From the website that brought you Rebecca Black, the "Leave Britney alone!" guy and the sneezing baby panda comes an honest-to-blog feature film.

"Noble" is the best word to describe Chris Weitz's new drama A Better Life. It was noble of Weitz to follow up a paycheck gig helming the second chapter in The Twilight Saga by making a low-budget film about a hot-button, socially relevant issue like illegal immigration. Mexican actor Demian Bichir's performance as the film's central character Carlos, a day laborer trying to earn a living for himself and his teenage son on the mean streets of Los Angeles, is also suffused with nobility and stiff-upper-lip suffering. And it's noble of the film's distributor, Summit Entertainment, to release a film like this at the height of the summer movie season, when multiplexes are generally crammed with far less weighty fare that revolve around giant transforming robots or zoo animals that for some reason feel compelled to talk to Kevin James.

While there was a certain amount of beauty to be had in director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's previous outings 21 Grams and Babel, it's hard to find any in Biutiful. Not only is it another real downer of a film, it also takes place entirely in the crowded, dirty slums of Barcelona, Spain, which makes it visually, as well as emotionally, harsh. A few truly beautiful scenes peek through, but for the most part the movie is a series of devastating revelations and creeping dread. But there's plenty of drama to go around the cast of characters, which means it'll probably win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. (Although Javier Bardem likely won't win Best Actor.) After all, Babel was nominated for Best Picture, and that was a pretty disturbing film. Biutiful isn't as sly with its interconnectedness as Babel, but it's got everything -- poverty, illness, mental illness, the plight of immigrants and death.

If you're still not sure if you want to see In a Better World even though it just won Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes, then I'll just tell you right off, see it. It's definitely worth seeing, even if it is a little sad and gory and disturbingly (if not excessively) violent. It's mostly in Danish, but there's also a lot of sitting around and looking at the pretty Danish scenery, so it's not like you're going to be reading the whole two hours. If you need to know more before you make a decision, read on and I'll tell you a little bit about the plot. No spoilers, just the broad strokes. It turns out Danish kids are just like ours!

The news that La Femme Nikita would be coming back with a brand new TV series came as somewhat of a shock -- after all, we still can't believe that the awesome French action film from 1990 managed to inspire such a terrible Bridget Fonda movie, let alone the hit Peta Wilson TV show that lasted five seasons. But then again, it is an awesome shoot-'em-up written and directed by Luc Besson, the godfather of modern French action films. Which got us thinking -- are there any other films in Besson's distinctively awesome body of work (including films he directed and films he just wrote) that would make kick-ass weekly TV shows? We found several, including one that's playing at the local arthouse cinema...

Fans of the films of Pedro Almodovar need no encouragement or discouragement to go see this movie. Nor do fans of Penelope Cruz, unless you're the kind who only likes her in Sahara and maybe Bandidas and that's it. We certainly can't blame you for liking those films (well, maybe a little bit), but you owe it to yourselves to watch Cruz in all of her films, including her four films by Almodovar. This latest finds Cruz in fine form as the secretary who becomes her boss's mistress who wants to be an actress and falls in love with her director, but it's a twisty, weaving path. The film is not linear, flashing back between the present day -- where the director, now blind, makes a living writing screenplays with his assistant and her son -- and the past, where Cruz meets him, and they have a torrid affair that is suspected by her jealous lover. And it is soap-tastic.

Depending on how you feel about security guards, Lyme disease, Matthew McConaughey, claymation, Avatar and the French, this is either a very good week for DVDs or the worst week ever.

Here at MWoP, we've been taking a "wait-and-see-but-don't-hold-your-breath" approach to the G.I. Joe live-action movie. Early on, the visual disparities from the cartoon were pretty jarring, but then, so were the X-Men movie costumes, and that worked out okay. (I'll leave the Transformers movie designs aside, since A. I still don't like them and B. the movies were successful in spite of them, making my opinion moot.) But when the commercials and action scenes started showing up -- including performance-enhancing accelerator suits, which were never part of the G.I. Joe mythos until very recently -- we started to worry a bit more. And now they've declined to screen the movie for the press. But given the fact that negative buzz got so bad at one point that director Stephen Sommers (Van Helsing) was rumored to have been fired, that may be a wise choice. Regardless, it seems there may be nothing to worry about.

To describe Park Chan-wook's newest film, the vampire tale Thirst, to someone who has never seen one of his films is difficult. The movie is horribly violent, and features people doing terrible things to each other in between graphic sex scenes. But, like all of Mr. Park's films, the violence and sex are intercut -- and often interwoven -- with hysterical comedy, so you find yourself laughing at things that you might not normally find amusing.

Starting with 1960's The Magnificent Seven (a remake of The Seven Samurai) and culminating in the recent spate of adaptations of Japanese and Korean horror movies, Hollywood has often looked to Asia for new ideas. But rarely do we see it go the other way -- at least, not in any sort of official capacity. But Sony Pictures Classics will distribute the new film from acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou (Hero, House of Flying Daggers), and it's a remake of the Coen Brothers' first film, Blood Simple.