Bill Weber

Godfrey Reggio's symphony of pristine 4K images doesn't add up to one grand epiphany, but an intermittent cluster of small ones.

It chronicles the quest of a self-described "geek," and there are pleasurable frissons of discovery in the detective work.

Though its ballast of jokes and spectacle are formidable, it often lurches about at a remote, enigmatic distance

This chronicle of two athletes throwing baseball's funkiest, least respected pitch is given depth by their stranger-than-fiction underdog status and camaraderie with mentors who've had the same struggles.

While crediting free-form radio pioneer Bob Fass with changing the culture of broadcasting, this documentary remains clear-eyed about the decline of community radio and the New Left.

A serviceable primer on the digital-celluloid divide in commercial cinema, if a bit unwieldy in scope and in danger of being made obsolete by the next version of the RED camera.

A historical melodrama that retains an ancient, elemental pull even as it insufficiently charts motivation and the self-denying values of antiquity.

Ultimately comes off as curiously anecdotal, lacking the dramatic dynamism that could give Marcel Pagnol's tale new life.

The layered, character-driven drama may subvert expectations of a sunny Venetian noir, but observes its five principal characters with a probing, egalitarian eye.

A direct-cinema document of the Cairo protests that toppled Mubarak, Stefano Savona's film doesn't pretend that Egypt's resolution has yet won a lasting victory.

A righteously outraged documentary targeting the "warm and fuzzy" iconography of the breast cancer fundraising bureaucracy and its camouflage of corporate priorities.

Goss's film carries its unique forms of narrative suspense, but her 16mm images imbue both the forbidding landscape and her characters' scientific aerie, though the observatory only dates from 1932, with a poetry of the seemingly eternal.

This documentary on the many forms of human debt, though often frustratingly broad, offers a path to balancing civilization's ledger with a hard-nosed brand of altruism.

A night of reckoning by a hoodlum in his haunted former home is a more sober and remote Freudian farrago than one expects from Guy Maddin.

Its director's romantic sensibilities wed to Terrence Rattigan's 60-year-old play, this period drama is buoyed by Rachel Weisz's poignant embodiment of a bourgeois wife seeking erotic autonomy.

Gambling on the unlikely redemption of a doom metal fuck-up, this potential rock-doc tragedy reveals a bromance of idol and idolator.

Re-employing the tools of Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis, this pleasant fable reclaims artful slapstick with a bliss that's hard to deny.

The movie's big joke is that Sue Ann turns out to be the potent, sociopathic one; for once, Perkins is out-psychoed by an honor-roll student who worries she'll be late for hygiene class.

A solid, affecting artifact of the cruelty of late 1950s South Africa, in which music often makes despair and long-suppressed anger bearable.

Lionizing a world-class architect without tipping into hagiography, this documentary performs a graceful cinematic dance around his works.

A freeform, New York-based variation on the Arabian Nights tales by Jonas Mekas is both a pan-narrative and a disarming portrait of its sweetly curious maker.

Fast on its feet, using 3D and motion-capture animation to kick its comedy-adventure into a superhuman gear, Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin is a wittily kineticized adaptation of the internationally loved comic books.

The beloved gang's sweet reunion will melt nostalgic adults into laughter and tears, and maybe kids won't mind drippy new Muppet Walter so much.

With six protagonists serving as a cross-section of Tehran's youthful population, director Hossein Keshavarz's Dog Sweat is a somber, minor-keyed debut feature about the daily manifestations of oppression in contemporary Iran.

Underlying the occasionally harrowing, consistently mournful tone is a philosophy that, more than being explicitly anti-capital punishment, puts both family ties and the social contract at the center of people's self-worth.

This bio-documentary of a New Left godfather presents a formidable character simpatico with today's zeitgeist in his championing of "spontaneous uprising."

It's not easy to give a character study concerning mental illness the aspect of a psychological thriller without some notes of exploitation or trivialization creeping in, and Take Shelter makes a few missteps.

Simply and devastatingly letting five residents of San Francisco share their reminiscences of that city's nightmarish "war zone" in the early, horrific years of AIDS, We Were Here creates a harrowing, streamlined oral history.