Watch a clip from the film "Upside Down." Adam (Jim Sturgess) sets out on a dangerous quest to reconnect with his love (Kirsten Dunst) who lives on a twinned world with a separate gravity. (Photo/Video: Millennium Entertainment)

Rather than star-crossed, the lovers in Juan Solanas's "Upside Down" are planet-crossed; they come from adjacent planets with opposite gravities. These mutually repellent orbs—one up, the other down, depending on which one you inhabit—are so close to each other that their mountain peaks almost touch, and they're connected by a giant corporation's towering (or plummeting) headquarters. People from our planet may dismiss this film as silly, contrived, self-enchanted or flawed in the terms of its own exotic logic, and it is all of the above (or below.) Yet I fell for it by rising to the bait of its design—beautifully burnished images that you've never quite seen anywhere else—as well as its audacity in going all the way with a madly chancy concept.

Falling for the film means seeing its stars— Jim Sturgess as Adam and Kirsten Dunst as Eden—upside down from time to time, even though their features aren't flattered by inversion. It means swallowing, with levitating grains of salt, lots of pseudosolemn pseudoscience about inverse matter and local laws of gravity. (Knowing how silly some of this stuff is, Mr. Solanas keeps it lightly droll, as in my favorite line, delivered by Timothy Spall's ostensibly devious scientist: "I combine upper and lower inversion with a hyperinfusion.") But it also means being treated to the oddly poignant sight of the lovers pitting hormones against gravity as teenagers and, when he seeks her out a decade later, to the sumptuous spectacle of their reunion at the Café Dos Mondos, a mountaintop tango club where Adam redefines the notion of burning passion. (If he stays too long in her world, inverse matter starts him sweating, then sets him on fire.)

Mr. Sturgess and Kirsten Dunst Millennium Entertainment

Neither star is a stranger to cosmic themes expressed by extravagant images. Ms. Dunst was marvelous in Lars von Trier's "Melancholia," a movie in which the spiritual state of melancholia is intensified by a planet of the same name that may obliterate life on earth. Mr. Sturgess was ardent, if nothing else, in "Across the Universe," Julie Taymor's overblown celebration of young love and the Fab Four. But stunning visuals alone can't sustain a feature film, as Ms. Taymor's phantasmagoria showed. To give his story additional bulk, if not substance, Mr. Solanas, the son of a prominent Argentinean filmmaker, has added a social context with whiffs of class warfare: Adam's world is poor and dystopian, Eden's is rich and dominant. (In a lighter, indeed goofier, vein, Adam uses a family secret going back to his beloved Aunt Becky to invent an anti-aging cream that lifts faces by reversing gravity.)

Still, it's the look—along with the sound—that gives the film its distinction: Alex McDowell designed the production, Pierre Gill was the cinematographer and Benoît Charest wrote the music. At a time when so many movies look alike, and studio productions sometimes look aggressively ugly, here's a quirky vision at the intersection of sci-fi and romance. "Upside Down" can be beguiling if you're willing to invert disbelief.

Watch a clip from the film "Beyond the Hills" about the friendship between two young women who grew up in the same orphanage. Winner of the Best Actress and Best Screenplay awards at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. (Photo/Video: Sundance Selects)

'Beyond the Hills'

Although Cristian Mungiu's fascinating, anguishing feature is set in contemporary Romania, the little Orthodox convent where most of the action takes place is feudal in its cultural isolation. (The convent is also isolated geographically, but geography isn't the issue.) The story concerns two young women, Voichita and Alina. Cherished friends since they were children in an orphanage, they're reunited when Alina, who's been working in Germany, comes to visit Voichita at the convent where the latter has found an austere but peaceful refuge. After the convent takes Alina in, austerity remains, but peace vanishes.

Cosmina Stratan and Cristina Flutur Sundance Selects

Takes her in, that is, over the strenuous objections of the defrocked priest who's simply called Father by the nuns. Doing the Christian thing doesn't come easily to this man of smugly rigid convictions. Neither does doing the enlightened thing when Alina's love for her friend leads her to challenge Father's authority, and to reveal herself as a deeply troubled soul. For a local doctor—not a distinguished clinician, but not a fool either—the appropriate therapy is pharmaceutical, a prescription for antipsychotics. As Father sees it, Alina's sickness is spiritual, a case of possession resulting from a surfeit of sin, and his treatment, which drowns the poor girl in guilt, culminates in an exorcism.

Mr. Mungiu, who won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his 2007 drama "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," has a gift for working with actors. Valeriu Andriuta plays Father with fearsome intensity. Cristina Flutur's Alina is touching at one moment, terrifying at the next. As Voichita, Cosmina Stratan gives a wondrously mercurial performance, by turns childlike, numb, vividly alive and hopelessly torn. (Last year at Cannes the two women shared a Best Actress award.) It's tempting to see "Beyond the Hills" solely as an indictment of religion, but the film is more ambitious than that. Ignorance and superstition aren't confined to the convent; people in town, including the cops, drop casual references to witchcraft as if it were part of everyday life. The broader subject is possession by primitive ideas.


Watch a clip from the film "Ginger and Rosa," a look at the lives of two teenage girls growing up in 1960s London, and the pivotal event the comes to redefine their relationship as the Cuban Missile Crisis looms. (Photo/Video: A24 Films)

'Ginger & Rosa'

Sally Potter's latest film opens with a mushroom cloud—uh oh, sententiousness alert—followed by scenes of the devastation in Hiroshima, followed by two babies being born in London in the same fateful year of 1945. Cut to 1962, when Elle Fanning's Ginger and Alice Englert's Rosa, best friends since childhood, are still living in the shadow of the bomb. As it turns out, "Ginger & Rosa" is less sententious—the hydrogen bomb truly did instill widespread fear at that time—than prosaic. Ms. Potter puts her heroines in a succession of interesting—and handsomely photographed—situations in which they define themselves by talking about what they're up to, rather than by taking urgent action. (The cinematographer was Robbie Ryan. )

Alice Englert and Elle Fanning A24 Films

Ginger becomes a political activist, a teenage ban-the-bomber in conflict with her father, Roland ( Alessandro Nivola ), a well-known pacifist and deep-dyed narcissist. Rosa, more interested in romance than politics, falls out with Ginger after falling in love with Roland. Ms. Englert's performance isn't as interesting as it might have been if the writing hadn't favored Ginger. But Ms. Fanning, a young actress of seemingly unerring instincts, is a wonder, whether in the existential despair that Ginger feels during the Cuban missile crisis—not only her world but the whole world seems about to end—or in the spiritual growth spurt that Ginger enjoys after both worlds carry on.


Watch a clip from the film "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone." Superstar magicians Burt Wonderstone (Steve Carell) and Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi) look to salvage on their act. Also starring Jim Carrey and Olivia Wilde (Photo/Video: Warner Bros.)

'The Incredible Burt Wonderstone'

Over the course of 100 minutes that seem like a lifetime, "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone"—was the title generated by an algorithm?—depicts rival magicians vying for celebrity with stunts that involve, inter alia, a marathon sweat in a transparent plastic box dangling above the Las Vegas Strip; a steady stream of pepper spray in the eyes; lying supine on a bed of hot coals; and drilling a hole into one's own skull. Torture? Yes, but nothing like watching the movie itself.

Steve Carell and Olivia Wilde Warner Bros. Pictures

The title role plunges Steve Carell deep into the territory of smirking self-parody that was pioneered, and pretty much exhausted, by Will Ferrell. Once a boy magician, Burt is a Las Vegas legend along the lines of David Copperfield, except that his tricks are manifestly impossible without trick photography, and that his act includes a friend from childhood who, as a quarrelsome adult called Anton Marvelton, is played by Steve Buscemi. (Burt is supposedly straight, yet he and Anton quarrel like nasty parodies of gays.) Jim Carrey is Steve Gray, a street magician who, as The Brain Rapist, topples Burt from fame's pinnacle by staging a succession of increasingly masochistic performances. (Also by outsmirking him.) Olivia Wilde plays Jane, a would-be magician whose loyalty to Burt is as unaccountable as it is unswerving, since he is relentlessly nasty, not to mention unfunny, until he turns tediously nice. James Gandolfini's Las Vegas hotel owner is louder than everyone else.



DVD Focus

'Another Earth' (2011)

Mike Cahill's debut feature is another saga of twin planets, and a provocative one. The Earth of the title, an apparent duplicate of our own, has suddenly appeared in the sky and just floats there serenely at a safe remove, as if the law of gravity had been repealed. Exactly what that extraterrestrial Terra represents is hard to pin down—a way of looking at ourselves, a chance to rerun our lives with different outcomes. The film's star, Brit Marling, wrote the script with Mr. Cahill and served as one of the producers.

'Hope Springs'

Steve Carell plays it admirably and affectingly straight as a marriage therapist confronted by a couple who, in late middle age, find their sexual and emotional connections essentially defunct. Meryl Streep is the wife, Kay. Her curmudgeonly husband, Arnold, is played by Tommy Lee Jones. It's moving to follow the couple's crabwise progress, and to watch two wonderful actors find flashes of beauty in unlikely moments. This is less surprising for Ms. Streep than it is for Mr. Jones, who finally finds in Arnold a pained, spiritual nakedness. David Frankel directed from a script by Vanessa Taylor

'Super 8' (2011)

Elle Fanning is Alice, an exquisite girl on the verge of young womanhood, in a retrocontempo thriller, by J.J. Abrams, that combines a sci-fi plot with an enjoyable account of middle-schoolers seized by the need to make their own Super 8 movie. Alice agrees to play the main zombie, but she doesn't know what a brilliant actress she is. Running her lines for the first time, she leaves her castmates stunned, and "Super 8" briefly becomes a movie about the primal power of movie acting, as well as a revelation of Ms. Fanning's extraordinary gifts.