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A potential pitfall of reviewing Incendiary: The Willingham Case is that rather than passing judgment on this engaging and enraging documentary, any critic with a desire for justice will instead pass judgment on the film's subject matter -- the infamous death penalty case of Cameron Todd Willingham.

The case began with the death of Willingham's three young daughters in a house fire in Corsicana, Texas in 1991. Willingham was home at the time of the fire. Despite his claims that he tried to save his daughters, he was charged with their murder by arson based on evidence suggesting someone had started the fire using a liquid accelerant.

Willingham was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1992, largely on the fire investigation evidence and the testimony of a jailhouse informant who said Willingham confessed to starting the fire. (The informant later recanted his testimony.) A psychiatrist also testified that Willingham, who had a minor criminal record, was an "extremely severe sociopath;" the psychiatrist later was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association for his questionable record.

I'm generally not a fan of action films, but I bear no grudge against them in the conceptual sense. I appreciate a good car chase, gun fight or calamitous explosion, as long as these elements aren't the entire point of a movie. My beef with most action films is that violence and mayhem usually are the point; a typical mainstream action movie is mindless eye candy, lacking the plot surprises, sharp dialogue, character development and real-world relevance found in my usual arthouse fare.

And so I had high hopes for Drive, a film billed as a thinking person's action film, a smart crime thriller with indie sensibilities. But while Drive is better than most movies of its ilk, its cardboard-cutout characters, gratuitous gore and clichéd ending render it little more than a stylish and only occasionally fresh take on a tired genre.

Drive starts promisingly enough, with a simple but intriguing premise. A Hollywood stunt driver billed simply as Driver (Ryan Gosling) earns a little extra cash as a getaway car driver, with help from his boss, custom car builder and small-time hoodlum Shannon (Bryan Cranston). When not engaged in on-camera or off-camera high-speed chases, Driver spends his time in a not quite romantic relationship with his neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan), whose husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac), is in prison.

As horror/thriller film fans, we must come to grips with the fact there will be remakes. There will be remakes of widely known horror movies, and there will even be remakes of the some of the more obscure films that we may hold more dear than the iconic films of the genre. It's always a pleasant surprise when these remakes turn out to be pleasant surprises that provide a fresh perspective and added nuances to the originals. It doesn't happen often nearly enough.

Straw Dogs, directed and co-written by Rod Lurie, is an example of a remake that is not a pleasant surprise, and that is a fact that shouldn't come as a surprise to any of the original Peckinpah classic film's fans. Not overall terrible, but when something like this is remade and is simply a halfway decent thriller with a bit of a misguided focus, why remake it in the first place?

David Sumner (James Marsden) and his wife Amy (Kate Bosworth) move to Amy's hometown of Blackwater, Mississippi where David can have some peace and quiet to work on his next screenplay and Amy can get back in touch with her roots. Tensions rise as some of the locals around town, particularly Charlie (Alexandar Skarsgard) and his group of cronies, begin to express their displeasure at David's unfamiliarity with the area.

Several times during this movie, miscellaneous characters talking about fund manager and mother Kate Reddy (Sarah Jessica Parker) admit, "I don't know how she does it." Just in case you were unsure what the title of the comedy was or hadn't read the original 2002 novel by Allison Pearson!

In I Don't Know How She Does It, Bostonite Kate is constantly pulled between the business and domestic spheres. It's the age-old story, simplified for film. Kate loves her job, but feels like she is missing her children's formative years. When she's home with her two kids and husband Richard (a handsomely bespectacled Greg Kinnear), she worries that her jerky male officemate Chris Bunce (SNL's Seth Meyers) will claim that all her hard work was really his.

While I'm not generally a fan of sports or fight movies, writer/director Gavin O'Connor's film Warrior has made me a believer. Echoing the struggles in Rocky and The Fighter, Warrior includes more than just incredible MMA fighting action; it's an amazing character piece that tells two very different stories about brothers from a broken family and smashes their worlds back together.

People are already talking about Nick Nolte for an Oscar in this incredible role modeled after his own experiences with alcohol and substance abuse. As an estranged father who hasn't seen one of his sons for 14 years, Nolte's character has cleaned up his act but struggles to reconnect with children who hate him for the mistakes that destroyed their family. Nolte is desperate for a chance to rebuild his relationship with sons Tommy (Tom Hardy) and Brendan (Joel Edgerton), who themselves are estranged.

Tom Hardy is comfortable by now with quiet, angry roles and bulked up for his performance as Bane in the upcoming The Dark Knight Rises. As Tommy Conlon, he is a soldier returned from Iraq motivated by a mysterious past. He seems to work out his anger aggressively on his opponents in the ring and constantly, silently threatens to explode outside the ring. He is hammered by his past but not beaten as he doggedly pursues the MMA title.

Steven Soderbergh's latest film, Contagion, opens on "Day 2" as traveling businesswoman Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) soon falls victim to a virus that is hitting a few others worldwide. A Japanese businessman faints on a bus, a twenty-something man in Hong Kong walks around in delirium and a model in London feels unwell at a photoshoot. Beth is married to Mitch (Matt Damon), who is immune to the virus, but whose teen daughter may not be. Theirs is just one of the many stories in this frenetic film.

While World Health Organization doctor (Marion Cotillard) finds trouble during her Hong Kong research, CDC doctor Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) heads to Minneapolis to investigate the source of this MEV-1 virus, and her boss, CDC Head Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne), deals with higher-ups (Bryan Cranston) and a long distance fiancee (Sanaa Lathan). And also! Jude Law plays a paranoid blogger (his blog has 12 million unique visitors, y'all), and Jennifer Ehle (best known for her Elizabeth in BBC's Pride and Prejudice miniseries) and twee hipster comedian Demetri Martin play CDC labworkers.

To Austin indie film fans, remaking the iconic Slacker may be the Austin equivalent of remaking Citizen Kane.

Producing a new version of what is arguably the most important and cult-worshiped film in Austin cinematic history is a herculean and potentially thankless task. The danger, of course, is that the end result might be at best a ho-hum imitation of the original film or at worst a widely scorned mess of a movie that pleases no one and embarrasses everyone attached to the project. ("What Were They Thinking?" the Austin Chronicle cover would read.) Like Citizen Kane, Slacker may be best left alone.

I am happy to report, then, that Slacker 2011 is neither a ho-hum imitation of Slacker nor a mess of a movie. It is an entertaining and generally well executed update of and tribute to Richard Linklater's classic. If you like Slacker, you'll probably like Slacker 2011.

Of course, given Austin's deep pool of filmmaking talent, Slacker 2011 may have been destined for success. A co-production of the Austin Film Society and the Alamo Drafthouse, Slacker 2011 was in the capable hands of no less than 24 teams of local directors and film crews, one for each scene in the original movie. The result is essentially two dozen seamlessly connected short films in diverse styles, each an interesting new take on the original scene.

Prejudice; I admit I have it. It's hard to have high expectations of a movie like A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, which does exactly what you'd expect, but that's not much.

When I first heard about A Good Old Fashioned Orgy I kept confusing it with Cummings Farm, a darkly comic 2009 AFF selection with a very similar plot and plot points; vacation home, old friends, a plan to have group sex. Cummings Farm was retitled All American Orgy for its DVD release, which included some heinously misleading cover art implying it's a sophomoric sex-romp instead of a dark relationship comedy/character study. So I readily admit I wanted to completely dismiss A Good Old Fashioned Orgy as something similar.

But the cast includes Leslie Bibb (the underrated AFF 2010 selection Miss Nobody), and Tyler Labine (Tucker & Dale vs Evil), two actors who've proven they have incredible talent. Coupled with co-filmmaker Peter Huyck having a part in Bob Byington's RSO [Registered Sex Offender], and A Good Old Fashioned Orgy has enough indie cred to make me give the film a chance. I wish it returned the favor.

One of the most inspirational writers whose work I've enjoyed reading is Harvey Penick, a golf professional and coach from Austin, Texas. Penick began his golf career as a caddy at Austin Country Club, and went on to coach at the University of Texas from 1931 to 1963. He co-authored with Texas Film Hall of Fame member Bud Shrake Harvey Penick's Little Red Book. The "must-read" book contained insightful anecdotes that applied beyond the game of golf -- life lessons on mental focus as well as achieving goals.

Like Penick, Seven Days in Utopia -- opening Friday in Austin theaters -- employs a fictional character who serves up life and spiritual lessons through golf. Based upon Dr. David Cook's book Golf's Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia, this golf-related movie centers around two individuals who appear quite different at first: Johnny Crawford (Robert Duvall), an eccentric rancher with a passion for teaching golf and truth, and young golf professional Luke Chisholm (Lucas Black), who has crashed and burned on the golf mini-circuit. Chisholm's demanding father (Joseph Lyle Taylor) second-guesses and overrides his decisions, which doesn't help either. After Chisholm's bad shots on the golf course cost him a critical game, his father turns his back and walks away, as the young Chisholm explodes in anger on national television.

Narrowly avoiding a cow on the outskirts of Utopia, Texas, Chisholm winds up stranded after driving off the road onto Crawford's ranch and rural golf course where the old rancher offers life-altering advice on golf and faith. Through exposition, Chisholm discovers Crawford had his own glory and downfall in the world of golf amongst the masters, until the demon alcohol took away his success and ended his marriage. Through experience and faith, Crawford learned that one's significance is more important than success -- a lesson he imparts upon Chisholm. 

Central to the espionage thriller The Debt (opening in Austin theaters today) is the notion of physical and psychological captivity. In this relentlessly taught, gripping tale, directed by John Madden, the characters are hostages; one is physically bound by the others, but all are prisoners of their own consciences.

The story of three agents of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad assigned to capture a Nazi war criminal, The Debt opens in 1997, when retired agents Rachel Singer (Helen Mirren) and Stephan Gold (Tom Wilkinson) are dealing with tragic news about their former colleague, David Peretz (Ciarán Hinds). Peretz's fate unearths an ugly history of lies and subterfuge involving all three agents, forcing Singer and Gold to confront their pasts.

For decades, the nation of Israel has venerated Singer, Gold and Peretz for a mission they undertook in 1965, when they tracked down Nazi war criminal Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen). Known as the Surgeon of Birkenau, Vogel's ghastly medical "experiments" left thousands of concentration camp victims disfigured or dead. By the 1960s, Vogel had successfully hidden his past, working under an assumed name as a physician in East Berlin. He evaded justice until Singer, Gold and Peretz finally captured him in a complex operation involving false identities, kidnapping and great personal risk.