Reviewed in brief: 'Attack the Block'

ATTACK THE BLOCK

As the low-budget British aliens-invade-the-hood thriller "Attack the Block" makes clear, there are certain sections of London that maybe the aliens should think twice about before plunging in and devouring the locals.On Guy Fawkes night, as fireworks pop off across the city, young thugs led by the charismatic Moses (John Boyega) select their target and mug her. But not every streak in the night sky is man-made. A meteor drops in and the thing that crawls out of it interrupts the mugging and sets Moses off.

"I'm chasin' that down," he vows in heavily accented English. "I'm killin' it."

Only after doing so does Moses realize that alien wasn't alone. As the night goes on and more meteors crash, Moses and his young homies find themselves in conflict with an older gang leader, chased by the cops and hunted by shadowy gorillas with glow-in-the-dark teeth.

Writer-director Joe Cornish, a veteran of British TV, has delivered a brisk blast of bloody good fun -- sci-fi with a little social commentary as subtext. --ROGER MOORE, ORLANDO SENTINEL

INSIDE OUTThis World Wrestling Entertainment production is yet another attempt to make Paul "Triple H" Levesque into a leading man. Levesque portrays an ex-con, A.J., who gets out of prison and re-connects with Jack, played by the motor-mouthed goombah Michael Rapaport. Jack's a former running mate, a low-rent gangster who is the son of another low-rent gangster. Jack didn't visit his pal in prison, but took up with and married A.J.'s ex-girlfriend (Parker Posey). He's determined to drag the hulking A.J. back into "the life," and keep his veterinarian-mobster dad (Bruce Dern) off his back.

Lawyer-turned-screenwriter Dylan Schaffer's script is an unhappy combination of genres, tones, too many dead stretches of people in cars and inept dialogue. Rapaport's tiresome patter doesn't allow for the weak laughs to land. Dern could have played his mobster, whose cover job is running an animal hospital, with a seriously strange or seriously silly spin. But he does neither. Posey does her best to hide that this is just a WWE paycheck part.

SHOLEM ALEICHEM: LAUGHING IN THE DARKNESS

Best known for his stories of Tevye the Milkman, a character later brought to Broadway and film screens in "Fiddler on the Roof," Sholem Aleichem was an immensely popular Russian humorist often called "the Jewish Mark Twain." Writing in folksy Yiddish, he poked fun at Jewish foibles, but his work reached far beyond the world of the shtetl, and he has captivated readers of every nationality and background. (Twain himself said, "Please tell him I am the American Sholem Aleichem.") Writer/director Joseph Dorman's still photos and talking-heads documentary traces the parallels between Aleichem's life, with fortunes won and lost, and his Job-like yet cheerful characters. It also details his significance as a chronicler of Jewish life in an era of radical, and often tragic, tumult. --COLIN COVERT

GRIFF THE INVISIBLE

A nebbishy office worker encounters a misfit soulmate in "Griff The Invisible," an uneven Australian romantic comedy that throws in a "Kick-Ass" twist -- by night, our hero transforms himself into a costumed crime fighter.

Griff's hand-me-down Batman routine is played for some laughs, but it's also obvious compensation for a stupefying day job where he suffers at the hands of a bully. His repressed life gets complicated with the arrival of a buttinsky sibling (Patrick Brammall) determined to take him in hand.

Writer-director Leon Ford wisely declines to make Griff entirely sympathetic -- the character's alienation is genuine and has a troubling edge. But you get the idea that the filmmaker is leaning a little too heavily on the quirkiness of it all. --WALTER ADDIEGO, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE