Conveys enough of the stirring true-life drama recounted in Butler's other Shackleton docu to satisfy ticketbuyers who demand substance even in larger-than-life entertainment.

Uproarious. Line for line, minute to minute, writer-director Judd Apatow's latest effort is more explosively funny, more frequently, than nearly any other major studio release in recent memory.

A heady spirit of spontaneity permeates the proceedings, suggesting the entire pic, much like the concert it documents, was conceived, planned and completed in a single burst of creative enthusiasm.

If John Cassavetes had directed a script by Eric Rohmer, the result might have looked and sounded like Mutual Appreciation.

By turns amazing, amusing and appalling.

Earnest and understated, Weekend has the intimate look and feel of a two-character stage play that has been opened up -- but only slightly, with minimal addition of supporting players -- for a mostly faithful filmization.

Mark Landsman's spirited Thunder Soul offers a heaping helping of uplift while documenting the past triumphs and recent reunion of a predominantly black Houston high school's singularly accomplished jazz stage band.

Has a washed-out look that may be off-putting to auds who might otherwise enjoy the pic's uncondescending view of Southern characters and customs.

Sometimes harrowing, sometimes hokey, sometimes heartwarming nature documentary.

For all the pic’s sentimentality, De Felitta refuses to back away from some unpleasantly realistic touches.

Trenchantly witty and acutely insightful.

When a documentary begins with its subject using his crutch to deliver a vicious blow to the director's nose, it's reasonably safe to expect less-than-smooth sailing ahead.

One leaves My Flesh and Blood with admiration for the lenser's craftsmanship, and for her ability to remain an unobtrusive observer during moments of extreme emotional turmoil.

Four excellent lead performances, vividly evoked ambience and a masterfully sustained mood of quiet desperation mark Sydney as an impressive piece of work.

Will please devotees without attracting many, if any, new converts.

This enjoyable East-meets-Western likely will succeed on its own terms as a sure-fire, long-legged crowd-pleaser.

An intelligent, well-observed and ineffably poignant study of an Amerasian woman's attempt to trace her roots by journeying back to Vietnam.

With a mix of sly humor, homespun grace and affecting poignancy, Get Low casts a well-nigh irresistible spell.

Picture inspires respect for its first-rate performances, artful construction and meticulous understatement.

Hot-wired, white-knuckle thriller.

A sluggish, charmless misfire in which even the most appealing players -- must try too hard to make anything close to an engaging impression.

Deliberately paced, richly atmospheric drama also boasts first-rate work by a splendid supporting cast and impressive production values.

There's no denying the pic's overall impact as a compelling study of art as a source of transcendence. And it will come as no surprise if this well-crafted doc eventually serves as source material for a dramatic feature.

Well positioned to slake the thirst of action fans for world-class, slam-bang rough stuff.

Documentarian Jessica Yu employs everything from animation and voiceover thesping to archival documents and eyewitness accounts while examining Henry Darger, a self-taught artist who has been posthumously lionized as a visionary genius.

Compelling but traditional feature.

A doggone hilarious cartoon extravaganza...virtually bursts at the seams with a supersized abundance of witty wordplay, silly songs and inspired sight gags.

The human dramas of individual gamers are what really make this technically polished documentary so fascinating and potentially commercial.

A solid and affecting piece of work.

A stealthy neo-noir drama that isn't afraid to take its time developing characters on the way to the payoff of a neatly designed caper scenario.

At once raucously free-wheeling and meticulously contrived, picture satisfies as a boys-gone-wild laff riot that also clicks as a seriocomic beat-the-clock detective story.

An engrossing and satisfying picture, one that can be enjoyed even by people who have never before heard of its subject.

Has more than enough across-the-board appeal to attract mainstream auds unfamiliar with source material.

With equal measures of prickly wit, gleeful pride and bemused gratitude, Charles Nelson Reilly looks back at his life, and invites his audience to share the view, in this thoroughly engaging filmization of his one-man stage show.

Quaid's effortlessly compelling and engagingly earnest performance keeps pic grounded in down-to-earth reality.

What it doesn't have, to its credit, is a neat conclusion. In the end, the film appears to suggest that Aura likely will feel free to keep searching for herself, repeating mistakes and making new ones, because she has all the time in the world.

Some movie buffs will be amused to note slight but perceptible plot similarities between Daylight and, of all things, "The Tall T," Budd Boetticher's classic 1957 Western. To their credit, the filmmakers more or less acknowledge the influence in the closing credits.

Looks, sounds and fascinates like an exceptional episode of a true-crime TV series.

Enjoyably upbeat and intelligently inspiring.

Having earned his stripes by directing a few TV episodes, Frakes makes an auspicious debut as a feature filmmaker, sustaining excitement and maintaining clarity as he dashes through a two-track storyline.

An improbably effective and affecting mix of raw emotions and exciting smackdowns.

Beautifully lensed and intelligently crafted.

Ingeniously conceived and impressively executed, Pleasantville is a provocative, complex and surprisingly anti-nostalgic parable.

Immensely entertaining and unabashedly inspirational.

Feels achingly sad and frustratingly incomplete.

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

One of the holiday movie season's more pleasant surprises. A mischievously clever and slickly commercial sci-fi comedy.

Genuinely clever switched-identities romp.

Slither begins briskly, gradually accelerates and eventually achieves a breakneck momentum that makes the wild ride even more exhilarating.

Grim but engrossing.

A frequently inspired hit-and-miss burlesque that definitely hits more than it misses.

A sly curve ball of a documentary best described as a sports-themed "Rashomon" with an O. Henry twist.

An impressively polished documentary by Bob Hercules and Cheri Hughes. Perhaps even more thought-provoking than its co-helmers intended, pic is bound to spark conversations and debate.

Arguably the best sports-oriented documentary since "Hoop Dreams."

Fortunately, helmer Michele Ohayon ("Cowboy del Amor") treats her tricky subject matter with sufficient sensitivity to keep doc from ever seeming offensively flip or overly sentimental.

A low-key charmer that's bound to enchant small children and amuse their parents during many hours of repeat viewings.

Sometimes shaky, sometimes smooth handheld DV lensing (by Drews and Krybus) gives the pic an immediacy that greatly enhances its dramatic and emotional impact.

Key to drama's success is the artful underplaying by Kurt Russell in the lead role of Herb Brooks.

Imagine a live-action version of the "Dilbert" comic strip with a touch of Hal Hartley's deadpan absurdism, and you're ready for the frequently uproarious "Office Space."

Segel makes an engaging impression throughout Forgetting Sarah Marshall, gamely making himself the butt of many jokes that involve Peter's non-macho proclivities.

A beautifully lensed but ploddingly paced tribute.

Koepp does a masterful job of grounding his intimations of the supernatural in a totally persuasive down-to-earth context.

The Prisoner is in many ways a justifiably angry film, simmering with moral outrage. But it is also -- surprisingly, maybe even amazingly -- hopeful.

An ingeniously twisted mockumentary.

Skillfully entwines stories of three young women drifting in and out of a Jersey City juvenile detention center.

Slight but lively sequel. Aimed squarely at moppets with piddling attention spans.

Exceptional performances by two femme leads and sensitive but unsentimental storytelling throughout.

This stunningly shameless follow-up to the 2002 theatrical sleeper (and homdevid mega-seller) offers more of the same -- a lot more -- while repeatedly upping the ante in terms of offensiveness. Which, of course, should greatly -- and profitably -- please is target aud.

Equal parts audacious dark comedy, wish-fulfillment fantasy and over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek action-adventure.

Strong performances, a few dramatically potent scenes and a vividly specific evocation of locale barely offset hackneyed and muddled elements in a script that plays like a first draft.

Sascha Paladino's overlong but engaging doc about banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck's harmonious journey through four African countries.

Intelligent, informative and unusually entertaining documentary errs only when it yanks too insistently on heartstrings while focusing on worst-case scenarios involving desperate debtors driven to suicide.

Deftly maneuvering through audacious mood swings and tonal shifts, The Matador emerges as a quirky yet commercial commingling of black comedy, seriocomic psychodrama, heart-tugging sudser and buddy-movie farce.

Deftly interlaces heart and humor in a witty, warm and well-observed comedy about the unexpected and inconvenient blooming of romance at the weekend gathering of an extended family.

Small children who will accept it as rock-'em, sock-'em excitement with a touch of gender-specific empowerment, and hipper teens and grown-ups who can appreciate the whole thing as a semisatirical hoot.

So insubstantial that it practically evaporates on screen, Pooh's Heffalump Movie likely will play best with toddlers and pre-schoolers easily amused by bright colors, merry songs and lovable, huggable toon animals.

Slow-burning buildup, lack of explicit mayhem and overall low-tech approach may strike cineastes as amusingly quaint.

Riveting portrait of a straight-talking, tough-loving Benedictine nun in charge of a South Bronx home for recovering substance abusers.

Has some genuinely amusing moments of dumb and dumber silliness.

Intelligent, involving and intricately plotted thriller.

Richardson, who gracefully sways through a memorable drunk scene, and Quaid, whose megawatt smile has never been more dazzling, are disarmingly charming as the parents. And that's important; if the actors were any less engaging, the audience might not be so forgiving of their characters.

The biggest laughs and most intriguing revelations are provided offstage in this slickly produced documentary, as O'Brien -- often pushing himself to the point of exhaustion before, during and after performances -- plays for keeps while playing for laughs.

Even though Frakes is back, Star Trek: Insurrection plays less like a stand-alone sci-fi adventure than like an expanded episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

It's meant as high praise to say that, very early in Robots, the extraordinary starts to seem perfectly ordinary.

The picture's dialogue-heavy stretches and ambiguous finale could leave ticketbuyers impatient for less chatter and more chomping.

Brimming with heart and humor -- Drumline is a formulaic crowdpleaser set in the competitive world of university marching bands at predominantly black universities.

The tone of Reel Injun is respectfully serious, though well short of angry, while focusing on how the stereotypical depictions of marauding redskins affected the self-images of Native Americans.

Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic showcases the comic-actress in her familiar on-stage persona as a blithely self-involved Jewish American Princess whose penchant for perky vulgarity can be explosively funny or unnervingly shocking.

Has the unmistakable look and feel of a micro-budget indie produced for a small circle of friends, many of whom are listed in the credits.

There's a potentially fascinating and appreciably more concise 60-minute documentary to be found somewhere amid the uneven and unfocused 88-minute hodgepodge that is Echotone.

Unmistakably sympathetic but mostly even-handed documentary.

Good intentions can't breathe fresh life into cliches or dispel the overall impression of schematic didacticism.

Slickly entertaining documentary.

Martin hits all the right notes while subtly conveying both the appealing sophistication and the purposeful reserve of Ray. But he cannot entirely avoid being overshadowed by Dane's endearingly vulnerable, emotionally multifaceted and fearlessly open performance.

Harvests a bumper crop of laughs.

Fitfully amusing and two leads generate engaging chemistry.

By turns whimsically humorous and intelligently sentimental, but also infused with a pungent air of working-class realism.

Although it's very much a contemporary yarn, there's a distinctly '70s feel to much of Beautiful Boy.