Lucid and engaging, Sketches of Frank Gehry provides the enormously gratifying opportunity to spend an hour-and-a-half with an artistic giant.

Ferrara finds himself imitating rather than innovating.

Though not without its flaws, the movie has authenticity and resonance; there have been plenty of good surfing documentaries, but very few good dramas about the sport — a short list on which Breath instantly earns a prominent spot.

Reid meticulously investigates why Dr. Dagg’s groundbreaking work didn’t quite collect the widespread acclaim that it deserved. Underneath it all lies a heartbreaking tale of a driven woman stifled by institutional misogyny — a fascinating story stunt coordinator-turned-filmmaker Reid patiently approaches from various captivating angles.

Yes, God, Yes is bound to rankle some conservative Christians of every denomination ... But Dyer’s Alice generates too much rooting interest, and the movie as a whole is too nondenominationally likable, for most other viewers to cast any stones.

Highly engaging, beautifully played romancer.

Emphasis on its combustible emotions, suspense and surprising humor should help draw sophisticated audiences who, once lured, will quickly find themselves hooked for the duration.

There is no denying Danny Hoch's talent. A monologist in the tradition of Eric Bogosian, Hoch assembles a cast of urban types and explores their dysfunctions and angst with a winning combination of sympathy, ironic point and dead-on mimicry.

Wilkerson's indictment is unapologetically agitprop. He sees Butte history as a testimony to "capitalist class" exploitation, corruption and environmental disaster.

When this "Enemy Within" settles into key action sequences, such as a stunning nighttime ambush or a daytime battle against Fabio, it becomes wildly entertaining.

Moves like an express train across almost 2½ hours without any sense of rush and with strong, empathetic characters etched en route.

Although the entire film runs just 87 minutes, as Lucky Grandma unspools, Wong’s predicament starts to feel increasingly outlandish, making it difficult for Sealy to sustain the offbeat humor and strong momentum of the opening stretch.

The movie’s equal-opportunity irreverence makes for a welcome addition to the bachelor-party genre, so often aimed at the frat-boy crowds.

Always engaging to watch and often dazzling in its imagination and technique, picture is also a bit distended, and lacking in weight at its center.

No sports film is short on pep talks, bonding sessions and heartfelt analogies to family kinship, but the teammates’ easy acceptance of Saelua — and her robust performance on the pitch — give the proceedings an extra kick.

The pic has genuine appeal, though in truth the script and direction are little more than average.

Despite strategic references to Joan Baez and pot, pic's sense of time and place feels synthetic.

Filled with small, telling moments rather than big events, film never really gets inside Fred’s head, but it neatly sketches the external aspects of his predicament.

Off-Broadway actor Tom Noonan, best known for his offbeat, crazy and villainous roles on stage and screen, emerges as a talented writer and director in What Happened Was, an intriguing, often mysterious drama about a date between two lonely misfits.

Florence Foster Jenkins is an audience picture first and foremost: one wholly sympathetic to its eponymous subject’s delusional drive to delight crowds with or without the requisite artistry.

Screenplay is marred by some glaring loopholes in its inner structure but story is a sweet takeoff on the innocence, mythology and sensuality associated with mermaids.

The film observes a guy verging on poverty or riches with a bounty of beautiful imagery and fresh angles on skateboarding culture.

Does it all come together? Well, yes, if viewers think of the film as a freewheeling poetic essay, highly personal yet captivating.

A spirited and captivating bio-doc that richly deserves the exclamation point in its title.

In telling the specific moving stories of a few men, The Space Race manages to provide such a rich perspective into their experience that it transcends its goals of shining a light on worthy lives and untold history, to entertain and educate.

Relative to the major brands, the intimate, handcrafted approach should yield more flavor. Instead, Drinking Buddies offers mostly froth.

What’s onscreen is less a cerebral experience than a stirring and bittersweet love story, inflected with tasteful good humor, that can’t help but recall earlier disability dramas like “My Left Foot” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”

Intellectually demanding and non-commercial film should be embraced in the festival and arthouse circuits by film students and viewers interested in postmodern, deconstructionist cinema.

Crammed into a lively 85-minute package delivered with loads of dark humor and cinematic flair, this is a worthy winner of Sundance's Grand Jury prize for documentary.

The chills and spills keep comin' to agreeable effect in Brit-made scarefest The Descent.

Though shot from the Palestinian P.O.V., the Dutch/Palestinian Film Foundation co-production is remarkably balanced, offering a convinced message of hope for the future.

Lazily scripted, without even a pretense of character development or psychological depth, it offers nothing new for genre fans and no reason for mainstream auds to bite.

Finds its titular merry pranksters up to yet more capitalist-critiquing chicanery and fat-cat-fooling fun.

Cividino depicts the tricky male power games between the boys with tact and compassionate impartiality.

Star Kevin Costner and director Clint Eastwood deliver lean, finely chiseled work in A Perfect World, a somber, subtly nuanced study of an escaped con’s complex relationship with an abducted boy that carries a bit too much narrative flab for its own good.

Fonte, it must be said, gives an expert performance as a saintly scamp who “blooms” into a butterfly of vengeance. I might have bought what he’s doing in a different film, but the one that Garrone has made strains too hard to have it both ways.

This low-budget shocker eventually pays off, displaying just enough narrative ingenuity to compensate for a cinematically crude and logistically sketchy deployment of the requisite blood-and-guts mayhem.

The movie doesn’t deal in labels — it’s not important to the filmmakers whether Luke identifies as gay, straight or bisexual — but instead presents this relationship as one that expands the provincial notion of romance someone like Luke might have had.

Dawn pummels the viewer with a series of ever-more-grisly events - decapitations, shootings, knifings, flesh tearings - that make Romero's special effects man, Tom Savini, the real 'star' of the film - the actors are as woodenly uninteresting as the characters they play. Romero's script is banal when not incoherent - those who haven't seen Night of the Living Dead may have some difficulty deciphering exactly what's going on at the outset of Dawn.

Reflective of its subject, the movie is content to exist on the stimulating surface, teasing us with the promise of something deeper while skirting around its delivery.

Well-intentioned but never entirely engaging chronicle.

This is one film where the fish win.

It’s good of its type — just not quite good enough to linger once the lights have come up.

Boseman is an empathic presence, and nothing he does smacks of mimicry. He feels Brown from the inside out, the way Brown felt his own distinctive rhythms, and even when the movie itself seems to be on autopilot, Boseman never leaves the captain’s chair.

McQueen, who wrote and directed Blitz, has an effortless technique that whisks you along. Yet I can’t say that Blitz ever enters terrain that’s morally fascinating or dramatically complex.

Charming character study.

The bottom line is that Oelbaum and Krayenbühl have fleshed out a complex, fascinating figure.

Moya’s vision may be bleak — and “vision” is the right word to describe the Spanish-born director’s stunning capacity to create images and atmosphere — but there’s something unnervingly familiar about the world he creates in his feature debut.

Has plenty of problems. But most stem from a young filmmaker overswinging on his first time up to the plate and hitting a deep fly out rather than a home run.

Structured as a straightforward life story followed by an extended coda looking in detail at the features Cohen is restoring, The Great Buster can’t hold a candle to the 1987 three-part series “Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow” but will make do as a decent DVD extra.

For some, the documentary will represent the endorsement of a self-hater spouting traitorous ideas; for others, it celebrates the courage of a reviled, truth-telling martyr to the cause of academic freedom.

When Tomorrow starts to make intellectual as well as geographical leaps and to draw macroeconomic, political, and social factors into its bright-eyed, approachable orbit, that’s when cynicism gives way to admiration, and admiration can flare into inspiration.

The Brink is an impeccably crafted verité ramble — an engaging and enraging, disturbing and highly revealing movie.

Feels achingly sad and frustratingly incomplete.

A light, funny, grounded, engagingly unpretentious sleight-of-hand action comedy.

While injecting considerable black humor, neophyte Detroit-based writer-director Sam Raimi maintains suspense and a nightmarish mood in between the showy outbursts of special effects gore and graphic violence which are staples of modern horror pictures.

Within the top-heavy cast, it’s Murray’s picture, as the popular comedian deadpans, ad libs and does an endearing array of physical schtick.

Proves as entertaining as the earlier "The War Room," which also featured Carville, but is more somber.

Austere but fascinating.

On the screen it comes out as a sublimated ghost story related with all surface seriousness and above all with a remarkably effective background of creepy atmosphere.

The Damned has a tendency to meander, but in so doing, it strives toward something authentic.

A bigscreen feature executed with a cookie-cutter small-screen sensibility, this often charming but untextured fact-based period piece is buoyed along by the redoubtable Judi Dench.

Byrne gives a credible, if low-key, rendering of the weak, illiterate father. Barkin downplays her looks and carries off an Irish accent with aplomb. The real stars are the two kids, notably Fitzgerald as the younger bro.

Now, Voyager, an excursion into psychiatry, is almost episodic in its writing.

Sy’s film is a curious little fable, not quite fully formed in its final stages, and occasionally so sedate and opaque, under Bachar Mar-Khalifé’s melodic, piano-forward score, that it feels like it is drowsing. But it’s a striking debut nonetheless, especially as it revolves, with graceful poetry around the inner experiences of such a curious, unknowable woman.

The Room Next Door, as driven by the scalding humanity of Swinton’s performance, lifts you up and delivers a catharsis. The movie is all about death, yet in the unblinking honesty with which it confronts that subject, it’s powerfully on the side of life.

[A] sensitive, deliberate debut feature.

Paul Schrader has created a pointed companion piece to his earlier portraits of lonely outcasts (Taxi Driver, American Gigolo). Contemplative and violent by turns, this quasi-thriller about a long-time drug dealer leaving the business has a great deal to recommend it but could have been significantly better had Schrader done some fresh plotting and not relied on his standby gunplay to resolve issues.

While art by definition must trigger certain emotional responses, occasionally there’s too-obvious a feeling of really being manipulated and stroked. Fact that Rocky gets his big chance from cynical schemers–with a black public hero as the instigator–rests uneasily at moments. Then there are occasional flashes that the film may be patronizing the lower end of the blue-collar mentality, as much if not more than the characters who keep putting Rocky down on the screen. However, Avildsen is noted for creating such ambiguities.

Technically impressive but rather flat and languid storywise, Richard Rich's first feature since leaving Disney only serves to reinforce the stranglehold his old studio still has on the animation market. While a perfectly serviceable confection for small fry, "The Swan Princess" will likely have its neck wrung commercially by all the high-profile competition aimed at the children's/family market this holiday season.

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.

Everything in L’Immensità is beautiful even when everything wasn’t: Crialese’s odd, affecting memory piece layers the world as it was, is and could be in the same gilded frame.

The movie, despite enthralling moments, is so self-intoxicated by its blissed-out vision of global healing that it’s a little soft.

Its potent sense of place and underlying ideas never compensate for the tiresome millennial musings that constitute most of its runtime.

Viewers are left feeling that it's still a male-dominated profession, but that determined women like these might just effect some small change.

The Motel offers a fresh take on characters and conventions, and compels interest with shrewd, sympathy-inspiring storytelling.

It's a very small pic but engagingly played by a fine cast.

A spellbinding, sensationally effective thriller with a complex moral center.

A satisfying and funny, if ironic, comedy intended for lovers of both the beast and/or sophisticated laughs.

Ambitious, well made but not exactly rousing.

An unusually low-key Filipino drama whose neo-realist air generally triumphs over the script's violent, tearful contrivances.

A moving, elegiac, deeply contemplative work that leaves the viewer not with a save-the-world checklist, but rather a spirit of hopeful reflection.

This slacker prince (Hawke) comprises a sinkhole at the center of adaptor-helmer Michael Almereyda's otherwise compelling contempo update.

Lacks an edge of danger or excitement that might have brought the subject alive in more than a cerebral way.

Fresh, funny, exquisitely bittersweet tour de force.

Helmer-poet Amie Siegel delivers a provocative, confident film.

Loud, tedious and unattractive in every sense, this barrage of blood set during the Franco regime combines the helmer's customary cartoonishness with horror and ups it a thousand notches.

Gushing more blood and possessing more stamina than any number of Hollywood hack-'em-ups, writer-director Na Hong-jin's pulse-pounding, mordantly funny genre piece is at times messily convoluted, yet serious and full-bodied enough to achieve a genuinely tragic dimension.

Detailing the birth, life and death of America's first major urban housing project in St. Louis, Chad Freidrichs' The Pruitt-Igoe Myth combines concise but thoroughgoing sociological-historical analysis and elegant cinematic resources in service of an uncommonly artful example of film journalism.

Stevens offers a couple of revelations that bring the documentary to a dramatically and emotionally satisfying conclusion — and, not incidentally, leave a viewer with the pleasing sensation of discovering a worthy individual.

Fatal Assistance is a powerful indictment of the aid process, though Peck lets Haitian politicos off too lightly, and the voiceovers would be better on paper.

Where the film goes is both unexpected and necessary, since however grounded and relatable these thinly detailed characters might be, the movie doesn’t actually seem to be going anywhere.

A mesmerizing glimpse into Sarno’s search for a sub-Saharan Walden and the implications of that choice.

As the hours roll slowly past, it’s hard not to feel that this epic achievement in monotonous misery might have retained its impact at a fraction of the length, and that even our grimmest truth-tellers might well find themselves capable of saying more with less.

Despite its familiarity, Chapter & Verse manages to make its material both fresh and authentic.

Hepburn’s film eschews the expected emotional progression of a grief drama by focusing as much on continuing pain as sudden mourning.

Overly-long, it nevertheless carries sock appeal in suspenseful racing sequences and its principals in a realistically-developed marital romance score strongly.

If terror is not particularly sought after, there is still sufficient tension, and downplaying the story’s fantastical aspect in favor of psychological conflicts lends the whole a persuasive pathos.