If you've ever ridden a Tilt-a-Whirl on the night before a theme park closes for the season, you'll recognize the mix of exhilaration and summer's-end melancholy in Greg Mottola's loving ensemble piece. The setting is a seedy amusement park staffed by proto-slackers, slumming college kids and aging Lotharios. The time is the summer of 1987, the morning after Reagan's "morning in America," which writer-director Mottola mines less for obvious yuks about mall hair and hair metal than for its fidgety apprehension of what-comes-next.

As he showed in the best parts of Superbad, Mottola is one of the few recent directors whose skills have been sharpened by TV. Years of directing superior sitcoms such as Arrested Development and Undeclared have honed his gift for purposeful drift—for getting across the ways smart, bored people meander and kill time without meandering himself. Even if many of the supporting roles remain one-note walk-ons, bit players in somebody else's how-I-spent-my-summer-vacation story, he more often gives actors room to enlarge their roles: Martin Starr as a pining stoner intellectual surveying the midway in misery, Ryan Reynolds as a married stud basking in the beds of the park's nubile wayfarers. (That Reynolds nearly makes this cheesy carny as sympathetic as he is pathetic is close to miraculous.)

In the lead, playing a college-bound virgin who's forced by economic downturn to trade his European vacation for a summer manning the ring-toss booth, The Squid and the Whale's Jesse Eisenberg embodies a kind of stammering decency, the uncertainty of a quick kid feeling his way for the first time into adult dilemmas of sex, loyalty and betrayal. And Kristen Stewart emerges from this and Twilight as the thinking teen's heartthrob—the quasi-emo inheritor of Winona Ryder's crush-of-a-generation mantle in Heathers. Speaking of late-'80s touchstones, consider this a kind request for ace music supervisor Tracy McKnight to give back my college-era record collection—even if hearing Hüsker Dü's "Don't Want to Know if You Are Lonely" and Big Star's "I'm in Love With a Girl" from Dolby speakers tipped my great like of the movie over into love. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday)

Possessed of a lugubrious, histrionic baritone that could make the most trifling of pop ditties sound like a slow dance on the brink of apocalypse, Scott Walker may be the unlikeliest figure to maintain any presence on oldies radio, thanks to The Walker Brothers' epically inconsolable 1966 smash "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore." From the increasingly out-there solo records that followed, and Walker's subsequent reputation as a reclusive genius and cult figure, you'd expect the subject of Stephen Kijak's documentary to be a forbidding, pretentious artiste—and the pleasant surprise of Kijak's film is that he's anything but.

Ignore the movie's infrequent heavy-breathing narration and Willy Wonka-esque graphics. In down-to-earth interviews all the more precious for their rarity, the Ohio-born teen idol turned industrial-cabaret innovator comes across not as a Jandek-like eccentric or obscurantist but a man trying to realize abstract visions through exacting concrete means. And if that means demanding retakes of a percussionist punching a side of meat (for his 2006 album The Drift), Kijak lets the results speak eloquently for themselves.

Admirers and followers ranging from David Bowie (the movie's executive producer) and Brian Eno to Radiohead and Pulp's suavely arch Jarvis Cocker testify to Walker's originality and importance. But for fans, the doc's biggest revelation may be the extent of his stardom, even as he began to explore bawdy Jacques Brel chansons and psychedelic dada crooning. In England, The Walker Brothers rivaled and perhaps surpassed The Beatles in popularity, and Kijak amasses evidence (including electrifying BBC performance clips) to show Walker's teeny-bopper audience followed his exploration, at least for three initial solo albums. Given Walker's notoriously unhurried methods, footage of him consulting with Leos Carax about the scoring of the director's gloriously mad POLA X are like glimpses of an obsessives' Olympus—the next best thing to witnessing a powwow between Phil Spector and Werner Herzog. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday at The Belcourt)

With the molded-rubber face of Savalas, the basso profundo of Stallone, and the name of an underdog gas alternative, Vin Diesel's already dubious ripped-tough-guy star has dimmed enough to warrant a return to the car-chase series that made him—and more importantly, made money. In the latest (number four), notably slack Fast & Furious, Diesel reprises the role of larcenist/muscle-car-enthusiast Dom Toretto opposite Paul Walker's import-fancying undercover agent Brian O'Conner. The untimely death of Dom's partner-in-crime sends the rivals converging on thoroughly unremarkable drug-runner Campos (John Ortiz); they infiltrate his surefire business model of smuggling heroin across the border via inconspicuous hot rods. For a sense of the movie's road sequences, note that the press-kit blurb for Diesel climaxes with his video-game production shingle. Pointing out Xbox aesthetics has become as familiar a move as bemoaning the disappearance of the frame in mainstream cinema, but sequences in Fast & Furious are as up-front about imminent adaptation to video game as some directors used to be about accounting for future TV broadcast. A movie whose second spoken line of dialogue is, candidly, "Let's make some money" at least ends with a satisfyingly ludicrous desert pile-on. But whether you blame the Part Four blues or Diesel's gaming distractions, Fast & Furious reconfirms that car-chase movies—good, bad or mediocre—all assure the future employment of the quaint old fast-forward button. —Nicolas Rapold (Opens Friday)

More than a year after its first twirl at Sundance, this Amy Adams/Emily Blunt dramedy finally shrugs its way into theaters, and it feels almost like an afterthought. A film about sisters who go into the crime-scene clean-up business, it's a muddled mess: terrific performances (from Adams, especially, as the ex-high school cheerleader now at the bottom of the pile) buried beneath contrivances and clichés, not to mention Alan Arkin cast yet again as the foul-mouthed gramps dispensing four-lettered advice to a troubled youngster (Jason Spevack, as Adams' son, who'll lick anything and anyone). Director Christine Jeffs, working with Megan Holley's screenplay, renders the light and dark as a muddy shade of sitcom-pilot gray. This has the makings of a great Showtime series—feels a bit like Weeds, but with cleaning fluid instead of bong water. Too bad what's intended to play as funny (girls and gore) stumbles into slapstick; what's meant to play as profound (girls and dead-mommy issues) sinks into the overwrought. Yet another willful, comically tortured "indie" coated with Hollywood's happy-ending sheen—or perhaps, at this point, it's simply hard to buy the perky Adams and pretty Blunt as schlumpy losers trapped in bland flyover country with an Oscar-winner stuck in rerun mode. —Robert Wilonsky (Opens Friday)

Imagine what an inquisitive filmmaker like Errol Morris or Werner Herzog could have done with the peculiar true-life story of Los Angeles evangelist Arthur Blessitt, the self-proclaimed "Minister of the Sunset Strip," who, on Christmas Day 1969, decided to walk around the world carrying a 12-foot wooden cross to spread the word of Jesus. As the focus of director Matthew Crouch's documentary, Blessitt is a fascinating character—a deeply religious man with an engaging storytelling style and a bountiful sense of humor who didn't let ideological differences stop him from reaching out to people in war zones or impenetrable jungles. At a time when those of faith are often stigmatized in popular entertainment as bigots or imbeciles, Blessitt's advocacy of compassionate, unconditional love is a meaningful corrective. But where Morris or Herzog might have turned Blessitt's highly improbable 40-year journey into a thoughtful exploration of humanity's quixotic desire to find meaning in an existence devoid of any such reassurances, The Cross opts to be a wan inspirational film that rams its Christian message down your throat—which is, ironically, the exact opposite of Blessitt's soft-sell. —Tim Grierson (Now playing)