Given the subject, you'd think maybe Marco Bellocchio would make a grand statement about the tides of Italian history, like Visconti's 'The Leopard' or Bertolucci's '1900.' And for a while you feel like you're getting it, but then the story starts to sputter and grow narrow and confined rather than epic, and the film's attempt at grandeur grows hyperbolic and shrill. Grade: B-.  

Javor Gardev's stylish noir is an entertaining if overstuffed entry into genre — shot in luminous black and white, it features enough genre flourishes to fill two movies: copious nudity, hardboiled voice-over narration, a mysterious missing diamond, a sage cellmate, a sexy femme fatale, multiple narrative flashbacks, pretentious dialogue quoting the likes of Voltaire and much more. Cincinnati World Cinema screens it Nov. 1 and 3. Grade: B-.  

Mix the knowingness of policy wonks from 'The West Wing' with deadpan, mockumentary-style humor from 'The Office' and then throw in the scabrous, pessimistic take on the political motives for going to war from 'Wag the Dog,' and you have 'In the Loop.' Grade: B.  

The Wrecking Crew is a term — which has become part of Rock history lore — for the younger, talented session musicians who arrived in Los Angeles as the city was becoming a center for such gifted, ambitious Rock & Roll and 1960s-Pop producers/arrangers/artists as Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, Jimmy Webb, Herb Alpert, Lee Hazlewood, Lou Adler, Bones Howe (the Fifth Dimension) and many more. Cincinnati World Cinema presents this documentary Sunday and Monday at The Carnegie in Covington. Grade: B-plus.