Culturopolis

Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics Whit Stillman's flowery, absurd Damsels in Distress substitutes Animal House 's crude frat boys for priss-pot coeds in this too-cute-for-school, obnoxious evocation of a make-believe college life. The damsels in question are all named for flowers, because girls are so, well, flowery. Block-of-wood indie queen Greta Gerwig is all square shoulders and flatline delivery as the bossypants Violet, the queen bee in a hive of girliness dedicated to rooting out bad smells and suicidal depression from their private Seven Oaks College. The slightly dim brunette Heather (Carrie MacLemore) and the elegant African-American girl Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke), who has come back from a London trip with an affected British accent and a conviction that all men are "playboys and operators," round out this coterie of Lanz nightgowns and proper enunciation. The girls live in a cozy dorm room...

 With so much of American life centered on celebrity worship and aspirational window shopping, it is nice to be reminded of the merits of the not-beautiful, the marginal, and, frankly, the geeky. Morgan Spurlock's new documentary Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope is a salute to the underdogs in life's lotto, the kids who didn't get all the lucky breaks and the good looks. But, based on this documentary, they at least wring their fair share of fun from it nevertheless. Their nirvana is the annual comic book convention in San Diego, Comic-Con. Inaugurated in 1970, the event has since grown into an enormous, celebrity-packed merchandise-shilling geek fest of 120,000 fanboys and girls that nerds across the country pine to attend all year long. In a tongue-in-cheek opening bit mimicking an old-school filmstrip, Spurlock shows the crude beginnings of Comic-Con in black-and-white stills of fuzzy-h...

Courtesy Lions Gate Films Bully has every element of a modern horror story. Sympathetic, persecuted victims, sadistic monsters, and even a deceptively banal setting, the sterile cinderblock hallways and asphalt playgrounds are where its tales of terror unfold. The worst thing about this horror movie, however, is that it is all real. This is one of the scariest, clammiest, most skin-crawling films in recent memory, a tale of victims stuck in small, isolated towns where no one hears their cries for help, and their persecutors — both bullies and clueless administrators and figures of authority — are pitiless. Whether you experienced some form of bullying in school or not, the way director Lee Hirsch (in a manner reminiscent of Gus Van Sant's Elephant ) captures the architecture of...