There are people, I’ve been told, who troll the Internet looking for cute things: kittens, baby chicks, puppies. People like that will no doubt adore director Thomas Balmes’s Babies.

For the rest of us, the experience lies somewhere between watching a compelling documentary and looking at a new mom’s pages of  Facebook photos.

The title pretty much says it all: Balmes followed four babies from different parts of the planet—Namibia, Mongolia, Tokyo, and San Francisco—from birth to first steps. There is no dialogue, no narration. Mostly, he keeps the camera trained closely on the babies, like little silent film stars.

One thing I learned from watching Babies is this: if you watch babies closely—I mean really watch them—they’ll tell you everything you need to know about their needs. Frustrated, hungry, happy, curious—all these emotions play across the faces of our little squeezable heroes. And it’s captivating to watch them work things out—to learn to learn.

Still, I couldn’t help but to...

Woohoo! The Maryland Film Festival is this weekend (May 6-9). I was able to get a sneak preview of 3 of the films.

DOGTOOTH

Rating: 3.5 stars

Likely to be one of the most buzzed about films of the festival, Dogtooth plays like some strange marriage of M. Night Shyamalan and Lars von Trier. It is dark—horrific at times—and, yes, perversely funny.

In Greece, an upper middle class family lives in a veritable fortress. Only the father goes to work. The three nearly grown children—two girls and a boy—are never allowed to leave the grounds. They know next to nothing about the outside world—they have no television, no telephone (the mother keeps one hidden so she can call the father if necessary), no Internet. They think airplanes are toy-sized, that cats are dangerous creatures who want to kill them, and that children can only leave the house when one of their adult dogteeth falls out.

In an example of the film’s sly sense of humor, the father asks the family if they want to hear “Grandpa sing.” He ...

If you believe the spin out of Jennifer Lopez’s camp, the multi-hyphenate actress merely took some time off after the birth of her twins before deigning to reappear at a multiplex near you.

But that’s a bit misleading. In truth, Lopez’s career has been in a tailspin since Gigli. Her last two albums have tanked. She hasn’t had a hit film since Maid in Manhattan. And her recent appearance on Saturday Night Live was panned by critics.

She needs The Back-up Plan to start rebuilding the J Lo brand. And frankly, I don’t think she picked wisely.

It’s not that The Back-up Plan is bad. It’s just kinda generic.  It’s standard-issue chick flick fare—cue the girl pop! the snarky best friend! the cute pet!—as disposable as a diaper.

Diapers, of course, are on the mind of Lopez’s Zoe.

She’s a 30something woman who hasn’t found Mr. Right so she decides to go motherhood alone. The very day she is artificially inseminated, she meets hottie Stan (Alex O’...

Imagine a Quentin Tarantino movie without any flair, wit, or joy and you have some sense of Kick-Ass.

The film’s big selling point is an 11-year-old superhero named Hit Girl  who uses profanity that would make Snoop Dog blush and is an unrepentant killing machine. In one scene, she shoots off a guy’s face. In another, she blows through a crowd of thugs with a machine gun. Later, she proves herself quite handy with a machete. All while alternating between wearing leather outfit with a hot purple wig and a school girl outfit with pigtails.

Chloe Grace Moretz, the precocious child actress who plays Hit Girl, is actually a serious talent, reminiscent of a young Jodie Foster. (She’d caught my eye a few weeks earlier in Diary of a Wimpy Kid—oh, we were all so young then.) But as I watched the film, I couldn’t help but to think to myself, “How on earth did her parents let her make this film?” Not since Natalie Portman teamed up with Luc Besson in The Professional has a child actress been so fetishized and exploited. (...