Ronnie Scheib

For Fry, the music's complexity, ambiguity, innovation and humanity far surpass Wagner's personal limitations. He may not convince his viewers of the rightness of his conclusions, but he certainly makes a fervent case for the triumph of art over biography.

Unlike "Unzipped," with its single focus on the charismatic Mizrahi, Seamless follows three of the 10 finalists, furnishing a quietly fascinating contrast in persona, approach and design.

Piles heavy emotional baggage on a slender story frame. Pic looks ravishing, featuring a nocturnal road trip through a cool kaleidoscopic landscape of shifting colors peopled by three commanding thesps of different generations whose interlocking stories form a cohesive whole.

Confusing lack of historical set-up considerably dims the potential luster of a great true story: Helmer Alberto Negrin relies instead on competently rendered but cliche-ridden melodrama of nasty Nazis and suffering Jews.

Burns' always impressive sense of place lends authenticity to the pals' perambulations, and the stellar cast brings a welcome overabundance of personality to regrettably one-note roles.

Barsky wisely includes just enough dissenting voices and admissions of grievous error by Koch himself to prevent the picture from seeming like a 100% feel-good puff piece.

Less cohesive and accessible than "The Maid" (which the Chilean duo co-scripted and Silva helmed solo), picture nonetheless contains unforgettable scenes.

Ron Frank and Melvut Akkaya’s docu isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but as a brief history of the Catskill resorts, liberally laced with well-edited archival promos, songs, homemovies and extended excerpts from routines by Jewish comics who performed there, it consistently entertains.

Holiff Sr.’s extensive audio diaries and taped phone conversations with Cash give authentic voice to the film’s otherwise stodgy re-creations of this true odd couple’s stormy relationship.

Director-producer Aviva Kempner's well-researched but unchallenging docu, like "The Goldbergs" itself, has cross-cultural appeal for Jews and goyim alike.

Uneven but enjoyably titillating black comedy should elate Rickman fans while pleasing aficionados of extra-flakey caper flicks.

The pleasures of well-observed characters and small epiphanies are undeniable, and Alex of Venice, actor Chris Messina’s directing debut, is amply supplied with both, thanks to Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s extraordinary performance: Registering profound shocks with slight ripples rather than big emotions, she quietly commands attention.

Despite lively commentaries by a pantheon of master musicians and magnificently performed classical pieces, "Exiles" only distantly echoes Huberman's visionary adventure.

Documentarian Jarred Alterman emphasizes oddball lyricism in the one-of-a-kind Convento, in which a 400-year-old Portuguese monastery provides the canvas for a Dutch family's artistic experimentation.

Schwarz lacks the writing chops to adequately embed the character’s predictable learning curve into a richer narrative fabric, but Dunne’s perf is pitch-perfect.

As a character study and revelation of a possible answer to addiction, the docu rocks. But Negroponte's low-res video camera, trivializes the film's already crude approximations of psychedelic experiences and its recordings of shamanistic rituals.

The indomitable siblings' unusual background, huge size and highly developed intellects, as well as the dramatic ups, downs and rebounds of their interwoven sagas, should result in a fascinating dual biodoc. But the two-hour pic's lack of economy makes for heavy slogging, with no boxing minutiae too small for exhaustive exposition.

The latest in a line of documentaries decrying the destruction of viable working-class businesses and residential neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Su Friedrich’s film bypasses sadness and indignation for flat-out anger and well-aimed sarcasm.

Picture loses its delicate edge when it builds to a prescribed dramatic flashpoint within an overly compressed timeframe

Unlike more generally philosophical, life-affirming autobiographical docus about dying, “One Cut, One Life” rehashes old problems and tries to resolve multiple unresolved issues already exposed in previous films, proving as exasperating as it is weirdly compelling.

Covering familiar ground from an unfamiliar angle, Ted Woods' oddball documentary White Wash examines the history of African-American disenfranchisement from a black surfer's viewpoint, in the process countering the racist myth that black people don't swim or surf.

As endless processions of friends and colleagues attest to Spinney’s genius, and the filmmakers wallow in never-before-seen behind-the-scenes imagery, they fail to fully capture the actual art of puppeteering, with woefully few substantial excerpts from the show itself.

Winner of the Golden Starfish fiction competition at the Hamptons fest, pic's gutsy, madly ambiguous unleashing of a mixed bag of religious reactions attests to a genuine sense of regionalism.

Though generally engrossing, Ikland's multiscreen displays and cross-cultural theatrical experiments prove more distracting than effective.

Koons Garcia has obviously opted for an upbeat approach: Choruses of scientists and farmers sing the praises of organic farming while John Chater’s camera visually devours the fruits, vegetables and livestock produced by healthy dirt.

In his intriguing take on the Frankenstein myth, first-time scripter/helmer James Bai establishes an entire alternate universe with consummate mastery only to fail to coax a convincing performance out of his lead actor.

Collectivist in spirit, this mostly entertaining film lacks an official host or voiceover narration, which first works swimmingly but eventually becomes too diffuse.

A strong cast, formal visual style and cynical voiceover that propels the action help elevate this Seattle-set gay romp from the ranks of the stereotypical.

For Semans’ conceit of an obsessively narrow world to really work, he needed to have established an initially more expansive milieu.

Luft grounds the film with an insistently believable performance, while other thesps float in and out of cliche.

In an act of "selfless service," a group of American women, backed by industry giants like Clairol and Vogue, open a beauty school in war-ravaged Afghanistan. The anomalies are manifold: Gun-toting soldiers patrolling the streets are visible through the windows as rookie beauticians busily snip, perm and tweeze.

An admirable if downbeat character study, Gabriel still sinks into a psychological quagmire.

Greif obviously ascribes to the Blake Edwardian school of comedy, laying out gags with commendable topographical precision. But, unlike Edwards' unique mixture of sophistication and slapstick, Funny Money falls squarely in the tradition of pure farce, itself an anomaly in this age of aggressively abrasive personality comedies.

Safer, more conventional and closer to broad TV sketch humor than Christopher Guest's comedies of manners, The Grand never quite recoups in laughs what it loses in spontaneity.

A Whisper to a Roar traces a too-familiar step-by-step political pattern: the transformation of a liberator into a despot, his subsequent reign of tyranny and the popular uprising against it.

Perhaps the least accessible of Tian's films, this serenely elliptical poser will elude all but the most devoted arthouse auds.

This offbeat charmer succumbs to the same airless artificiality that has claimed many recent efforts in the genre.

Though the picture meanders somewhat in the absence of a clear throughline, the focus on Scott's music and electronic experimentation remains strong throughout, thanks to an eclectic roster of musicians and scholars and a generous sampling of his compositions.

Uniquely Southern documentary has become surprisingly timely this election year.

Once Heifetz becomes a household name, Rosen struggles mightily to milk drama not from his musical genius, but from his relatively unremarkable personal life.

This inordinately likable and consistently funny boxing saga-cum-romantic comedy doesn't so much ridicule the "Rocky"-type inspirational sports fable as gently deflate its heroic overdrive.

Certain moments in the film resemble nothing so much as attending a school reunion, being buttonholed by an old acquaintance and shown snapshots of the grandkids. A complacently conservative acceptance sometimes seems to blanket all of 56 Up, as if maturity entails a serene blessing of the status quo.

Frank Langella's note-perfect, tour-de-force turn as a man elegantly shaping his own demise is nicely counterpointed by a shambling Elliott Gould as a bird-watching private eye.

Brand has assembled a cast of world class improvisers, yet doesn't take advantage of their own particularized, inflected rhythms, as each ritualistically experiences a jump-cut fragmentary flashback in front of the same bathroom mirror.

Though no "Love and Diane," this modest film nevertheless reveals the fragility of hope in survivalist mentalities pre-programmed to expect the worst.

Maxine Trump’s feature loses focus as it progresses, though its insights into guitar making, forestry harvesting and environmental shortages resonate strongly.

Likable but lightweight slacker comedy.

Evocatively fleshed out with surprisingly iconic homemovies, passionate love letters and well-chosen pop tunes, Kleine's homegrown Jewish "Madame Bovary" escapes the navel-gazing boundaries of the personal-diary docu by the sheer force of its evocation of bygone sensuality.

Moving, engagingly low-key curio.

The improvisational zeal with which Cusack approaches his role (absent from his miscast villainous turn in “The Paperboy”) is particularly fun to watch.

If Dalsgaard’s advocacy of Gehl’s utopian vision largely ignores the socioeconomic forces arrayed against it, the film should nevertheless enthuse pedestrians, bike riders and public-space proponents everywhere.

Its extremely narrow focus on the death throes of an art form, rather than the art itself, limits its appeal.

An ambitious, low-budget neo-noir, Stephen Purvis' El Cortez navigates the genre's tawdry twists and crosses and double-crosses with intermittent flair.

Despite a comic Yiddishe mama turn by Meryl Streep and a sensitively nuanced performance by Uma Thurman in a convincing changeup from her recent kickass action roles, Prime remains an oddly juiceless older woman-younger man romance, with a Freudian twist.

Gay Gotham farce written, directed and starring veteran actor Craig Chester ("Swoon," "Kiss Me Guido") delivers plenty of well-timed slapstick, a brace of oddball zanies and a couple of show-stopper musical numbers. Material is uneven, but rhythm and pacing keep action moving smartly.

Watching a consummate pro like Turner navigate an uneven script, veering from farcical determination, her cheeks puffed like those of a demented chipmunk, to utter devastation, can be immensely entertaining, particularly when she's backed by an able cast, as she is here.

Documentary seems best suited to cable: Lake's informal, Oprah-like concern invites the intimacy of home viewing. But the chick-chat approach in no way undermines the gravity of the problems the docu addresses.

Tracing a journey of self-discovery through six North Indian states without a formal script, Ali’s actors, like his characters, effectively improvise in a meandering present tense, stripped of any viable destination.

Above and Beyond reps an uneasy combo of two very different kinds of documentary, one of them personalizing the past and the other “objectifying” political advocacy.

If Caranfil’s mix of comedy and tragedy seems too scattershot to fully achieve catharsis, it does boast a rather Jewish sense of humor, itself a curious testimonial to the past.

Set in cramped apartments and hole-in-the-wall storefronts in the East Village, Michael M. Bilandic's nanobudget comedy Happy Life plays like a poor schlub's "High Fidelity."

Of particular interest to gay-rights activists and their adversaries, this "War Room"-like but extremely civil documentary seems best suited to community venues and the smallscreen.

Miller deftly navigates his picture's unusual tonal mix, balancing absurdity, melodrama, comedy of manners and an unblinking ethnographic stare. But the film's nearly three-hour length may consign it to cult status.

Scripter/helmer Sue Kramer's awkward freshman outing eventually coasts on the genuine charm of its leads. A strong vehicle for Heather Graham, who has never looked lovelier, "Gray" scores most convincingly in its reinvention of Carole Lombardian sexual screwiness as head-spinning gender confusion.

A bathetic TV-movie-type "learning experience" that provides about as much insight into teenagers as 40s westerns did into Indians--it's all in the costumes and customs.

Its straight-ahead rape, humiliation and ingenious revenge competently executed but not aestheticized, the essential grunginess never overly slicked up.

Teper buries his material in gimcrack mod trappings that trivialize rather than celebrate Sassoon's accomplishments.

With Swaziland providing this mother lode of material, helmer Michael Skolnik extracts only the most pedestrian of films.

This far-fetched, deliberately artificial game of musical chairs -- in which mismatched characters encircle, attract and repel each other -- feels forced, often losing itself in excess verbiage.

More entertaining than especially revelatory, this timely documentary adds a sprightly note to a somber subject.

Aggressively upbeat docu, helmed by two males ill-equipped to bring any distance to the camp's pervasive feel-good feminism, tends to relentlessly reiterate points better served by example.

The script’s autobiographical roots tend to substitute for a well-constructed dramatic throughline, giving the film an open-endedness that feels more dismissive than ambivalent.

The overly simplistic script by Zac Stanford (“The Chumscrubber”) hits nothing but high notes, making the whole dramatically less than the sum of its parts.

Live From New York! registers as simultaneously too outsider and too insider — a perfect definition of mainstream media itself.

In scope, depth, rhythm and gags, "Pizzas" seems best suited to the small screen.

Dave Boyle's picture is fueled by no overriding visual style, relying completely on its actors' chemistry for momentum. Unfortunately, the two strike no sparks.

Though it retains the narrative complexity of the Swedish bestseller on which it's based, WWII saga Simon and the Oaks never creates an emotional or intellectual throughline of its own.

In striving simultaneously to cover the transplanted rap scene, sample a wide range of groups, and give an unbiased picture of Cuban society, helmers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who have hitherto worked in short-form, blur the overall shape of their picture.

Amiable but uneven.

Racks up damning anecdotal evidence without substantially altering the discussion.

Revenge is a disappointment. Admittedly, the picture deploys the same kind of cinematic bells and whistles that made "Killed" so enjoyable. But without true tension, the documentary feels as slickly manufactured as its va-va-voom subject.

Since Thomas’ character is incapable of change or variation, and the film’s only engaging supporting players occupy a small fraction of the running time, it falls squarely upon Arquette to carry the film.

A convoluted bilingual thriller about a kidnapping in Colombia, Towards Darkness may be too clever for its own good. Frosh director Antonio Negret intertwines so many disparate characters, each with a flashback-studded backstory, that after a while the exhausted viewer, assaulted by sudden time-jumps, agitated handheld camerawork and tediously protracted suspense, ceases to care.

Stephen Vittoria's documentary about Mumia Abu-Jamal -- unrepentant commie cop-killer to some, political martyr to others -- makes no bones about its allegiance.

Inevitable comparisons to Quentin Tarentino's femme-centered carnage extravaganza "Kill Bill" are not unwarranted insofar as both films featurefeature an abstract, self-conscious, and decidedly post-modern approach to a moribund genre.

Ultimately, nothing can save this pic from the warm fuzzies.

A killer ending does not a movie make, and ultimately In the Bedroom may be more interesting to talk about than sit through.

In the central role, first-time feature helmer Alexander Poe may trigger sheepish identification among the neurotic with the protag's vaguely ridiculous reactions. While his character registers as white-bread bland, strong performances from the two "exes" save this indie from a surfeit of self-deprecating charm.

Part personal quest, part testimonial and part fund-raiser, A Journey in My Mother's Footsteps fulfills disparate agendas for helmer Dina Rosenmeier, a mildly resentful daughter wondering why her humanitarian mother prioritized orphaned Indian children over her own offspring.

Happily, "Upwards" picks up immeasurably when three legit luminaries (Andrea Martin, Julie White, Peter Friedman) enter the picture as the couple's parents.

The leads jell well but the film overcompensates to justify their union, surrounding them with broadly drawn secondary characters presented in an uncertain, inconsistent comic tone.

Though the actors don't flesh out or particularly fit their roles, they seem perfectly at ease with them and with each other.

Nothing here -- technologically, linguistically or visually -- would not be more at home decades ago, when director Stephen Herek helmed "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" and "The Mighty Ducks."

Loveless exerts a low-energy, dread-tinged fascination that intrigues rather than wows.

Picture narrowly avoids outright bathos, thanks largely to first-rate perfs by its child thesps and by Ray Liotta. But by self-righteously rejecting facile solutions, then employing them anyway in the tradition of "no ending left behind," the result conforms to parents' old-fashioned notions of kid movies rather than demonstrating true kid appeal.

Name cast, occasional deft touches and nifty contrast between the two locales cannot overcome script's terminal awkwardness.

The bros are built, and "Hand," with its gorgeous shots of mist-shrouded woods and sun-burnished hay, plus a brief but rapturous foray into gay sex, may attract queer auds.

With its striking Arctic scenery, “Ice” is a gorgeous if overexplained armchair adventure.