Another round from Cardiff's finest.

For a band singularly possessed by a ramshackle and manic pop sensibility, Los Campesinos! finds plenty of opportunity on We are Beautiful, We are Doomed to add fresh coats of paint to their idiosyncratic sound. There are handclaps and fist pumps aplenty, and more than one track makes good use of the familiar violin and guitar point-counterpoint before resolving into seismic breakdowns and bon mots, such as this one, from the album's title track: “We kid ourselves there’s future in the fucking / but there is no fucking future."

Release Date: Nov. 21
Director: Ellen Kuras
Co-Director: Thavisouk Phrasavath
Writers: Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath
Cinematographer: Ellen Kuras
Studio/Run Time: Pandalino Films, 96 mins.

Ellen Kuras is probably best known as one of the strongest cinematographers to come out of the '90s, due to her work on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Summer of Sam and Personal Velocity. Her directorial debut shares little in common with her most of her previous work, though, either in content or form. The Betrayal is a not quite cinema-verite (featuring voice-overs and interviews) documentary that deals with the United States’ extrication from Laos following the Vietnam War’s resolution and its effects on Thavisouk Phrasavath and his family. 

This ain't no party, this ain't no disco

It’s amazing what a couple decades can do. When we last left Brian Eno and David Byrne, it was 1981 and the two had just released My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a funky postscript to the hallowed Talking Heads/Eno trilogy (More Songs About Buildings and Food, Fear of Music and Remain in Light). Their collaboration was a final pioneering burst of creative energy that broke ground by pairing found sounds with post-modern disco.

Rambling foot notes

Geoff Nicholson’s latest encyclopedic investigation into an ordinary activity (Sex Collectors was his last) is a strolling, strutting, occasionally limping look at bipedalism. A droll Brit, the author is Bill Bryson with better legs and less interest in walking—or narrating—along straight lines.

Release Date: Nov. 26

Director: Gus Van Sant

Writers: Dustin Lance Black

Cinematographer: Harris Savides

Starring: Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, Diego Luna, James Franco

Studio Information: Focus Features, 128 mins.

Today, Harvey Milk is remembered as a local hero in San Francisco, and Sean Penn’s joyful, deeply layered portrayal in a new biopic by Gus Van Sant gives us a pretty good idea why. Harvey was the first openly gay person elected to public office in the U.S., and he served on San Francisco's board of supervisors until he and mayor George Moscone were shot and killed by a fellow supervisor, Dan White, in 1978. But the lasting image of the film isn't a gunshot or a riot but the ear-to-ear grin that tops Penn’s compact, gesticulating frame.

Standing room only

Collaboration tracks dominated 2008, an aesthetic writ large on Ludacris’ sixth album. All but two of Theater of the Mind’s tracks boast big-name rappers for this glossy snapshot of the hip-hop landscape. The cornucopia of voices leaves the leading man scant room to maneuver, but his towering persona overflows from the proscenium anyway.

Release Date: Nov. 26

Director: Baz Luhrmann

Writer: Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Bryan Brown, Brandon Walters

Stuart Beattie, Baz Luhrmann, Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanagan

Studio/Run Time: 20th Century Fox, 176 mins.

Well-mannered lust in the dust

The country's tourism board may have sunk a tidy sum into the picture, but Australia, the return of Moulin Rouge director Baz Luhrman, is less a commercial for travel than a plea for tolerance. Alongside the gorgeous landscapes and simmering love story between Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman is the story of prejudice against half-caste Aboriginal children and, by extension, all of the continent's original residents. But while Luhrman's intent is admirable, he seems to realize that the only way to tell a tale of social consciousness is to wrap it in a fantasy.

Release Date: Nov. 26

Director: Seth Gordon

Writers: Matt Allen, Caleb Wilson, Jon Lucas, Scott Moore

Cinematographer: Jeffrey L. Kimball

Starring: Vince Vaughn, Reese Witherspoon, Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Jon Voight, Mary Steenburgen

Studio/Running Time: New Line Cinema, 82 mins.

Proving that quantity does not equal quality, director Seth Gordon (The King of Kong) presents Four Christmases, a weak, soulless holiday film in spite of its inclusion of five previous Oscar winners.

D&D escape fantasy for the masses

Around 1975, my cousins and I invented the core element of the modern role-playing game. Alongside the Powe brothers—Joe, David and Mike—I imagined myself in worlds overrun by spies, pirates, giant monsters and superheroes. Superheroes were the troublemakers, as arguments over whose character was stronger, faster or (pardon the grammar) more invulnerable during some imaginary battle often derailed anything resembling play. Our solution: We assigned numbers, one to 25, to describe just how super the Tarantula was versus, say, Cerebrus. Play resumed, and all was right with the worlds.

Mixed bag points to potentially exciting future

Repeat after me: I will not, under any circumstances, play prog rock. If ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead has any hopes of returning to its glory days, Conrad Keely and Co. should repeat this phrase like a mantra, perhaps even write it a couple hundred times on a chalk board a la Bart Simpson.