What soldier, anticipating his death in combat, wouldn’t want to be remembered as a fallen hero who gave his life for his comrades? What grieving family wouldn’t accept the official account, however fraudulent, of a son or daughter’s heroism, stifle their doubts, keep their mouths shut and be content to find some comfort in the ritual honors? That was probably the assumption of the military brass who concocted a bogus account of the combat death of Pat Tillman, a football star and a casualty of so-called friendly fire in Afghanistan in April 2004 at age 27. The official story initially had him saving the lives of fellow soldiers during a mountain ambush by the Taliban. It was a flag-waving, “Rambo”-worthy feel-good fantasy that played well on television. But as Amir Bar-Lev’s sorrowful, devastating documentary, “The Tillman Story,” reveals, not every soldier or every soldier’s family is willing to be so glorified. — Stephen Holden, The New York Times

Spaghetti, spinach and French fries, all smothered in cream sauce: the menu at Soul Kitchen, a decrepit restaurant in a converted warehouse in an industrial section of Hamburg, Germany, may not be to everyone’s palate. But the place attracts a scraggly following of regulars who exit in a huff after its manager, Zinos Kazantsakis (Adam Bousdoukos), hires Shayn (Birol Ünel), a snooty culinary prima donna, as its new chef. When Shayn scraps the menu to serve dishes with names like Acupuncture Master’s Soup, the place empties. Recently fired from his job at a more upscale restaurant after refusing to honor a customer’s order for hot gazpacho, Shayn is not above spiking desserts with an aphrodisiac made from Honduran tree bark. The scene in Fatih Akin’s sweet slapstick farce, “Soul Kitchen” (named after the restaurant), in which the patrons go orgiastically berserk while under the bark’s influence, isn’t laugh-out-loud-funny so much as warmly amusing. We’ve seen it before, just as we’ve also seen the mishap at a funeral when, to the mourners’ shock and chagrin, a coffin is dropped, rather than lowered into the ground, and the corpse’s legs are exposed. What gives these hoary gags some screwball vitality is the skill with which Mr. Akin piles them on willy-nilly in a swiftly edited comedy that never loses its exuberance. — Stephen Holden, The New York Times

The closest person to a protagonist in the gripping historical mosaic “Army of Crime” is the eminent Armenian poet Missak Manouchian (Simon Abkarian). A militant Communist and hero of the French Resistance, executed by the Nazis in 1944, he is the noblest figure in a sprawling, semifictional movie that has enough characters to fill an entire neighborhood. As the story begins in 1941 in occupied Paris, Germany has just invaded Russia. Manouchian, along with fellow Communists, is rounded up and detained at a nearby camp from which he is released after signing a document disavowing his politics. A reflective soul, scraps of whose poetry are heard in the film, Manouchian does not believe in killing. And the scenes of his rendezvous with his beautiful, adoring French wife, Mélinée (Virginie Ledoyen), who risks her life to bring him food while he is interned, lend the movie a faint romantic blush. But when the Nazis crack down on the Resistance, Manouchian’s philosophy toughens. He joins the FTP-MOI, an armed unit of anti-fascist partisans — mostly Communist, mostly Jewish immigrants from Spain, Hungary, Poland, Armenia and Italy — and becomes its commander. — Stephen Holden, The New York Times