Laura Sinagra

Though Zilberman's affection for the women leads to some indulgent digression, the doc's low-key tone (and lack of the stock, timpani-backed Nazi iconography) throws certain anecdotes into powerful relief.

Not only documents the soul-titan concert held at L.A. Coliseum seven years after Watts burned, but illuminates the rue and kinesis of a city in full Black Power flower.

Moormann's film transcends A&E hagiography, and Dowd's spry egoism and science-hipster joie de vivre provide piquant icing. Recalling trends, technical advances, artists, and landmark sessions (one where he suggests the rhythm for "Sunshine of Your Love"), Dowd conjures the excitement that helped coax so many iconic performances.

Like "Spellbound's" glimpse of the darker side of childhood competition, Mad Hot Ballroom--a look at New York City schools' fifth-grade ballroom dance program--is best when exploring issues of class and gender and definitions of success.

The total effect, of course, is abject sadness as we helplessly watch each enact a unique anti-success story in an inverted reality show.

Though the edits can be too living-room smooth, the passion and pathology on display transcend the Tabitha Soren overload.

Despite similar excess, Garbus's follow-up to 2002's "The Execution of Wanda Jean" provides another powerful glimpse inside the American justice system.

Harmless slapstick fun.

Beyond the buzz of iconoclasm, our explorers find a regular troubled marriage, only with three sides to every problem.

Offers a bumper crop of tasty bits.

In interviews, Norbu has compared the editing process to meditation. While his pacing echoes that of polestars like Ozu and Makhmalbaf, his edits make striking events out of mundane motions like hands moving under running water and mouths meeting cups of butter tea.

Unfortunately, Bardem is confined by more than Ramón's paralysis. He also must work within the limits of a partially numbed script.

The best moments belong to Shirley MacLaine, who makes the clipped script sing as Ella.

Bravely bucks the "Behind the Music" arc, conveying a reality of constant flux, a sense of the band being jerked in many different directions.

It's an exhilaratingly decentered tale, with the perspective shifting around so there's no character with whom we totally identify throughout.

With Awesome's insistence on professional sound--only a few times do we get sonically dropped into the cavernous, thumping Garden--and cuts to pristine close-ups of things like Mixmaster Mike's admittedly sick scratch detail work, it plays like a hype victory lap rather than a boundary-smashing study of fan curiosity or pathology.

A quiet tour de force for Tilda Swinton, who plays researcher Rosetta Stone and her feisty but fragile alter egos.

Kennedy takes pains to illuminate aspects and insights that buck cliché.

If you can handle the truth, Sarah Goodman's entropic doc is as exquisite a basic training in banal U.S. Army culture as you're likely to find.

The reverent pacing lags a bit, but the film's meditation on the struggle to find spirituality that reconciles Islam with tribal belief systems is powerful in its understatement, and its wordless observation of France's Malian community quietly evidences daily cultural preservation amid the hard labor.

Manages to explore the darker facets of friendship without being dark.

Like Catherine Hardwicke's "Thirteen," this film has an ear for the way moms talk to kids, a sensitivity to drug-sweetened intimacies, and an appreciation of the urgent nuance, not just the comedy, of recovery-speak.