From documentaries like No End in Sight and Fahrenheit 9/11 to narrative pieces like The Situation and Rendition, no conflict has gotten as immediate a cinematic response as the one we're currently embroiled in. The latest movie to join the fray: The Kingdom, starring Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner about FBI operatives trying to locate terrorists in the Middle East. While The Kingdom wants to do good by exploring the topic of international politics and subterfuge, critics claim that the drama is manipulative and the film quickly descends into war genre trappings, treating enemies as generic moving targets.

With Everything is Illuminated a few years behind us and Watchmen coming up, the idea of some novels being too complex to be adapted suddenly seems passe. Feast of Love, based on a novel by Charles Baxter about a community of people looking for emotional connections, could also have been deemed too sprawling and multi-faceted to adapt convincingly. So while they haven't found any weak links in the fine ensemble cast, critics call Feast of Love a hodgepodge of sentimentality that's ambitious but fails to go in-depth with its characters. And the film's congenial manner, coupled with its total lack of cynicism on love and human relationships, makes for a pleasant time at the movies, if not a riveting one.