Self-taught artist Elmer Wayne Henley claims that the act of appreciating nature “calms the soul” — “it proves to me that there’s a God,” he says, and so his rather naive paintings depict flowers and landscapes. Henley is serving six life sentences for the sexual torture and murder of dozens of young men, and whether … more…

Bahman Ghobadi is an Iranian Kurdish filmmaker — the only Kurdish filmmaker — whose short films have been set among his people, a disenfranchised ethnic minority in Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. Horses, his first feature film, is fictional, but the characters and events are based in fact. Ghobadi hopes to promote awareness of his cultural heritage and the lives of his people, and he succeeds stunningly — this is a haunting film, performed by an extraordinary nonprofessional cast, about hardscrabble life at the outermost fringes of civilization.

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.