Ronnie Scheib

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.

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

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.

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.

Though highly improvisational and slapdash a la mumblecore, Kotlyarenko’s pic proves more anarchic and satirically energetic, showcasing individual actors almost like performance artists.

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.

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 film doesn’t so much avoid cliches as brush off any sentimental excess, briskly maintaining narrative flow.

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

Impressive though the results of the WHO’s campaign to eradicate polio may be, it is Zaidi’s lensing of the streets, waterways and people of Pakistan that lingers in the mind.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

In its avoidance of all ambiguity, this giant-screen opus ultimately boils down to a rhapsodic endorsement of the tourism and shopping industries.

A magnificent tapestry of sounds and images, this documentary interweaves multiple leitmotifs that flow through the film like familiar old friends, surging to the forefront only to be reabsorbed and casually encountered farther on.

Momentarily abandoning the strain of imagining liberation within a realistically perceived Israel, Fox here settles for the ephemeral glow of an exuberant block party.

Marquardt never buries her symbolic subtext very deep, what with a woman who freezes her eggs and a man who ensures that his patients feel nothing.

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

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

The superlatively acted indie promises more than it delivers, but chillingly evokes sufficient primal dread.

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.

Star Chiyaan Vikram delivers a knockout three-pronged performance, but this cinematic bravura is offset by underdeveloped scripting, flatly one-dimensional villains and overdone lone-hero-vs.-swarms-of-murderous-attackers setpieces.

Static, strikingly composed documentary stretches are interspersed with actors playing workers who voice a variety of complaints, appreciations and parables that deliberately, even pointedly, fail to encompass the sense of being there amid the unfolding spectacle.

The film replaces choreography with metronomic editing, while one-note overstatement drowns out character development.

The amazing invincibility of Hollywood-entrenched pedophiles creates a thematic unity of its own in Berg’s otherwise somewhat shakily constructed film.

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.

Beneath the strings of gags and wisecracks run parallel threads of ruthlessness and hysteria which bring “Motivation” a little closer to “Full Metal Jacket” than “Private Benjamin” as off-screen conflicts invade the closed-in encampment.

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

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.

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 movie belongs to thesps Jacobs and Meester. Jacobs fully inhabits her less-than-completely-sympathetic role with warmth and just the right touch of unconscious entitlement, while Meester luminously expands the film’s affective core.

Altina makes for loose, exasperating but oddly endearing viewing.

Thanks to Saville’s tightly controlled direction and a superlative cast, the mere exchange of glances builds as much suspense as the kinetic action sequence that opens the pic.

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

After a seductively moody intro, Michael Walker's domestic thriller devolves into a cartoonish attack on the filthy rich.

Hentoff presides over a film rich in the sounds and occasional sights of legendary cultural figures, from Lenny Bruce and Malcolm X to Bob Dylan and Coleman Hawkins.

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

Competently written and skillfully acted, the film seems to be melodrama-bound, when a shocking discovery and the sudden arrival of friends instead send it careening into comedy.

The problem is not the stretched improbability of the film’s premise, or even the political incorrectness of its caricatured stereotypes (this is slapstick, after all), but rather that the actors fail to come off as funny in any of their incarnations.

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.

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

The film continually resists coherence or synthesis, with puzzles left unresolved amid multiplying possibilities and highly repetitive flashbacks, yielding a mystery that wearies rather than intrigues.

Maintaining a bemused, sometimes comic distance, Betbeder traces how happenstance crystallizes into biography as his characters traverse the titular seasons.

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.

Alain Gsponer’s well-crafted romantic comedy, glides along on the sheer power of rising German star Daniel Bruhl’s boyish charm.

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.

The film’s emotional center rings coldly hollow, its star-crossed lovers coming off more like projected figures than flesh-and-blood players.

A surprising, well-crafted documentary.

Consistently fascinating and suspenseful.

[A] meticulous postmortem.

Mistaken for Strangers, a documentary about indie group the National, comes off like an exercise in self-deprecation. As much a diary film as a rockumentary, it almost compulsively veers away from its ostensible subject.

The constant, genial comic undercurrent of teenspeak exchanges, penned by the writing team of helmer Meyer and Luke Matheny, contrasts satisfyingly with Kingsley’s wry musings and the more serious treatment given to David’s evolving maturity.

Giving not an inch to any sort of readable moral paradigm, this third installment in Potrykus’ Grand Rapids-set animal trilogy (including his 2010 short “Coyote” and his 2012 feature “Ape”) proves as fascinating as it is off-putting.

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

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.

Laid-back yet incisive, The New Black examines the complexity of black attitudes toward same-sex marriage, which the mainstream media tend to oversimplify as church-dominated and uniformly negative.

In “The Greatest” (2009) and “Country Strong” (2010), Feste proved herself quite skilled, if not especially innovative, at limning her characters’ emotional travails. But subtlety, complexity and even the slightest modicum of realism elude her here.

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

French actress-writer-director Josiane Balasko plunges in with all the finesse of a hopped-up Pollyanna, her simplistic interpretation of an impaired sexagenarian coming close to outright parody.

Suliman (“Paradise Now,” “The Attack”) dominates the screen as Khaled, utterly compelling in and out of jail, his magnificent perf tying up cinematic loose ends.

The film is hamstrung by its fidelity to real-life inspirational models.

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

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.

Works better as a series of well-conceived, impeccably timed and executed physical gags, with light dustings of pathos, than as the story of a woman sacrificing her artistic identity on the altar of motherhood.

Morrison has always closely collaborated with musicians, but here the helmer goes one better, making music the ultimate product of the Great Flood.

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.

More scenes of Richner’s admirable efforts in the hospital and fewer expressions of admiration by the doctors and nurses he trains would also have helped to anchor the film’s sincere but repetitive hosannas.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

Once Mulholland has established that both men hark back to a bygone, Teddy Roosevelt-fostered image of laconic masculinity, his peculiar vantage point generates little insight into the psychology and accomplishments of either man, as “The True Gen” abandons biographical logic in favor of a catalogue of arbitrary differences and similarities.

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

The idea of framing Holocaust atrocities in contemporary genre terms, although intriguing, is not without its perils, and the secret, when revealed, looms too large to fit within the plot’s parameters, creating strange disconnects between form and content.

The storyline develops so erratically that it lacks any internal momentum, with some scenes unfolding in exhaustive detail and others seemingly missing, as if whole chunks had been shot and later edited out.

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.

Although the film wears its dated genre affectations on its sleeve, the script avoids pretension, its hero’s believably alienated exhaustion overriding mere nostalgia.

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.

Kashyap relies completely on star Ranbir Kapoor to put over this relentless reiteration of cliches and, admittedly, the actor invests his aggressively tasteless, crotch-grabbing antics with enough energy and humor to make it palatable, but only just.

This engaging if somewhat underwhelming tale of unlikely redemption builds a funny-sad web of intersecting interactions around its strong central perfs.

[A] deft assemblage of homemovies, work tapes and interviews is further invigorated by 1980s interviews with Pomus and a dynamite soundtrack of his rock ‘n’ roll perennials.

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

Hampered by pedestrian, underpopulated mise-en-scene, a sketchy script and uneven thesping, “Destiny” definitely underwhelms.

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

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

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.

The film’s rather simplistic cultural juxtapositions, pitting artistic appreciators against status-seeking philistines, work best when narrowly focused on the subject of wine.

“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.”

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.

Shetty’s need to maintain his characters’ romantic heroism constantly grates against his depictions of their ridiculousness.

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.

Spearheaded by phenomenal pint-sized lead Sydney Aguirre, this challenging third feature from the Zellner Brothers retains much of their provocative trademark idiocy but navigates darker waters.

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