Most every festival review declares that director Aaron Schneider has created a near-perfect folk tale with his debut feature, one for which Robert Duvall might be celebrated come awards season. Aside from Duvall, the presence of funeral parlor owner Bill Murray might obscure attention paid elsewhere, but we think Sissy Spacek and Bill Cobbs, playing a widow and a reverend, respectively, are the performances to note here. Don't count out heat for Schneider, won an Oscar for the short Two Soldiers, and the screenplay, which was co-written by "Mad Men"'s Chris Provenzano.

We're wondering how PG-13 director Jay Roach will handle himself in the post-Hangover world, where the mainstream has embraced bawdy language and behavior. Meanwhile, there have been *a lot* of writers attached to this story during its development and production. Maybe that industry expression "this is a high-concept comedy" is more like a distant-early warning of a tough sell?

So much time between the original movie and this sequel -- it's like the TRON: Legacy of anthropomorphic talking animal movies. Why can't the LOLCats get involved here?

By the end of this decade, Zac Efron might pull a Joseph Gordon-Levitt and put his cheesy TV origins fully behind him. For his next drama, Efron reteams with his 17 Again director, Burr Steers, for a project that seems like it has more in common with Steers' first film, Igby Goes Down. Originally set for a summer release, Universal made the smart decision to movie Charlie to the fall. Oops!

We missed this one at Sundance, but Kevin Kline's nimble performance is earning raves - if you've watched the trailer, you might agree there are few actors who can pull off this sort of role. And now that we think of it, the same could be said for Paul Dano, whom we applaud for keeping his career more on the indie side of celebrity. Like Solitary Man, look for the latest oddity from Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini to liven up the art-house; next up from the filmmaking duo is the HBO's Cinema Verite, a reworking of the documentary series "An American Family" (which we think will serve as Thomas Dekker's true breakout role).

For most of last year, Radu Mihaileanu's latest project was eclipsed by A Prophet in its native France (and, well, most everywhere else it played), but kept winning over audiences throughout Europe. American critics have taken offense at some of the characterizations here, but we're ... a bit ... oversensitive. Producer Luc Besson has backed Mihaileanu's next film, La Source des femmes, which will shoot this fall.