Logan Marshall-Green, Noopi Rapace, and Michael Fassbender in PrometheusPROMETHEUS

After many months of speculation, the question of whether Ridley Scott's Prometheus is, in fact, a prequel to the director's Alien can finally be answered: Hell yeah it is. And a good thing, too, because the enticing echoes of that 1979 sci-fi/horror essential are among the scant few elements that truly resonate in this visually extraordinary but only fitfully engaging endeavor.

Andy Garcia and Mauricio Kuri in For Greater GloryFOR GREATER GLORY

To my considerable chagrin, before seeing For Greater Glory, I had no knowledge of the Cristero War that serves as the film's subject - a brutal conflict between devout Roman Catholics and the Mexican government that, in the late 1920s, claimed nearly 100,000 lives. Consequently, I thank director Dean Wright and screenwriter Michael Love for their two-and-a-half hour exploration of this years-long struggle, a movie that's intensely informative and sincere, and mostly engaging. If only it weren't also so sentimental, and so manipulative.