whether they know it or not. Grade: B.  

Matt Reeves' remake of Swedish filmmaker Tomas Alfredson's atmospheric vampire thriller — both of which are based on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel 'Let the Right One In' — is not as restrained or as poetic as its predecessor, but Let Me In's nuanced take on the genre generates unexpected empathy for its central duo in near equal measure.