Suffice to say, unrelenting material like this isn't for everybody. That it is a gloriously filmic gesture - by turns jaw-dropping, elusive, silly, obnoxious, painful and beautiful - is celebration enough.

One of the best sports documentaries in recent memory.

With American independent filmmaking all too often a ready punching bag in today's cinéaste culture, this frequently dazzling, eccentric portrait of mutually assured destruction is that most delirious of combos: charmingly funny and emotionally terrifying.

The same intelligence, wit and mature spirit that actress Vera Farmiga brings to her performances is richly apparent in her directorial debut as well, the inquisitive spiritual drama Higher Ground.

Deliberate and marked by uncommon grace, In The Family manages to feel politically and culturally acute without ever resorting to melodrama, or having to wave banners for issues or causes, except perhaps in its quiet way for a renewed humanism in movies and a return to stories about everyday lives.

As a strictly psychological portrait of destructive masculinity it's a gut-sock, vividly photographed, thrillingly edited and marked by performances (Donald Pleasence and Jack Thompson, most notably) that heave with strange complexity and dark camaraderie.Wake in Fright is true horror.

Garrone achieves something uniquely colorful, disturbing and trenchant about self-perception in an increasingly fishbowl-like society.

The film doesn't always follow up on its more interesting issues: safety, technique, financial hardship, even the sport's history. But the emotional dynamics of its trio of formative hopefuls, and their touching relationships with the parents or guardians who work hard at enabling their passion, set a solid pace.

Informally sketched but deeply felt, Bradley Beesley's documentary Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo mingles with the spirited cowgirl inmates who compete in Oklahoma's annual state penitentiary rodeo.

If you meet the fiendishly deadpan Rubber halfway, its assured mix of cinephile artiness and grindhouse spoof will offer some oddball surprises.

A transgender icon with a life as tragically short as some of the idols she worshipped, she's the deserving subject of an archivally rich remembrance, and such is James Rasin's poignant documentary Beautiful Darling.

As gut-punch storytelling, Viva Riva! delivers much, not the least of which is the promise of an exciting new filmmaking talent.

Rapt fuses strands of dramatic tension in a shrewd enough way that it even saves its sharpest cuts for the kidnapping's aftermath, when a well-heeled life laid bare must reconcile with a much different form of enforced solitude.

A unique glimpse into the recovery mechanism of damaged hearts and bewildered minds, how a visage of hollowed-out sorrow after one year becomes a look of more peaceful acceptance down the road.

Summer Pasture has an earthy intimacy and compassion for its subjects that will have you thinking about their plight long after they've packed up and moved on for winter.

A farce of misunderstanding first, body-count nightmare second and at nearly all times a refreshingly upending horror-comedy bromance.

Tomboy stands out as an especially affecting delicacy about the thrills and pitfalls of exploring who one is.

This is when the movie earns its hushed exclusivity and kitschy title, when we see an art form bridge generations with a strange mixture of grace, joy and melancholy.

It's a character study about faith in connectedness, with an unforced love for cross-generational companionship that's special indeed.

Visual sumptuousness trumps the coldly erotic dastardliness of previous incarnations, but where this version feasts is on close-ups, with exchanges between pairs of eyes - the predatory versus the hesitant, the manipulatively comforting opposite the blindly vulnerable - that recall the silent era.

In its gently atmospheric camerawork and nicely underplayed moments between Mike and Chris, Resolution manages to keep its eerier moments surprising and its emotional life arresting.

Predictable if measured uplift aside, Fox keeps Yossi effortlessly affecting, graced with deadpan humor and a knowingness about lonely lives.

Eden is never less than suspenseful, but rather than sentimentally pander to easy outrage, or indulge in icky women-in-distress titillation, the movie...zeros in on the details of how dignity can be stripped like bark from a tree, and the queasy determination it takes to stay alive in a living hell.

Pieta, which won last year's Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, is disturbing, for sure, but its larger points save it from being a quick and dirty wallow.

Whenever Rebney gets to be Rebney -- be it insulting, sweet or wearily perturbed -- "-Winnebago Man shows a full tank of irascible charm.

The Viking saga Valhalla Rising, from the brutally stylish Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, has the bones of an action epic but the soul of something cultier.

As with many well-intentioned scare flicks, the wrapping-up feels dissipated and obvious, but for a good while The Last Exorcism makes for an atmospheric, character-rich stab at movie fright.

Catfish was built to charm, not indict, and on that front it makes for a diverting seriocomic wade into the pitfalls of Internet-based immediacy, and by extension, the manipulative mysteries of documentary assemblage.