Mark Holcomb

What keeps Murderball from devolving into redemptive drivel is its insistence on treating the players it profiles as jocks first and disabled men second.

Despite its affinity for whimsy over realism, Small Voices effectively captures the embittered desperation and ragged dedication of its exploited teachers.

Rifkin milks the generic Bukowski-land setting for all its melodramatic potential, but what little grace his tale of precarious skid-row dignity achieves is pushed into the margins by predictable plotting and tiresome histrionics.

Nawal's travails are more in the vein of a Latin American soap opera than Greek tragedy, and Jeanne and Simon's climactic, genuinely god-awful discovery plays like artistic sleight-of-hand rather than the profoundly tautological revelation it aspires to be.

Porterfield intersperses these delicately underplayed scenes with doc-style question-and-answer exchanges that, while initially jarring, achieve maximum cumulative impact.

Few clichés go unexercised, but there's also something quietly amazing going on here: For once, American Indians are portrayed not as spiritually attuned mystics or powerless patsies but as ordinary working stiffs, or at least the cinematic equivalent thereof.

Best in Show succeeds only insofar as you're willing to laugh at a bunch of sad freaks.

The rapid-fire satirical sophistication (scatology notwithstanding) and lovingly rendered pulp surrealism of this sequence should delight adults, while kids will get a charge out of the heroines' grown-up-defying chutzpah.

While far from perfect, Hitch is a rare studio product that earns the goodwill it smugly demands.

Anand manages to work in shamelessly exploitative September 11 footage between numbers, but aside from this sequence, Love couldn't be more giddily benign.

Charles Bukowski, the bard of post-war L.A.'s working-class underbelly, was no ordinary cult writer, and John Dullaghan's thorough, compelling doc Bukowski: Born Into This does a credible job of showing why.

Cloaks a familiar anti-feminist equation (career - kids = misery) in tiresome romantic-comedy duds.

Makes for unexpectedly giddy viewing.

Continues Disney's trend of crafting animated movies as much for adult viewers as for their pre-adolescent progeny.

It's nauseating, unfunny stuff, unmitigated by the revelation that Griffin's mom physically abused him.

Unusually impassioned indie.

Actually manages a fresh perspective. The director, camera in tow, had unimpeded access to the devastation for a full day before being shooed away by officials, and the footage he captured (sans commentary) is both gut-wrenchingly familiar and disconcertingly foreign.

Uneasy mélange of occult thriller and insane-asylum-as-social-microcosm parable.

First-timer Wayne Kramer brings pathos to Bernie and Shelly's fraught relationship, but his film never amounts to more than a cute idea stretched to poker-chip thinness.

This sly, sobering doc exposes the grievously fucked-up priorities surrounding the sport in a small town with little else on which to hang its hopes.

The film's real flaw is its limited focus.

The result is a film as tenacious, peculiar, and likable as Burt Munro himself.

Comfortably familiar. It lacks the tension between grandeur and intimacy that characterizes the films it apes.

This earnest, well-observed weepy has more depth than its genteel trappings might imply.

The scenario recalls everything from "High Noon" to "Unforgiven," but Costner is less interested in grappling with the grim ambiguities underlying those films than in codifying them. There's still much to like, including the warm, thoughtful performances and cinematographer James Muro's fearless use of natural light.

Wanders all over the map thematically and stylistically, and borrows heavily from Lynch, Jeunet, and von Trier while failing to find a spark of its own.

A quietly impassioned, genuinely stirring indie rarity.

A must-see for opera lovers and a snappy diversion for cinephiles.