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Few chapters in recent history are as bleak as the Rape of Nanking. In late 1937 the then-capital of China was toppled and occupied by Japanese forces allied with Nazi Germany. The atrocities of the following two months left thousands dead and many more Chinese scarred for generations.

It's a tough thing to commit to film, which explains why Nanking swivels between a straight documentary approach with interview subjects and archival footage, and historical accounts retold by actors like Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemingway and Stephen Dorff, each in character as someone who witnessed the horrors as they unfolded.

When air raids first battered the city, one witness recalls, "The rich are fleeing. The poor remain behind," offering shades of Hurricane Katrina. Soon surrendered Chinese soldiers (and non-soldiers) were being marched to their slaughter while American missionaries watched in helpless horror.

More than 20,000 POWs were similarly "processed," and it's estimated that the same number of women were raped in the first month of the occupation alone. Women between the ages of 13 and 60 were routinely raped, and sometimes even teenage boys were too. One man describes his baby brother being impaled on a soldier's bayonet, and another's sister was sliced in two for resisting rape.

Meanwhile the Japanese media filmed staged acts of beneficence while hiding the atrocities, and some Americans got rich selling war supplies to Japan. The heart of this film, however, lies in the story of a few Westerners who made it their moral obligation to do something. They lobbied for and were able to establish a "safety zone" where rations were provided for refugees, among other things. It's estimated that the safety zone saved 250,000 lives, and several of its founders remained in Nanking for years afterward to help the Chinese people recover.

Though 25 Japanese leaders were found guilty of war crimes, to this day some Japanese believe the accounts from Nanking to be lies and exaggeration. The film doesn't vilify the Japanese--in fact, the word genocide is never used, though it applies--but casts war itself as the villain. Nanking may be a bleak vision of loss and endurance, but it's infused with enough humanity to save it from being just another bitter pill.

Despite its grammar-fudging title and ties to MTV Films, the Canadian How She Move plays more like a gritty little indie than most of the studio-assembled urban dance movies that precede it. It's a genre picture, sure, but one with considerable meat on its bones and a warmer heart than most.

Newcomer Rutina Wesley stars as determined teen Raya, who dreams of becoming a doctor but is forced to abandon private school and return to the old neighborhood when her drug-addict sister dies and her tuition money dries up. Everyone at her former high school assumes Raya's too good for them now, and soon she's at odds with Michelle (Tracey Armstrong), a muscle-bound bad girl who's a breath away from expulsion.

But hey, it's a dance movie, so instead of brawling, they try to outdo each other's moves, growing more fevered and frustrated as a crowd accumulates. (And of course Raya is a natural.) In a somewhat sitcom-y version of punishment, Raya is tethered to Michelle for tutoring, which provides a bit of stability for the girls' stormy relationship and offers a glimpse of Michelle's right-to-be-worried Jamaican mother, who turns out to be a lot like Raya's.

That subplot is handily couched, though, and Raya's quest for the money for a proper education leads her to step-dancing competitions, where cash prizes flow freely for the best dance teams. With her eyes set on a national dance-off in Detroit, she falls in with bland heartthrob Bishop (Dwain Murphy), leader of the boy-band-ish step squad JSJ, and his little brother Quake (Brennan Gademans), an argyle-wearing freshman who reads Tolstoy by choice and secretly diagrams his own step moves.

Between quarreling parents and competing step squads, there's plenty of conflict to send Raya hurtling toward the third act, which unfortunately is protracted and jerky where the rest of the film is durable and well paced. But director Ian Igbal Rashid taps into the innate aggression and rhythm-driven rapture of step, regardless of how watered-down these characters' moves may be. And Raya, somehow a wiry bookworm with concrete abs and blurring moves, is a pleasure to watch, whether she's flailing madly atop a sports car or navigating the trickier steps of adolescence.

A triumph of gimmickry from producer/huckster extraordinaire J.J. Abrams, the breathlessly hyped Internet sensation Cloverfield arrives already overshadowed by its brilliant viral marketing campaign, which offered the kind of peek-a-boo P.T. Barnumesque salesmanship not seen since The Blair Witch Project. How amusing then to discover the movie is, for all intents and purposes, Blair Witch's bigger-budget, slightly stupider baby sibling.

A creepy prologue informs us we're watching a videotape recently unearthed in "the area formerly known as Central Park," but impatient audiences may be forgiven for assuming we've accidentally channel-surfed onto an episode of Manhattan Twentysomethings' Most Inane Home Videos. It's a downtown going-away party for Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who's headed to Japan to be a vice president of a company or something, while his true love Beth (Odette Yustman) has finally figured out they're more than friends and blah blah blah. The turgid soap operatics are captured via camcorder by a drunken buffoon named Hud (T.J. Miller), and just when everything is seriously bordering on unwatchable, Godzilla suddenly attacks and the Statue of Liberty's head goes tumbling down the street.

Okay so technically it's not Godzilla, but who do they think they're fooling?

Beyond the inherent satisfaction of watching a gargantuan reptile stomp all over what up until then has felt like an especially shitty episode of Felicity (not coincidentally the program where Abrams, screenwriter Drew Goddard and director Matt Reeves all cut their teeth), Cloverfield's niftiest trick is sticking exclusively to that handheld camcorder footage. The monster is caught in fragments, the chaos glimpsed on the fly--armageddon from street-level, and running.

I'm sure we're in for plenty of straw-grasping think-pieces full of phrases like "post-9/11 anxieties" and "YouTube generation," but in all honesty the movie hasn't been thought through well enough to support any of that hand-wringing. (If you're looking for a giant monster movie with subtext to burn, rent The Host.) Cloverfield is just a kinetic, intensely visceral experience, using the camera's often obscured perspective and unclear images to enormous advantage, as what we can't see is always so much scarier than what's actually visible.