Ronnie Scheib

As so many mainstream films venture further into the screamingly implausible, indie efforts veer toward the understated and mundane, their realism obviating any perceived need for drama. But the pleasures...

Giving an electrifying performance as a mentally disturbed young man, Rory Culkin dominates every scene of "Gabriel," writer-director Lou Howe's indie debut. But that domination proves both the film's greatest...

Director Jody Lee Lipes delivers an exhilarating third feature with "Ballet 422," tracing the two-month creation of a new work by New York City Ballet dancer/choreographer Justin Peck. Sampling various...

The economical/ecological paradox at the heart of tyro helmer Sofia Norlin's impressive "Broken Hill Blues" could not be clearer: The northernmost Swedish town of Kiruna fiscally depends on the iron-ore...

Ballroom dancing bridges gaps between Jewish and Palestinian children in Israel in "Dancing in Jaffa," a surprising, well-crafted documentary about how the celebrated dancer Pierre Dulaine, a veteran of a...

A close collaboration between two Bens (Rivers and Russell), both well-known experimental filmmakers, results in "A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness," a triptych that purports to explore possible utopias...

As its title implies, "She's Lost Control" tracks the gradual breakdown of its heroine (Brooke Bloom), a grad student working as a sexual surrogate in New York. A hundred eighty...

Nature and civilization square off in Jessica Oreck's poetic meditation-cum-documentary "The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga." Alternating between two complementary narratives (fairy-tale and cultural-anthropological) in two languages (Russian and...

A career-stalled rock musician, leaving Paris for his small hometown of Tonnerre, falls in love and falls apart in Guillaume Brac's engrossingly nuanced character study. Brac shifts tones radically, veering...

The tumultuous, hotly contested 2012 French presidential election, pitting right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy against socialist Francois Hollande, provides the larger maelstrom against which a couple's custody battle unfolds in Gallic helmer-scribe...