Neil Genzlinger

You may find this sparse film maddeningly elusive, but chances are you’ll come out of it with your head spinning, in a good way.

A bit of patience is required to get through The Taste of Tea, but patience is often rewarded, and it certainly is by this droll and oddly touching film.

Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day is usually pretty appealing when he dabbles in acting, and he’s appealing again in Ordinary World. But after a promising start the script lets him down, and the film turns into a predictable midlife-crisis yarn.

Any wilderness ordeal has to help some character clarify something, and for Ben it’s his relationship with his girlfriend (Hanna Mangan-Lawrence), which gives the film a modest side interest. But mostly this one is for fans of desert scenery and of Mr. Douglas in cranky, crazy mode.

The efforts to document the teams' creative processes aren't particularly successful - no camera can capture something that elusive - but the filmmakers do a fine job with the back stories of the featured poets.

Stands as both a tribute and a study in healing.

If you prefer to view dying as a natural part of life, a step in a cycle, this film will feel discordant and perhaps counterproductive. But visually it will certainly stick with you, and your children.

The film is, if nothing else, an interesting meditation on how a child who grows up without guidance might react to a situation that requires judgment.

The film does a pretty good job of conveying the bleakness and pointlessness Eva and her fellow mutants feel, but it's as if Ms. Trachinger were reluctant to take the premise any deeper for fear of being accused of imitating "Memento" or "Groundhog Day" or any number of other trapped-in-time films.

Approach Something Better to Come with the same patience that the filmmaker exhibited in shooting it and you’ll be rewarded. That is, if your definition of “rewarded” includes being dismayed by the bleakness that exists on the edges of prosperity.

Those whose tolerance of Greatest Generation war stories isn't exhausted, not to mention those who still thrive on them, will find the group of men who called themselves the Ritchie Boys good company.

Mr. Bezmozgis creates a disturbing portrait of a girl turned calculating and nihilistic by her upbringing, and there is no coyness here.

[Grohl] shows a decent grasp of how to pace a documentary and how to push nostalgia buttons, avoiding the marsh of smarminess most - though not quite all - of the time.

An aimless film about an aimless fellow, but it's not without its charms. It may be without a point, but hey, you can't have everything in a no-budget film like this.

Commendably, the film, narrated by John Leguizamo, sugarcoats nothing, and the people involved - the players, their trainers, their parents, the scouts - are remarkably forthright.

Sometimes a film feels a bit too pat and yet is impossible to resist. The Mighty Macs, based on the national championship run of the 1972 women's basketball team at Immaculata College near Philadelphia, is such a film: lots of button pushing, but in the end you're glad you saw it.

The film doesn't just serve up Mr. Balog's amazing and undeniably convincing imagery. It also records his personal struggles as knee problems threaten his ability to hike the difficult terrain to get the shots he wants.

How do you know you're looking at a pretty good piece of filmmaking? When the director and actors can make you care about the central characters even though they exchange almost no dialogue.

The filmmakers found an appealing collection of relatives and others who knew these artists and Savitsky to tell the story, but they also let the art do the talking, with loving, lingering shots of the brightly colored works.

A striking experiment in music and moviemaking.

A thoughtful bit of filmmaking, one that at heart is not really about birds at all.

It’s a fantastic collage that the filmmaker, Thorsten Schütte, uses to illuminate not only Zappa (who died of cancer in 1993), but also the cultural upheavals that defined his time.

The film, by Justin Bare and Matthew Miele, would be better if it spent less time gushing about how great Mr. Benson is and more time confronting some of the questions his approach raises.

The film, derivative (see “The Shaggy Dog” of 2006) and devoid of wit, is about that tiredest of kid-movie clichés, the parent who is too busy for his children and must be taught a lesson.

The film may be one-sided, but if nothing else, it is a reminder that the “coal equals jobs” equation is a serious oversimplification.

Revenge is the theme and cheeky is the tone of In Order of Disappearance, a delicious Norwegian film full of icy landscapes and icier hearts.

This appealing documentary makes you understand why aficionados regard baseball as a form of poetry.

It’s a stretch to call Mr. Everson’s film a documentary.