Ronnie Scheib

Intelligently written, brilliantly cast and thesped story of a German mail order bride in a Norwegian-American community in Minnesota just after WWI never hits a wrong note.

Brief Encounters reps a must-see for art lovers.

Dramatically spellbinding and intellectually stimulating, picture abstractly manipulates multiple layers of representation to shattering effect.

A fascinatingly fractured glimpse into a disengaged mind and a biopic-in-reverse of its subject, quite unlike any documentary seen before.

Adapting the cold language of data encryption to recount a dramatic saga of abuse of power and justified paranoia, Poitras brilliantly demonstrates that information is a weapon that cuts both ways.

The brilliantly edited tapestry of actions and reactions exposes a pattern of prejudice and fear capable of infinitely repeating itself.

Though targeted at tots, Ponyo may appeal most to jaded adults thirsty for wondrous beauty and unpackaged innocence

Utterly engrossing dual-character study, unfolding with a serene disregard for indie quirkiness, Goodbye Solo radiates authenticity.

Imamura's square-framed, black-and-white imagery, in all its various stylistic incarnations, proves as compelling through the docu's myriad detours as in any of his better-known psychological thrillers.

Lively, intelligent collage, both richly complex and immediately accessible.

Tension flows organically from every phase of this dangerous endeavor, making for a highly entertaining outing for operaphiles and operaphobes alike.

Sweetgrass offers a one-of-a-kind experience.

The kinetically shot concert footage captures the volatile dynamic between performers and audience, as Mick Jagger's provocative posturing is followed by fans storming the stage.

Beginning as a colorful documentary about the Puerto Rican transgender community, candidly showcasing nine very different subjects, Mala Mala slowly morphs into a celebration of solidarity and collective activism without ever losing sight of its likable protagonists.

The novelty of helmer Gardner’s approach to 9/11, her insider’s look at the almost unimaginable difficulties faced by Cantor Fitzgerald in the weeks following the attack, and the abundance of coverage spanning 10 years of inhouse interactions more than compensate for the docu’s occasional unevenness.

Sly, inventively drawn, brilliantly executed cartoon.

Sampling snippets and snatches of lives and conversations, Maysles and his fellow filmmakers undertake a folk odyssey through northern landscapes that proves a fitting farewell to an American ethnographer.

Pray deftly maintains the integrity and momentum of his story’s various strands while moving backward and forward in time, and from one discreet subtopic to another, his segues as unpredictable as they are imperceptible.

Devos depicts stages of grief not as a series of emotions but as an evolving alchemy of perception that surrounds the protagonist, distorting time, space, color and light in patterns of dislocation, muffling the synapses that connect sounds and images.

With remarkable warmth and immediacy, Green and co-scripter Keogan have managed to capture the beauty of an obviously flawed family, one neither too perfect nor too demographically balanced to ring true, and imbue it with a sense of plenitude that seems to flow as much from the sun-drenched land itself as from the quirkily particular personalities involved.

Brimming with energy, elan and the unpredictability of his "Something Wild," Jonathan Demme's triumphant Rachel Getting Married may just lay the wedding film to rest, being such a hard act to follow.

Consistently fascinating and suspenseful.

Feminist without the arrogance of 20-20 hindsight, vividly precise in its depiction of 18th-century pre-revolutionary France (the filmmakers were allowed to shoot inside Versailles), alive with exuberantly thesped personages and awash in the joy and power of music, the picture is a stunner.

The dialogue — natural, vibrant and totally embedded in the moment, never sententious or showoff-y — is delivered with consummate believability by an excellent cast.

Does a superb job of condensing an overwhelming mass of documentation, archival imagery and artistic representation into a concise yet passionate history lesson whose relevance could not be timelier.

Here, as in his 1992 breakthrough feature, “In the Soup,” Rockwell conveys his characters’ peculiar suppositions and perceptions using a variety of cinematic approaches, many recalling the untrammeled exuberance of early cinema.

Paley sustains a consistently funny, sometimes even self-deprecatory comic tone.

Rarely has anyone embodied contradictions as happily and harmoniously as octogenarian New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham.

This must-see expose entertains as it horrifies.

The film represents a scathing critique of America’s juvenile justice system, the privatization of penal institutions, and the whole notion of “zero tolerance.”

Like Sebastian Silva's "The Maid," Queen posits a radically different approach to class and gender empowerment.

Todd Robinson constructs a riveting thriller.

A highly engaging picture with a post-apartheid edge (certain scenes play like a farcical "Invictus").

A potent combination of ethnography and concert film, Brit helmer Jasmine Dellal's joyous celebration of tzigane music follows the 2001 U.S. "Gypsy Caravan" tour, which showcased five bands from four countries.

A skillfully crafted, highly entertaining documentary.

Rob Schroder and Gabrielle Provaas' raunchy, hilariously uninhibited documentary should wow arthouse audiences.

Zombie Honeymoon scores simultaneously as romantic, tragic, grotesque and screamingly funny

Contemporary issues pale before the fascination exerted by the generously sampled films themselves, executed throughout with masterful classical film vocabulary.

Despite its title, Bruno Dumont's extraordinary first feature is not about Christ, at least not on any literal level. The Life of Jesus may not be about religion, but like the films of Bresson, it is about redemption.

The film’s slow deliberation and aesthetic rigor act as a form of seduction, luring the viewer into unwilling identification with Carlos.

Hassan Yektapanah's first film attests to the deceptive simplicity of Iranian cinema, transforming the most minimal of props, scenes, and stories into a complex journey of discovery.

A joyous celebration of creativity and razor-sharp wit sustained into old age, as evinced by outspoken nonagenarian fashion icon Iris Apfel, Iris also offers proof of Albert Maysles’ continued vitality as a documentarian.

Sharp dialogue, idiosyncratic characters and a wickedly brilliant structure that subtly derails expectation make Laura Smiles a rarity among mellers.

A delightful, well-crafted documentary.

The filmmakers eavesdrop on intimate musical interludes at home and in the workplace, where it becomes immediately apparent that these forgotten maestros consider themselves representatives of families who have practiced their art for centuries, passing on their musical knowledge from generation to generation.

Banks allows the exhilaration of the game and the exigencies of realpolitik to determine the ups and downs of her film’s sentimental journey.

This thoroughly engrossing, highly anticipated picture boasts assured direction by sophomore helmer Reema Kagti, a well-constructed script by Kagti and fellow femme writer Zoya Akhtar, and strong thesping by familiar Bollywood luminaries Aamir Khan, Kareena Kapoor and Rani Mukerji.

Mordaunt previously directed a docu in Laos that featured kids who sold unexploded bombs for scrap metal, and that earlier experience invests this feature’s characters and milieu with an absolute integrity.

The uncompromising power of Ingrid Jonker's poetry runs like a pulsing vein through Black Butterflies.

Yet even as the timelessness of the human activity on display seduces with its serenity, it evokes in modern viewers a definite impatience with the impracticality of traditional rites and rhythms, perhaps only enjoyable in 90-minute doses.

Less groundbreaking video experimentation than extraordinary concert experience, Lou Reed's Berlin expertly fulfills its function.

With rare candor and a refreshing lack of piety, first-timers and combat-weary veterans exhibit their camaraderie, euphoria and burnout as the camera documents their struggles with logistics, horror, death and self-doubt.

A unique blend of camp and conviction, To Be Takei deftly showcases George Takei’s eclectic personality and wildly disparate achievements.

Fascinating.

The documentary sometimes bears an eerie resemblance to Claire Denis' brilliant "White Material" in its tense evocation of menace stalking the periphery of the frame.

The perceptively balanced "Dreams" transitions seamlessly from domestic drama to 70-mph heats.

Spoken Word benefits from an improbably perfect storm of production circumstances: The muscular, balanced script, the brainchild of an unusual alliance between professional poet Joe Ray Sandoval and TV writer William T. Conway, consistently plays to Nunez's strengths.

In astounding detail, Stonewall Uprising recalls the now-famous three-day riots in June 1969 after a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a popular Greenwich Village gay bar, as homosexuals finally, openly fought back.

This strong, well-crafted documentary preaches eloquently to the choir.

This mesmerizing morality play, rich in rare archival footage and complete with heroic Allied saviors, merits a full-fledged arthouse run before reaching larger PBS and cable auds.

The documentary moves with the same fluidity that characterizes Peck’s choreography.

This dual focus on the need to end the ineffective, destructive “war on drugs” and broader questions of political compromise gives director Riley Morton’s film particular resonance.

The sensual movement of bodies through space creates a visual language whose infinite variations seduce and fascinate over the course of the film’s numerous rehearsals.

The filmmakers quietly expose conflicts and contradictions without the intrusion of voiceover, and with only occasional intertitles furnishing factual information.

Gee follows Sebald's path with only occasional detours, while intermittently glimpsed talking heads fade in and out of artful black-and-white landscapes.

The director’s double vision establishes a level of equality on film that in some ways defies the disparity in power between the two opposing forces.

Lee Hirsch's "The Bully Project" serves as a call to action against abuse of students by their peers as it follows, over the course of a year, five sobering case histories of unrelenting schoolyard persecution.

The film offers surprisingly cogent, lived-in evocations of a period too often glossed over in impersonal, by-the-book montages.

Always surprising documentary makes excellent use of its many serendipidities.

Throughout the film, the beauty of the landscapes and the totally natural insertion of human, animal and insect movement within the frame lend The Creation of Meaning a particular grace.

Gondry and his frisky hieroglyphs successfully convey Chomsky’s concept of language as the fleeting “meanings we impose on fragmentary experience.”

Now, 50 years later, the Justice Department has decided to reopen the case, due largely to Keith Beauchamp's documentary, which contains testimony from hitherto unseen witnesses.

Petra Seeger's beautifully crafted documentary about neurobiologist Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory, interweaves experience and experiments, autobiography and science as seamlessly as the Nobel Prize winner's same-titled book.

Lively interviews from a wide range of people, a wealth of excerpted footage stretching over decades, and a story packed with legend are served up by helmer Joe Angio with a verve mirroring the restless creativity of the film's subject.

Expansively, dramatically, magnificently Russian, Nikita Mikhalkov's loose remake of "12 Angry Men" plays like vintage jazz from a veteran band.

Chris Browne's sense of humor captures perfectly the contradictions, absurdities and drama at the intersection of class, media, money and sports without dissing any of his player/subjects.

Bear Cub casually pulls off an amazing feat--combining innocent childhood nostalgia and graphic sexuality.

Director Kimball's sharply focused, serenely ravishing nature photography provides reason enough to go armchair birding.

For all their concentration on the human factor, the filmmakers by no means shortchange the aesthetic dimensions of LHC.

Morrison sometimes slows down imagery to a hypnotic, frame-by-frame trance-like state; one can imagine townsfolk scrutinizing the faces of long-dead relatives magically raised.

Veering wildly between paranoia (being judged by "12 people who voted for George Bush") and self-aggrandizement (modestly comparing himself to Da Vinci, Bach and Galileo), Spector makes a fascinating subject.

Rollicking story of a rich kid whose wildly successful bid for popularity has him playing drug-distributing shrink to an entire high school boasts pitch-perfect faceoffs between upstart Anton Yelchin and alcoholic principal Robert Downey Jr. that could fuel a chemistry lab.

Deftly sidestepping both melodrama and family-values messaging, Poppe imbues the film with enormous emotional resonance, brilliantly grounded by his leading lady.

This worthy follow-up to Kosashvili's brilliant "Late Marriage" should delight auds worldwide.

Gini Reticker's lucidly impassioned film, filled with strong, eloquent spokeswomen, garnered Tribeca's docu award.

Jams affords the opportunity to hang with gifted, genre-defying fringe artists at a pivotal point in their evolving careers.

Hungarian schoolteacher Gyongi Mago's campaign to raise awareness of her hometown's once-vibrant, now conspicuously absent Jewish population is captured in the superior docu There Was Once ...

“Waka” refers to an ancient form of poetry still widely popular today, and helmers Haptas and Samuelson, through their serene lensing and fluid editing, propose a visual thread linking the past to the present “as the crow flies.”

A surprising, well-crafted documentary.

Incandescent performances by Naomi Watts and Matt Dillon and an unerring grasp of strip-mall-dominated Florida distinguish Sunlight Jr.

Oreck spins a mesmerizing web that appropriates a wealth of disparate Eastern European images — of mushrooms, farmers, falling trees and war-destroyed buildings — to illustrate its lyrical discourse.

Throughout, Before You Know It resists foundering in pathos or kitsch; its subjects are too complex and resistant, having survived decades of change, to be reduced to victims or examples.

Richly layered picture dramatizes a landmark doctor/patient showdown, chronicles a classic case of transgenderism and reveals how aspects of Schreber's story prefigured Nazism.

Gloriously flamboyant comedic extravaganza, fuses soap opera and "American Idol"-type competition, following four wildly different women vying for the star role in a feature filmization of a popular telenovela.

The actors are charismatic, particularly Ricardo Darin.

Filled with colorful, articulate neighborhood champions, this absorbing picture eschews militant outrage for a quietly devastating look at social commodification.

An edgier Richard Linklater for a less privileged generation, mumblecore helmer Frank V. Ross captures his characters' dead-end disaffection not through stasis, but through nervous activity.

In dangerous and downright cruddy conditions, the personable Palestinians share stories, lodgings and camaraderie with the young Israeli filmmaker, whose handheld camera follows them everywhere.