Bill Weber

Godfrey Reggio's symphony of pristine 4K images doesn't add up to one grand epiphany, but an intermittent cluster of small ones.

It chronicles the quest of a self-described "geek," and there are pleasurable frissons of discovery in the detective work.

Bille August's film is a protracted, soporific trip into Portuguese history that would like to be a romantic thriller.

Though its ballast of jokes and spectacle are formidable, it often lurches about at a remote, enigmatic distance

LisaGay Hamilton and Yolonda Ross play persuasively embody modern urban feminine strength, but they're eventually stranded in a recycled road movie.

This chronicle of two athletes throwing baseball's funkiest, least respected pitch is given depth by their stranger-than-fiction underdog status and camaraderie with mentors who've had the same struggles.

While crediting free-form radio pioneer Bob Fass with changing the culture of broadcasting, this documentary remains clear-eyed about the decline of community radio and the New Left.

In a character study of an ex-con who gives her heart and mind to animals rather than people, Melissa Leo's risky performance is ultimately framed with a disappointing, distanced pity.

This adaptation of a prize-winning Australian novel is a stodgy slog save for some sporadic moments of blunt force supplied by Judy Davis and Charlotte Rampling.

A serviceable primer on the digital-celluloid divide in commercial cinema, if a bit unwieldy in scope and in danger of being made obsolete by the next version of the RED camera.

A lumpy spoof of electoral mudslinging that offers some bracing bipartisan contempt amid the lowbrow, labored slapstick.

An ostensible Danish "Hangover" that more closely resembles "Two and a Half Men" with nudity and unexpurgated dick jokes.

A historical melodrama that retains an ancient, elemental pull even as it insufficiently charts motivation and the self-denying values of antiquity.

Ultimately comes off as curiously anecdotal, lacking the dramatic dynamism that could give Marcel Pagnol's tale new life.

The layered, character-driven drama may subvert expectations of a sunny Venetian noir, but observes its five principal characters with a probing, egalitarian eye.

A Slovakian character study of a boy ambivalently caught between worlds that ultimately squanders its promise.

"With age comes exhaustion," according to a rueful line late in the film, and it serves as a fitting diagnosis for Woody Allen's latest fallen souffle set in a European cultural capital.

A direct-cinema document of the Cairo protests that toppled Mubarak, Stefano Savona's film doesn't pretend that Egypt's resolution has yet won a lasting victory.

A banal "poetic" drama of a grieving stranger licking his wounds in a bayside Michigan town.

A righteously outraged documentary targeting the "warm and fuzzy" iconography of the breast cancer fundraising bureaucracy and its camouflage of corporate priorities.

A mixed bag of Nixon-era pop burlesque and vampire kitsch is ultimately undone by pedestrian gags and bloated genre boilerplate.

Goss's film carries its unique forms of narrative suspense, but her 16mm images imbue both the forbidding landscape and her characters' scientific aerie, though the observatory only dates from 1932, with a poetry of the seemingly eternal.

This documentary on the many forms of human debt, though often frustratingly broad, offers a path to balancing civilization's ledger with a hard-nosed brand of altruism.

A night of reckoning by a hoodlum in his haunted former home is a more sober and remote Freudian farrago than one expects from Guy Maddin.

This handsome mate-swapping drama never moves beyond the erotic to become incisive about the barriers built into sexual experimentation for committed couples.

Its director's romantic sensibilities wed to Terrence Rattigan's 60-year-old play, this period drama is buoyed by Rachel Weisz's poignant embodiment of a bourgeois wife seeking erotic autonomy.

Endng in risible bathos, Tony Kaye's urban high school melodrama is all about the cute teacher's crises and the girls who love him.

The ill use made of the stars' charms in this initially strained, then egregiously dopey mushfest can likely be credited to market-tested notions of modern popular romance.