Sony Pictures Classics Lubna Azabal in 'Incendies.' 
 
 This is the film that should have won an Oscar in its foreign-language category this year and didn't. Its languages are French and Arabic, but there's nothing foreign about its substance, or its shattering impact. Denis Villeneuve's screen adaptation of a play by the Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad tells a story—masterfully—of courage, cruelty, family mysteries and a chain of anger that can only be broken by love. 
 
 Watch a clip from the film 'Incendies', courtesy Sony Pictures Classics 
 
 "Incendies," which means "scorched," starts with a dramatic device worthy of Agatha Christie (and ends with one worthy of Sophocles.) A Montreal notary summons the twin children of a recently deceased woman from the Middle East for the reading of her will. The twins, Jeanne and Simon, aren't surprised about the distribution of their mother's modest estate; it's to be divided equally between them. But they're astonished when the notary hands them a pair of envelopes for delivery—one to the father they'd assumed was dead, the other to a brother they'd never heard of. To find these shadowy figures, Jeanne, followed later by her brother Simon, embarks on a Middle Eastern odyssey that's intercut with the story of their mother, Nawal; she is brought back to life in a glorious grand-operatic performance by Lubna Azabal. 
 
 The actress and the role deserve each other in the best way. Nawal grows from a passionate girl in a backward village to a college student, a nonviolent activist for peace, a violent activist for peace and then a prisoner so ruthlessly brutalized by her captors that she becomes known as La Femme Qui Chante, the woman who sings through her pain to keep her sanity. The film was shot in Jordan—André Turpin did the inspired cinematography—though the locales aren't specified; indeed, the country isn't named. Nevertheless, Nawal's life is clearly intertwined with the agonies of Lebanon that culminated in a Christian militia's massacre of Palestinian refugees in 1982. And it doesn't matter that the logic of the warfare may be difficult to decode. What "Incendies" sets forth so powerfully is the biblical nature of sectarian violence—retribution leading endlessly to more of the same—and Nawal's struggle to live a principled life in its midst. 
 
 The ending literally derives from Sophocles, with all that implies of drama heightened—sometimes uncomfortably—to the level of myth. It's all the more remarkable, then, that Mr. Villeneuve and his superb cast keep the action grounded in the moment-to-moment realities of the siblings' quest—of the detective story, really—as they cross the chasm that separates generations and slowly discover who their mother was. Jeanne is played by Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, and Simon by Maxim Gaudette. Rémy Girard is the notary in a film that makes a compelling case, in passing, for the role that notaries have played over the centuries in keeping historical records and tracing family connections. 
 
 Watch a clip from the film "Water for Elephants," starring Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson. 
 
 'Water for Elephants' 
 
 How do I count the ways this movie goes wrong? Maybe by starting with the pictorial rightness of a circus train pulling into town in Depression-era America: Rodrigo Prieto's cinematography gives the whole production an evocative beauty that it never earns dramatically. 
 
 The circus of "Water For Elephants" isn't supposed to be the Greatest Show on Earth, but it might be expected to resemble the exuberantly tawdry microcosm of Sara Gruen's novel, with its fiery lovers, fascinating freaks, unregenerate brutes and a menagerie dominated by a fancy-dancing linguist of an elephant named Rosie. So much for expectations. These lovers, Robert Pattinson's Jacob and Reese Witherspoon's Marlena, generate less heat than a naphtha stove. These freaks are noted only glancingly. (The fat lady doesn't get to talk, let alone sing.) The brutes have been combined into one bipolar monster that a surpassingly subtle actor, Christoph Waltz (the Nazi colonel of "Inglourious Basterds"), has been directed to play coarsely. And the director, Francis Lawrence—working from a screenplay by Richard LaGravenese—blows the moment when Jacob finds the key to Rosie's behavior: What was a magical discovery in the book becomes a mildly intriguing plot point. 
 
 Enlarge Image Close Twentieth Century Fox Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon in 'Water for Elephants.' 
 
 The film starts going wrong in a "Titanic"-like prologue with Hal Holbrook as the aged Jacob looking back on his life. His performance is too big, the camera is too close, the scene is being sold to the audience instead of offered to it. But that's nothing compared to the too-muchness of Mr. Waltz's evil ringmaster, August, and the too-manyness of the doting closeups devoted to Mr. Pattinson, who does far more reacting than acting in a movie that keeps insisting on the obvious. It's a tiny point, but that insistence even infects the moment when Marlena finds herself a ladder in order to climb aboard Rosie for the first time. "Can you help me with this ladder?" she asks Jacob, as if he might not recognize a tall narrow thing with lots of rungs. 
 
 'Meek's Cutoff' 
 
 Kelly Reichardt's marvelous, minimalist epic, which is entering national distribution this week, amounts to a master class in the power of observation. Much of the action—the outward action, since a lot goes on in people's heads—is seen and barely heard in long shots. The pace matches that of the characters, three families in a wagon train moving slowly toward Oregon in 1845. (At least the families hope they're headed for Oregon, since their guide, a mountain man named Stephen Meek, has taken them on an unmarked path and they've lost their way.) Yet you watch with unswerving attention. 
 
 Enlarge Image Close Oscilloscope Laboratories Shirley Henderson, Zoe Kazan and Michelle Williams in 'Meek's Cutoff.' 
 
 Meek, who is played with layered extravagance by Bruce Greenwood, is part of the reason the movie is intrinsically dramatic. Is Meek to be trusted, or is he the blowhard he seems increasingly to be? But the other component of Jon Raymond's brilliant script presents an equally fateful alternative—an Indian wanderer who may lead the pioneers to the water they must find, or to their deaths at the hands of his unseen tribesmen. 
 
 Insisting on nothing, "Meek's Cutoff" operates on faith in our concern for understated yet complex issues of trust, fear, empathy, ignorance versus evil, the mystery of authority and the role of The Other in an encounter between civilizations. Ms. Reichardt conveys all of this with her own serene authority. The flawless cast includes Michelle Williams, Will Patton, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson, Zoe Kazan and Rod Rondeaux. Christopher Blauvelt did the cinematography, which is luminous by day and mysteriously dark by night. Jeff Grace composed the score, an austere symphony of woozy swoops. 
 
 'POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold' 
 
 Morgan Spurlock has come up with a terrific idea—a movie about product placements that depends completely on product placements for its financing. He admits from the get-go that he's selling out, then insists that such transparency proves his integrity. The full title gives POM Wonderful its own line because the makers of the pricey pomegranate elixir paid $1 million for above-the-title naming rights. (Hats off to them, not only for getting the joke but helping promulgate it.) Most of the movie's substance consists of Mr. Spurlock's campaign to find backers—he's an engaging pitchman—but he also discusses matters of ethics (while slugging down bottles of POM Wonderful) with such deep thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Donald Trump, and with Ralph Nader, who warns that "you can satirize and spoof yourself out of your objective." 
 
 It's good advice, but Mr. Spurlock doesn't need it. He spoofs himself into an exuberant documentary that demonstrates the all-pervasive influence of modern advertising by satiric example, and with great ingenuity—talking, for example, about product placement while he's placed in such products as a JetBlue terminal (where he slugs down a bottle of POM Wonderful.) During the course of the film he helps us understand why school districts like the one in Florida's Broward County stoop to selling ad space on their vehicles and fences (they know they're bending, though they don't consider it stooping.) Toward the end he favors Mr. Nader with a pair of Merrell shoes. In the interests of transparency, I should say that I left the screening with a swag bag full of placed products, and used one of them, Mane 'n Tail shampoo, on my hair the following morning. Although Mane 'n Tail was originally developed for horses, I can't tell you how clean it left me feeling. 
 
 In Brief 
 
 Jeanne, the single mother at the center of "Fly Away" lives with incipient crisis. Her teenage daughter, Mandy (Ashley Rickards), is autistic, and that incipience can give way to utter chaos without warning. Janet Grillo's modestly produced feature breaks no new ground in depicting those who live with autism—both the afflicted and their loved ones. So much is so familiar—the sudden terrors, the financial pressure, the beckoning prospect of institutionalization, the unanswerable question of how to have a life of one's own while caring for an autistic child. But Beth Broderick's lovely portrayal illuminates Jeanne's loneliness, and the steadfastness of her love. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Cy Harvey, who died last weekend at the age of 85, opened my eyes, and lots of others, to foreign films. Along with Bryant Haliday, his partner in the Brattle Theatre off Harvard Square, he founded Janus Films, the distribution company that introduced a generation of Americans half a century ago to the work of such directors as Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa. While it's hard to recall what the film scene was like before Janus, it's easy to remember the thrill of discovering the company's releases. The Roman god Janus faced two ways, but Janus the distributor taught me to look only one way—forward, with anticipation. 
 
 DVD FOCUS 'Caramel' (2007) Once known as the Paris of the Middle East, Beirut isn't all bombings and political upheavals. Nadine Labaki's beguiling debut feature, a small-scale comedy of sisterhood, is comprised of urgent, intimate vignettes about five women who meet at, or work at, a Beirut beauty salon called Si Belle. All but one of the actresses who play them are nonprofessionals—not unprofessional, just untrained in the craft—and they are, to a woman, enchanting. (The film takes its title from a sticky mixture used in Lebanon as a depilatory.) Ms. Labaki, the professional, plays Si Belle's owner. 'Horton Hears a Who!' (2008) Jim Carrey is the voice of Horton the elephant in this animated feature from Blue Sky Studios, the company that's currently flying high with a blue macaw named Rio. The film turns enchanting when it plunges from the jungle of Nool into the cheerful pandemonium of Who-ville, the microscopic civilization atop the white speck that Horton finds perched on a pink clover blossom. (Chuck Jones did a TV version of the Dr. Seuss classic in 1970.) The voice cast includes Steve Carell, Carol Burnett, Will Arnett, Amy Poehler, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Dan Fogler and Isla Fisher. 'Super Size Me' (2004) Morgan Spurlock took on the fast-food industry—and took the measure of this nation's obesity—by eating three meals a day only at McDonald's for one month, pigging out on the full caloric sweep of the chain's menu and agreeing to have orders supersized whenever a counter clerk asked. The result was a substantial weight gain, surprise, surprise; a spike in blood cholesterol and a likable documentary that puts American portion control in vivid perspective. The only other movie to do that more graphically is "Wall•E," with its extraplanetary leisure world of grotesque waddlers. --Joe Morgenstern 
 
 Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com ||||| This movie has been designated a Critics' Pick by the film reviewers of The New York Times. 
 
 Morgan Spurlock could sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. After watching his documentary “Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” I could imagine this charming red-headed 40-year-old filmmaker raking in money as a door-to-door salesman of crummy encyclopedias in the slums of Philadelphia or as a pitchman in an infomercial peddling a flimsy abdominal toner. He could probably earn millions as a motivational speaker. 
 
 For what Mr. Spurlock says matters less than the way he says it. Cocky with an undertone of ironic self-deprecation that forestalls accusations of insincerity, he is a superb promoter of himself as a brand. In “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” he may look ridiculous wearing clothes plastered with corporate logos, but he lets us in on the joke. 
 
 “Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” is even more amusing than “Super Size Me,” the documentary that put Mr. Spurlock on the moviemaking map in 2004. In that film he jeopardized his own health by restricting himself for a month to an all-McDonald’s diet. By the end of his experiment his numbers (weight, cholesterol and blood pressure) had shot up to potentially dangerous levels. 
 
 Like “Super Size Me” his new film is a documentary comedy in the Michael Moore mode but without a political or moral agenda. Mr. Spurlock has Mr. Moore’s prankster’s instincts, though not his sense of outrage. Exploring product placement in movies and on television, the documentary is as much celebration as it is a critique of what is called co-promotion, in which movies like “Spider-Man 2” are infiltrated with images of brand-name products that pay for the exposure. If “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” affects the attitude of an exposé, Mr. Spurlock is really a gleeful participant in the corruption (if that’s what you want to call it) that his movie purports to criticize. 
 
 The conceptual joke is that the entire project was financed by conspicuously placed products in a film that is little more than a string of ads for its sponsors, stitched together with scenes of Mr. Spurlock hustling like crazy to line them up. Brief appearances by Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader lend it a frisson of cultural and intellectual weight. 
 
 Mr. Spurlock hits the jackpot with Pom Wonderful, the pomegranate juice that markets itself as an antioxidant and that is supposed to have a Viagra effect if you drink enough of it. For $1 million, Pom Wonderful earned the privilege of having its name on the marquee in front of the title of this $1.5 million film. At the screening I attended small bottles of the juice were distributed in gift bags with other items from sponsors. 
 
 For Mr. Spurlock to get his million his contract with Pom Wonderful stipulates that the movie must gross $10 million at the box office (high for a documentary), sell 500,000 DVDs and downloads, and generate 600 million “media impressions.” 
 
 Other products prominently featured include Merrell shoes, JetBlue, Hyatt, Sheetz convenience stores, and (mostly bizarrely) Mane ’n Tail, a shampoo marketed to equestrians for use by both humans and horses. Of all the film’s comedic ads the funniest finds Mr. Spurlock sharing a bathtub with a tiny pony. 
 
 His idea for a “doc-buster” supported by corporate sponsors, he says, was a tough sell. Telephone calls to several hundred companies are met with indifference and sometimes suspicion, which is not surprising because “Super Size Me,” for all its humor, attacked McDonald’s. 
 
 Finally Ban deodorant invites Mr. Spurlock to a meeting where he works his fast-talking magic. More than once the movie shows Mr. Spurlock, armed with clever storyboards, selling his ideas with an enthusiasm and skill that would put Don Draper of “Mad Men” to shame. 
 
 The actual product placements in which Mr. Spurlock is shown plugging the sponsors who eventually sign on to the project are so outrageous that you want to laugh. Here the insidious “hidden persuaders” of Vance Packard’s book on subliminal advertising are gaudily on display. 
 
 The movie takes two tangents: one productive, the other mystifying. A visit to São Paulo, Brazil, where outdoor advertising has been banned, is almost shocking for the absence of Times Square-style signs. If the city looks pure without such visual stimulation, it also seems naked and poor. 
 
 The movie, which keeps a sprinting momentum, suddenly reaches a dead halt in a section that debates putting advertising in budget-strapped Florida public schools and on school buses to raise money. If the sequence belongs anywhere, it would be in a movie about paying for public education, not advertising. 
 
 What would “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” be with a different narrator-guide? 
 
 It is hard to imagine. Mr. Spurlock has the gift of gab along with an undeniable star quality. In fact I’ve already ordered the ab toner and am saving up for a down payment on the Brooklyn Bridge should he offer it up for sale. 
 
 “Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some language and sexual material. 
 
 POM WONDERFUL PRESENTS: 
 
 THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD 
 
 Opens on Friday in New York; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Chicago; Washington; Boston; Philadelphia; San Diego; Phoenix; and Austin, Tex. 
 
 Directed by Morgan Spurlock; written by Jeremy Chilnick and Mr. Spurlock; director of photography, Daniel Marracino; edited by Thomas M. Vogt; music by Jon Spurney; produced by Mr. Chilnick, Abbie Hurewitz, Mr. Spurlock, Keith Calder and Jessica Wu; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes.
– Morgan Spurlock, the guy behind Super Size Me, calls his latest documentary—an exploration of our ad-obsessed culture—The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. And critics seem to agree: Spurlock “has this habit of making documentaries that come hidden in the Trojan horse of silly and then stab at your conscience,” writes Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. “As ever, he makes you laugh till it hurts.” Spurlock "spoofs himself into an exuberant documentary that demonstrates the all-pervasive influence of modern advertising by satiric example, and with great ingenuity,” notes Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal. Spurlock has an appeal all his own, adds Stephen Holden in the New York Times: It’s “the gift of gab along with an undeniable star quality," making him "a superb promoter of himself as a brand." But “something gets lost as the distance between filmmaker and subject disappears—I think we call it objectivity,” warns Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. Still, Spurlock offers “some surprisingly salient observations.”