Mark Holcomb

The documentary Audience Award winner at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Buck follows itinerant horse trainer Buck Brannaman as he applies his uniquely humane and frankly astounding methods in four-day clinics around the country. If that sounds as exciting as watching hay turn yellow, director Cindy Meehl finds the real......

As agreeable as it is insidious, Morgan Spurlock's latest exposé of corporate control via immersive humiliation is his best, most formally inventive project yet. The premise is initially fuzzy — Spurlock proposes to fund a documentary about product placement solely with product placements — and The Greatest Movie Ever Sold......

INCENDIES This latest blast of unwavering miserablism from Denis Villeneuve, Oscar-nominated and everything, reaches for something deeper than mere stroppy melodrama. Adapted from a 2003 play by Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies (“scorched”) obliquely chronicles the adult life of Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), an Arab woman living in Canada whose sudden death......

Sharing the narrative opacity and marginal milieu of its 2006 predecessor, Hamilton, this assured feature-length follow-up from Matt Porterfield surveys the effects of a young man's overdose death on his extended working-class family. And like the militantly decentralized storytelling that Porterfield favors, their grief surfaces in flashes but pointedly resists......

ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM Love is messy, unfathomable and occasionally lethal, as this low-budget, benignly prosaic exposé of the trade in nondomesticated animals proves. The film revolves around Tim Harrison, a Type A Ohio cop whose encounters with escaped exotics has fostered a dedication to their protection, and Terry......

GO  BILL CUNNINGHAM NEW YORK No passion for fashion is required to enjoy this absorbing portrait of legendary New York Times "On the Street" photographer Bill Cunningham, but a sense of history and tragedy might help. Director Richard Press doggedly shadows the chipper octogenarian, foregrounding the modest lifestyle and quietly......

DESERT FLOWER Combining a harrowingly frank account of childhood genital mutilation with '80s-style goofball humor, this adaptation of Somalian supermodel Waris Dirie's 1998 autobiography only narrowly escapes PSA purgatory. The film begins as 12-year-old Waris (Soraya Omar-Scego) flees an arranged marriage nine years after her traumatic cutting, and picks up......