It is a rare thing to witness the creative process. But in the excellent new documentary Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, filmmaker Ben Shapiro gives us fly-on-the-wall access over a 10-year period to an acclaimed artist as he envisions, designs and executes his surreal commentary on small-town American life in the form of an epic photo installation, "Beneath the Roses."

Despite his cogent finger-pointing, nifty graphs and succinct highlighting of recent climate change history, longtime followers of the hyper-partisan topic may not find much terribly new or revealing here.

The film's re-creations, some involving actors and some the girls themselves, aren't always successful, but the truths at their core are rock-solid. Illuminating and ultimately hopeful, despite the horrible circumstances depicted, Girl Rising stands as a testament to the power of information.

The Silence is an exemplary German-language thriller, a complex and disturbing examination of guilt, violence and psychological torment that chills us to the core not once but two times over.

Sometimes sweet, sometimes scary, sometimes sour, Oz the Great and Powerful is a film that doesn't know its own mind. A partially effective jumble whose elements clash rather than cohere, this solid but not spectacular effort stubbornly refuses to catch fire until it's almost too late.

The powerful things we expect from War Witch are as advertised, but what we don't expect is even better.

It's all slight stuff with a typically oversold Bollywood score, but there are pleasures here and there.

The Last Exorcism Part II is an effectively unnerving, slow-burn supernatural horror tale. The film is smartly different enough from the original to survive on its own, though it lacks some of the first film's sense of surprise.

Barsky does a good job of taking all the complexity of such a major personality and the times in which he flourished and boiling it down to the essentials.

More than a gimmick, that self-conscious visual strategy suits the self-impressed creative-class characters, even as it is, finally, more interesting than they are.

Marquette, aided by Frank Langella's precise narration, has crafted an engrossing and disturbing tribute.

An exceptionally intimate, human-scaled picture. It's also quite a special piece of work.

Mumia Abu-Jamal would be the perfect subject for an investigative documentary that explored his life and thought with a calm and even hand. Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary is not that film.

The filmmakers vividly illustrate the power and depth of the long-spiraling problem of "food insecurity" by immersing us in the hardscrabble lives of a cross section of our nation's poor.

Phantom is a relatively tight, gripping story told with efficiency that makes room for its fine roster of actors to explore old-fashioned ideas on honor and loyalty.

The new thriller from South Korean director Park Chan-Wook is a bizarrely perverse, beautifully rendered mystery that you may or may not care to solve.

Don't look for The Sweeney to win any awards. It's not going to, not even close. But that doesn't stop it from being a briskly involving British crime entertainment of the old school. You've seen the type, and more than once, but the genre still has enough juice to take us for a ride.

This is a movie that celebrates selfishness, stupidity and the mean-spirited insensitivity that goes along with it. We're better than this, America.

With some momentary exceptions, Jack the Giant Slayer simply isn't any fun.

Beautifully envisioned, badly constructed, the only truly terrifying things in the new horror movie Mama are the fake tattoos, short black hair and black T-shirts meant to turn "Zero Dark Thirty" star Jessica Chastain into a guitar-shredding, punk rocker chick.

Really the biggest problem with Dark Skies is that Stewart can never quite decide just what story he is telling — a slow-burn horror parable or paranoid invasion flick — or whether to focus on this character or that, instead struggling to string together scares regardless of how they fit together overall.

The wildlife documentary One Life is a visually gorgeous, at times astonishing screen experience.

Far from closing the case, The Jeffrey Dahmer Files opens up a whole new perspective, acknowledging the banal and the baffling.

Writer-director Leone Marucci has a scratch-worthy itch for plump visuals and flashy camera moves, but a limp way with dialogue and story, and — despite his cast — no grip on directing actors.

The film, though nicely performed, rarely builds into the kind of gripping emotional journey it clearly intended.

A seeming lack of conclusive answers or solutions to a complex global problem makes Stuck feel more like a work in progress than a completely baked depiction.

The film, which came out in 1970 after a censorship battle with the Franco regime, catches — and releases — all the tension of shifting sexual mores. You can almost sense the director's pleasure in taking apart the duplicities of a patriarchal Spanish society. [21 Feb. 2013]

Kai Po Che packs a lot into its two hours, with not a lot of subtlety -- and in some cases, bracing grimness. But its performances are enjoyably boisterous, and director Abhishek Kapoor refuses to linger on clichés for too long...before hurling his trio into their next complication or moment of triumph.