Filmed with no sets, no controlled environments, no professional actors, and little more than ambient light and sound, this is practically a Dogme 95 film, a triumph of style over very little substance, so self-conscious and affected that it is willing to sublimate story and character to Art. In a storytelling medium like film, that’s unforgivable.

Is this a film that will be lauded a century from now? Will we even be talking about it next month? Of course not. But in the wake of the mean-spirited Meet the Parents, it’s refreshing to find a comedy so frothy, sweet-tempered, and ultimately optimistic as Bedazzled.

I’ll lay it out for you right here with something you can quote back at me in your complaints: Pay It Forward is a cheaply manipulative film of constructed sentimentality that left me feeling angry at how it tried to jerk my emotions around. Feel free to rant about how heartless and unfeeling I am.

Put on your magnetic bracelet, gaze into your crystal, and align your chakras. Now you’re ready to journey into the world of “alternative” medicine and pseudoscience devotees director Eli Kabillio explores in these short documentaries. Hippies looking to expand their minds take the concept a tad too literally in A Hole in the Head, engaging … more…

On Independence Day weekend in 1997, UFO enthusiasts descended upon Roswell, New Mexico, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of what they say was the crash of a spaceship from another world. And the documentarians who brought you Trekkies were there, looking at the faithful with the same half-withering, half-respectful eye. But this time, in a … more…

I discovered a straight-outta-the-50s juvenile-delinquent B movie recently, one I’d seen and loved as a teenager when it was new in 1984. Like that coelacanth discovered in the 1930s, Footloose is a living fossil, a holdover from a time when kids were cool and adults square, and the drive-in burger joint was the place to be seen after school.

You could call this overwhelmingly wonderful movie Boydance, the diametric opposite of the recent Girlfight: Boy unexpectedly discovers himself on the dance floor. But what he learns about himself are not the kinds of things that mesh well with the expectations of those around him. If you liked My Dog Skip and October Sky, if stories about being different in a conformist small town and being sensitive and expressive in a place in which people don’t know how to deal with that speak to you, I promise you that you will love Billy Elliot.

Life is horrible, and there’s no escape except the ultimate one — that about sums up writer/director Lynne Ramsay’s feature debut, Ratcatcher. A young boy drowns in the cruddy, sickly canal that wends its way through rundown council flats in mid 1970s Glasgow; 12-year-old James (William Eadie) secretly witnessed it, and now he’s haunted by … more…

It’s been a while since I watched Tim Robbins’s sublime Bob Roberts, and I forgot how hilarious and pointed it is. Only eight years old, this razor-sharp mockumentary about a neo-fascist yuppie running for the U.S. senate from Pennsylvania is barely satire anymore. Who but a comedy writer could come up with the concept of ‘compassionate conservatism,’ which as far as I can tell, translates as ‘We don’t help the poor and needy, but we feel really bad about that’? Who but a modern day Jonathan Swift could invent a Democratic ticket that blatantly courts Hollywood money out of one side of its mouth and then condemns the very products that rake in some of those millions?