Cameron Crowe tries on something of a forcedly whimsical tone in We Bought a Zoo, a well-meaning and sentimental but lumbering family drama that never quite connects. Existing in a kind of wan emotional middle-ground, only occasionally punctuated and illuminated by Matt Damon‘s winning lead turn, the film is a search for familial rejuvenation and self-renewal in only the vaguest terms possible.

Based on a memoir by journalist Benjamin Mee, We Bought a Zoo tracks closely in its massaged feeling to Marley & Me, which distributor 20th Century Fox had great success with in the same holiday frame in 2008, pushing to $240 million worldwide gross. But while character-driven, tonally commingled qualities have always been a hallmark of Crowe’s big screen efforts, this film exudes the feeling of an artist reaching more than halfway to make contact with an audience that market-parsers have told him should be right in his wheelhouse. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG, 124 minutes)

A sprawling tale of power, sleaze and ambition in the vein of City of God, The Departed, Infernal Affairs and The Wire, writer-director Jose Padilha’s Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is a howling, labyrinthine lament against the brawn and fraudulent self-protection of entrenched institutions that could and perhaps should well find a welcome audience amongst #OccupyWallStreet cineastes. Brazil’s official Academy Award Best Foreign Language Film submission, the movie — which is set in Rio de Janeiro and unfolds at the intersection of drugs, crime and high-level governmental corruption — is programmatic, and tipped heavily toward procedural rather than emotional payoffs, but nonetheless still packs an effective, gritty punch.

At the center of the movie is Rio’s Special Police Operations Battalion, or BOPE (so named for its native-language acronym). When a mission to bring an end to a jail riot ends in violence, it puts several men on a trajectory that will eventually result in unlikely new alliances. Andre Mathias (Andre Ramiro) willingly takes the fall for the raid, out of devotion to BOPE, but his superior, Beto Nascimento (Wagner Moura, quite good), fails upward, and finds himself installed as Sub-Secretary of Intelligence, where he oversees the city’s wire-tapping programs. Academic and social activist Diogo Fraga (Irandhir Santos, above), meanwhile, decides to enter politics, winning a position that puts him further at odds with a crooked mayor and the moneyed political-discourse entertainers who prop up their efforts with much on-camera bloviating.

Nascimento is no friend of Fraga’s either. He views him as a pain, and his irritation is exacerbated when Fraga takes up with his ex-wife, and starts influencing his son’s view of Nascimento’s work. Then there’s the fact that Nascimento comes to realize that by strengthening BOPE and bringing low the drug gangs that run the slums, he’s actually only made things easier for the corrupt cops and dirty politicians who are actually pulling the strings from above, including a particularly brutal police captain (Sandro Rocha) who has no qualms about flaunting his thuggishness.

The qualities that most benefit Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (it’s actually a sequel to Padilha’s 2007 feature debut, featuring several holdover characters) are also what make it slightly impenetrable at first — its density, and attention to detail. There’s also the matter of Nascimento’s overwritten narration, which serves as an effective hatchet through some of the bureaucratic bramble but also bleeds the movie of the chance for a more rooted emotional connection. Eventually, though, the movie’s pieces start to fit together, and somewhat disparate strands cross paths in interesting ways when old allies become enemies, and vice versa.

Padilha, who got his start in documentary filmmaking, has an obvious eye and ear for the sorts of information that makes this material seem snarlingly current. It’s a fictionalized tale, but one rooted in real scandal as it relates to both BOPE and Brazil’s government. The film is also properly awash in the shades of grey morality required to tackle a telling of such systemic indecency and corruption, which is quite separate from individual malice. “War is like medicine — it keeps the mind busy,” says Nascimento early on, who comes to realize the double-edged nature of that statement. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance Films, R, 115 minutes)

Crazy Wisdom focuses on a subject perhaps worthy of a documentary, but hopelessly obscured by fawning and myopia. Director Johanna Demetrakas sets her sights on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a personable and unique Tibetan monk who on foot escaped the 1959 Communist invasion of his homeland in quite unlikely fashion, studied and taught at Oxford University, and then shattered Westerner’s preconceptions of Buddhist enlightenment, renouncing his monastic vows, bedding students, drinking alcohol and eventually eloping with the 16-year-old daughter of an aristocrat. For more information on the film, click here; meanwhile, for the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Crazy Wisdom Films, unrated, 89 minutes)