By introducing funky licks, fancy footwork and many of his own compositions to the band's stodgy set list of jazz standards, this indomitable leader (whose declining health adds a poignant twang to the film's final scenes) instilled racial pride alongside musical competency.

A vibrantly vulgar comedy that never hangs around to admire its own cleverness.

With marvelous discipline, Mr. Shapiro crams a wealth of material into a tight 77 minutes, smoothly communicating the group effort required to achieve the perfect shot.

Featuring exceptional people doing extraordinary things, Blindsight is one of those documentaries with the power to make you re-examine your entire life -- or at least get off the couch.

This is no splatter movie: spare, suspenseful and brilliantly invested in silence, Bryan Bertino's debut feature unfolds in a slow crescendo of intimidation.

Cool-headed, lighthearted and outrageously entertaining.

Exquisitely captured in natural light by the cinematographer Alexis Zabé, Juan's journey is framed by sherbet-colored houses and lemon sidewalks, dipping palm fronds and a burnished, turquoise horizon. The director calls his style "artisan cinema"; I just call it dreamy.

Like the director's cover story, the movie is a Trojan horse: an exceptionally well-made documentary that unfolds like a spy thriller, complete with bugged hotel rooms, clandestine derring-do and mysterious men in gray flannel suits.

This strikingly humane film may function as a prequel to Animal Planet's "Whale Wars" but is light years ahead in visual clarity and narrative ambition.

Epic in scope but intimate in theme, The Warlordsheaves with spectacular battles and the relentless sway of self-interest over conscience.

Educates without lecturing and engages without effort.

Exit could be a new subgenre: the prankumentary. Audiences, however, would be advised simply to enjoy the film on its face -- even if that face is a carefully contrived mask.

Remarkable patchwork of unremarkable lives.

Strongly acted and beautifully photographed (by Virgil Mirano), Spoken Word is a quietly resonant family drama about the tug of old habits and the difficulties of escaping the past.

Sweet, generous and tonally sure, Patrik, Age 1.5 has a nostalgic feel, and not just because of a soundtrack skewed toward last-millennium tunes and a hyperreal suburban setting lifted straight from "Pleasantville."

Remarkable as much for its speculative restraint as for its philosophical reach.

Four years in the making, Marwencol emerges as a number of things: an absorbing portrait of an outsider artist; a fascinating journey from near-death to active life; a meditation on the brain's ability to forge new pathways when old ones have been destroyed.

The focus of this bizarre Finnish fairy tale - as black as anything the Brothers Grimm could have dreamed up - is a sinister old codger who chews off ears and whose demon minion kidnaps innocent children. Ho ho no!

Like the best westerns, Red Hill is a stripped-down morality tale; like the best horror movies, its true monsters remain cloaked until the final reel.

The filmmaking is rough and rather clumsy, but by ceding the floor to his open, highly articulate sisters, Mr. Colvard has created a fascinatingly raw study of ferociously wielded male power.

Visually distinctive and aurally delightful, "Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench" has style to burn. A soulful black-and-white commentary on love, art and their competing demands, this Boston-based musical from Damien Chazelle floats on a wave of spontaneity and charm.

Beautiful in its minimalism, Nénette is no antizoo rant but a melancholy meditation on captivity.

Though filming his hulking hero off and on for nine long years, he (Levy) has created a work that feels remarkably out of time, a snapshot of a man - and a relationship - running in circles.

Smartly written and flawlessly acted, Lovers of Hate is a Trojan horse, the kind of movie that begins so self-effacingly that we don't expect any surprises.

Here, excessive piety and rampant paganism are equally malevolent forces, the film's baleful view of human nature mirrored in Sebastian Edschmid's swampy photography. As is emphasized in a nicely consistent coda, the Lord's side and the right side are not necessarily one and the same.

Circo offers a touching chronicle of a dying culture harnessed to ambitions that remain very much alive.

Buoyed by a fully integrated soundtrack, Kati With an I delivers a lovingly personal observation of young people at a crossroads. The film's sound is not always crisp, but no matter: Kati's story is written in every vital, vérité frame.

Like a Ken Loach drama stripped to bare bones, The Arbor springs to life in the bright bitterness of Dunbar's prose, showcased in alfresco performances of contentious scenes from the play.