When it comes to film premises, few can grab you quite like that of Holy Rollers: Hassdic teens build ecstasy smuggling empire. On top of that, it’s “based on true events.” How could you go wrong? As it turns out, a lot of ways.

Harry Brown (Michael Caine) is an ex-Royal Marine octogenarian living in “the estates” of South London, where the local youths’ idea of a fun time is smoking crack and dropping bags of flaming dog crap through people’s letterboxes. After a feeble attempt at self-defense ends the life of his only friend, Brown decides to take matters into his own hands.

Director Ken Loach has made a film that fuses his own mastery of the British kitchen-sink drama with the whimsy of Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam and the underdog sentimentality of ‘80s John Hughes teen films. It’s the kind of odball amalgamation of styles that SCTV used to imagine.

Sparks fly—literally—when Robert Downey, Jr. and Mickey Rourke share the screen in Iron Man 2. Rourke’s character, the vengeful Russian physicist Ivan Vanko, is on the attack, with deadly electric whips of metal stemming from his arms, when he first confronts Tony Stark (Downey) on a Monaco speedway. But those expecting the figurative sparks to fly between Downey and Rourke, two of American film’s more daring actors and intriguing offscreen personalities, will be disappointed.

The third night of the 14th annual City of Lights, City of Angels (COL•COA) film festival, a weeklong showcase of new French films at the Directors Guild in Los Angeles, was highlighted by the Cold War espionage thriller Farewell and the West Coast premiere of Please, Please Me!, from writer/director Emmanuel Mouret (Shall We Kiss?).

The only thing Kick-Ass the movie has in common with Kick-Ass the comic book is the premise: New York high-schooler Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is a nobody to everyone around him except for his two best friends (played by Clark Duke and Evan Peters) and his father. After he and his buddies are mugged one too many times by a couple of neighborhood hoods, Lizewski takes up the mantle and MySpace page of an amateur vigilante.

The story of Chess Records founder Leonard Chess, who would help launch the careers of Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, and Etta James, falls flat, without igniting the fire that helped make recent music pics like Once and Walk the Line successful.

“This is what music is supposed to be,” says wheeler and dealer of contraband, Nader, while listening to a track by indie rockers Ashkan and Negar. But under the strict moral and political code of Tehran, non-traditional music like theirs is supposed to have a permit.

A gynecologist (Julianne Moore) suspects that her husband (Liam Neeson), a suave music professor, is cheating on her, so she pays a young escort (Amanda Seyfried) to test his fidelity. Sounds rational and plausible, right?