Nathan Rabin

There's a terrific short film somewhere inside Mark Moskowitz's feature-length documentary Stone Reader. Unfortunately, it's buried within a flabby 128-minute slog that feels like a rough draft nobody had the heart to edit down.

Often uproariously funny, even though much of its queasy power comes from its acknowledgment that some matters are too horrifying to be washed away with cheap laughter, or packaged into soundbites.

Is it possible to talk about the fascinating and complex universe of black hair without dealing with race and identity? That’s the question posed by Good Hair.

The Bitter Buddha closes with Pepitone pondering whether he’s wasted his life by focusing on comedy rather than family, but everything that’s come before suggests that decision has led to a life that’s a triumph rather than a tragedy.

The Tunnel boasts the kind of plot that would seem ridiculously implausible if it weren't based on a true story.

The Signal would desperately like to be a film of ideas, but the few it presents are vapid and secondhand. Eubank’s overachieving work on the film suggests he’s destined for bigger and better things, though given the airy nothingness of the film’s mind games, that’s setting the bar awfully low.

In the earthly realm, it’s a sledgehammer-subtle social satire filled with cartoonish Keystone Kops haplessly pursuing their elusive prey, and crudely drawn authority figures behaving like petulant children. On a more ethereal level, it’s an intermittently lyrical, strangely poignant fantasy powered by the beatific, magnetic presence of Cort and Shelley Duvall in an electric debut, and “Papa” John Phillips’ lovely songs.

A surprisingly fresh and funny feature-length look at an unrelentingly filthy vaudeville gag that's been passed down from comic to comic like an urban legend, often changing with every telling.

Kwapis fills small roles with great character actors like Stephen Root, Andrew Daly, Kathy Baker, Tim Blake Nelson, John Michael Higgins, Rob Riggle, and James LeGros, all skilled at making a lot out of a little.

As the conceptually similar documentary "Spellbound" proved, spelling bees are innately dramatic. But that doesn't keep Atchison from constantly pushing the film toward theatrical moments instead of letting the drama arise organically from the story.

Time Is Illmatic is a documentary worthy of its subject. It’s no masterpiece, but it’s a strong, substantive look at an album whose greatness was apparent immediately, but that’s still grown in stature since its release.

The astonishing visual poetry of Step Into Liquid's best surfing footage nearly compensates for the mindless boosterism of Brown's constant narration and the often comically banal observations of the film's largely homogeneous master surfers.

The Kill Team tells a compelling story, but the 79-minute runtime leaves that story feeling incomplete.

Along with producer Laurie David (who was also behind Inconvenient Truth) and director Stephanie Soechtig, Couric has made an unabashed muckraking documentary that ends with a call to action that’s half inspirational, half grating. It’s propaganda, to be sure, but effective propaganda.

In spite of the out-of-place pregnancy subplot, Smashed is a film of pummeling intensity and bruised emotions.

Quietly heartbreaking.

Seconds is certainly a flawed film, and it's easy to see why it flopped during its initial release: It's a relentlessly depressing, claustrophobic movie that offers no sense of catharsis whatsoever. Nevertheless, it's strangely touching, and as a portrayal of identity and alienation in suburban America, it's about a hundred times as creepy and sincere as David Lynch's thematically similar Lost Highway.

Director Craig McCall approaches Cardiff with something approaching awe, though his subject views his accomplishments with the good-natured humility befitting a proper English gentleman.

Writer-director Chris Kentis has dreamed up an ingenious premise, but he botches its execution. Every once in a while, the film stumbles upon a twist that ratchets up the tension, but then haphazardly discards it.

In a medium generally about action and momentum, Factotum is largely concerned with inaction and inertia.

The Coens engineer a funny, entertaining battle of the sexes here, but the preponderance of indelible male characters and less memorable female roles render it something of a mismatch.

Gulpilil, a solid cast, and gorgeous scenery keep The Tracker watchable, but they can't mask the fact that as an adventure, it's sluggish, and as a film about racism, it's often reductive and clumsy.

Trumbo sexes up Trumbo's already dramatic story with a massive infusion of star power.

God-awful.

Broomfield's documentaries present life on the fringes as one long, sick joke. The joke still works, but in Life And Death Of A Serial Killer, it leaves a bitter aftertaste.

As charming as it is winningly modest, but it's so incredibly slight a stiff wind would knock it into a different hemisphere.

This material could easily have devolved into soap opera or romantic melodrama, but Wilkinson and Watson's superb, subtle performances lend it tremendous depth and gravity.

An extraordinarily faithful—though schmaltzy and ultimately pointless— 1983 remake of Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 farce.