Ronnie Scheib

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.

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

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.

So strong are the perceived parallels between the Peruvian situation described in State of Fear and the sociopolitical dynamics of the current U.S. war on terror that filmmakers have trouble, in post-screening Q&As, returning the discussion to the historical subject at hand.

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

Luc Cote and Patricio Henriquez's You Don't Like the Truth demonstrates, through excerpts from an actual videotaped interrogation at Guantanamo, the process by which human will can be systematically broken down to force an admission of guilt, regardless of truth.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Unfortunately, instead of the usual larger-than-life male figures--Marcello Mastroianni, Harvey Keitel, Bruno Ganz--of Angelopoulos's recent films, we get a distractingly vapid couple who tend to drain the emotional resonance of these extraordinary, ever-shifting tableaux.

Always surprising documentary makes excellent use of its many serendipidities.

It's all so overdetermined -- each encounter of the present-day lovers mirrors some moment from the long-ago day when they parted -- that it reduces their whole affair to a matter of last-minute revisionism.

Amid the flood of documentaries about the Arab Spring in general and the Egyptian Revolution in particular, Uprising takes a clear, cohesive approach to the spontaneous events at its center.

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.

Gerwig, charmingly unflappable in "Greenberg," lets it all hang out here, unafraid to sacrifice likability to over-the-top hysteria as someone who cannot control herself, despite a lingering sense of her own absurdity. Alexander proves a worthily understated foil, his self-deprecatory whimsy recalling that of a young Johnny Depp.

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.

An unremarkable documentary about Harper Lee and her single literary masterwork, Hey, Boo features what the French call a "structuring absence," that of Lee herself.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Woefully amateurish psychological thriller.

With equal measures of showmanship, patriotism and irony, hundreds vie at NYC's Pussycat Lounge for the East Coast Division of the first-ever nationwide air guitar championship for the right to eventually represent the U.S. at the world championship.

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