This documentary about the public education crisis isn't as smart or rigorous as Bob Bowdon's shoestring production "The Cartel," which arrived in town earlier this year and quickly vanished. But the new movie is still an admirable exercise in straight talk.

Werner Herzog is a stranger in a strange land as soon as he gets out of bed in the morning: in this travelogue of Antarctica, his perverse curiosity and zest for the harshest extremes of nature transform what might have been a standard TV special into an idiosyncratic expression of wonder.

Masterful low-budget drama.

Written by Angus MacLachlan, this indie drama explores the lingering tension between north and south with vinegar and precision.

The hues are so muted you may remember this as a black-and-white film, but its emotions are as vivid as primary colors.

Apocalyptic visions are nothing new in cinema, but they're almost always epic in scale; Von Trier's innovation is to peer down the large end of the telescope, observing the end of the world in painfully intimate terms.

The scenes are so dramatically cogent the characters' lives seem to stretch far beyond the concluding blackouts.

This remake by Joel and Ethan Coen is being positioned as a truer True Grit, and though they take their own liberties with the plot and tone, they preserve Portis's impeccably authentic dialogue, which does more to conjure up the Arkansas of the 1870s than any period trappings.

The show has been the gold standard for satirical TV ever since it debuted in 1989. This long-awaited movie adaptation has plenty of laughs, plus an assortment of milestones for fans.

It's the first stop-motion feature filmed entirely in stereoscopic 3-D, and the technique makes Selick's artwork even more wondrously creepy. The problem is Gaiman's story, which keeps accumulating otherworldly mythology but doesn't establish a clear line of action in the home stretch.

Lorna's sudden change of heart is a pointed example of what the Dardenne brothers' movies are all about. Capitalism may seem at times like a raging river, but every day, all over the world, people try to make it flow in the opposite direction.

As scripted by Michael Arndt, this isn't much more than a glorified sitcom, but it deftly dramatizes our conflicting desires for individuality and an audience to applaud it.

A brief but piercing cameo by Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake), as a desolate old woman who fiercely rejects professional counseling for depression, drives home Leigh's greatest insight, that true happiness is not found but realized.

Like the incessant ringing of cowbells in the first two segments, the film may either hypnotize you or drive you stark staring mad.

Ron Howard directed, with outstanding support from Kevin Bacon as Jack Brennan, Nixon's fierce chief of staff.

The first 20 minutes are masterful, as Cruise hunts down a killer-to-be; the last 20 are mediocre, as screenwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen untangle the mystery they've grafted onto Dick's story. In between lies a conventional but expertly realized cop-on-the-run drama.

Some of the eggs fail to hatch and some of the chicks die, and the parents' cries are painful to hear, though what they're really crying for is the future of their species.

This drama about an obese, illiterate black teen in Harlem practically guarantees some emotional uplift. But when it arrives, eventually, its authority is unimpeachable, so deeply has director Lee Daniels (Monster's Ball) immersed us in the depths of human ugliness.

Cheadle's quiet, superbly modulated performance as an ordinary man driven to heroism by hellish events reminds us that the slogan "no justice, no peace" has a private as well as a public dimension.

Rivers comes across as a consummate professional but also a genuine person, ruthlessly honest about her life decisions and utterly devoid of self-pity.

Visually and dramatically it works well - it's Shakespeare by way of "Black Hawk Down" - but as an allegory of modern-day geopolitics it doesn't really go anywhere.

The 37 Yale and Harvard players Rafferty interviews are such a rich and articulate cast of characters that the season leading up to the game and the game itself become an epic story.

Claudel commits the cardinal sin of withholding the full story until the very end, when it spills out in a histrionic scene between the two sisters and largely exonerates the older one.

The movie is enjoyable for its flashy surfaces--the witty editing, the narrative forecasting, the droll omniscient voice-over--but as drama it seems superficial.

Like the Coens’ protagonist in "The Man Who Wasn’t There," Stuhlbarg is driven to an existential crisis, but in contrast to the earlier movie, with its tired noir moves, this one is earnestly engaged in the question of what constitutes a life well lived.

Bale dominates the movie as Dicky Eklund, a pathetic loudmouth who's let his own fight career slip away from him, yet what really holds this together is Wahlberg's low-key, firmly internalized performance as a man torn between his loyalty to the clan and his responsibility to himself.

Powerful second film by writer-director Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent).

Bong's opening and climactic scenes, in which the old woman bops around to a dance tune amid a vast field of yellow grass, are typical of the movie's cockeyed poetry.