During La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, director Frederick Wiseman’s leisurely immersion into the rhythms of the POB, the world outside of the company’s grand, historic home is irrelevant. If the company was not seen rehearsing The Nutcracker—along with several premieres and a repertory staple—one would have no idea what time of year it was. Wiseman and his crew roamed the studios, stage, offices, corridors, as well as the rooftop and the catacombs of the venerable Palais Garnier for three months in late 2007. In this eminent documentary filmmaker’s trademark style, the film offers an elegantly edited compilation without any information beyond what we see and hear, as though we too had an open pass to observe behind the scenes.

ASHLEY SPRINGER IS rapidly becoming the go-to guy for movies that require sexually explicit high school scenes. After losing his dick in 2008’s Teeth (a fantastic, underappreciated black comedy about a teenager with vagina dentata), Springer is back on screen in director Adam Salky’s Dare (based on Salky’s 2005 short, also written by David Brind), helping Emmy Rossum shed her good girl image as onethird of a sexually adventurous trio nearing the end of their high school careers.

WHEN JOE MAUCERI was young, his grandmother took him to a double feature.The first movie was a Yogi Bear cartoon, during which Mauceri quickly fell asleep. The adults decided to let him snooze and take in the second feature: Robert Aldrich’s creep-tastic Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, in which Bette Davis plays an aging recluse living in the same house where her married lover (Bruce Dern) was mutilated decades earlier.When Mauceri finally opened his eyes, he was confronted with a rather startling image.

It’s fitting that the Asia Society should whittle down Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s filmography down to what they deem to be his bare essentials, leading up to Face, his latest and certainly one of his best films. Tsai’s films are about mundane phantoms, invisible people that exist in the same places as one other but rarely at the same time. A complete weeklong retrospective of Tsai’s work shouldn’t be done since none of his characters in any given film can fit into the same spot, let alone the same frame-of-mind. To respect the films’ spare vision of sexual mystery and longing, you have to be a little selective in choosing which ones best fit together.

When Andrew Jacobs spent several late-summer days at Four Seasons Lodge, a close-knit Catskills bungalow colony, in 2005, he was there to write a feature article for the New York Times. But his experiences amid the longstanding community of aging but spirited Holocaust survivors affected him well beyond completing the article. Rapidly and efficiently, the Times staffer morphed into a documentary filmmaker. He felt compelled to capture the unique atmosphere and vivid personalities of the place particularly when he learned that the colony had been sold to a developer, and that the summer of 2006 was scheduled to be its last.

Crude Oil (Yuan You) Nov. 4 through 8, Light Industry, 230 36th St. (betw. 2nd & 3rd Aves.), Brooklyn, www.lightindustry.org; times vary, donation requested Wang Bing’s epic 14-hour film

At a moment when DVD sales continue to decline and new releases can often be downloaded (legally or otherwise) days after their theatrical release, Matt Grady has taken a bit of a gamble. The 39-year-old founder of Factory 25, a new independent film and music label based out of Brooklyn, is betting that you’ll still shell out some money for a DVD—or even a vinyl record—so long as what you’re getting is more than just a disc in a plastic case.

In the opening scene of director Allan Miller's new film about the acclaimed Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, the sweaty-browed maestro poises his baton over a student orchestra in Rotterdam. “I’m important now,” he says, daring the musicians to better respond to his stick. “You cannot start without me.”

In a fitting dramatic flourish, the Two Boots Pioneer theater closed one year ago this upcoming Halloween. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was the last movie screened at the much-missed hub for both vintage and contemporary cult flicks. The saddest part about the space closing was how quickly its unusual programming disappeared with nothing to fill the space. Programmer/manager Lee Paterson’s eclectic and exciting month-long “Schlocktober” festival, featuring everything from Italian zombies to Mexican wrestlers, made it seem as if the Pioneer was going strong right up until its last night. This is the first Halloween in a decade that New Yorkers will have to get their horror fix without the theater and, while it’s tempting to say that it’s not going to be an easy one, there is hope yet.

Starting tomorrow, the Museum of Modern Art will present Spike Jonze: The First 80 Years, a retrospective of the work of the 39-year-old filmmaker running the gamut from his early commercials and music videos to clips from his upcoming adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic childrens book Where The Wild Things Are.

Catherine Hardwicke’s feeling for teen angst and female anxiety gave Twilight (the first film of the series based on Stephenie Meyer’s novels) immense potential. But Chris Weitz’s sequel New Moon is full of lost potential. Harwicke’s visual elegance via cinematographer Elliott Davis emphasized the wooded Northwest territory as a natural wonderland where the heroine Bella’s (Kristen Stewart) uneasy puberty emerged. Hardwicke gave Meyer’s fairy/gothic tale an idealized representation of universal adolescent tension. Bella’s attraction to teen vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) normalized today’s sexual permissiveness—the cultural pressure teens feel to be sexually active—with a concept both shrewd and authentically Bronte-esque.

Hot on the heels of Bored to Death, HBO’s neurotic noir starring Jason Schwartzman as the least likely of private detectives, comes The Missing Person, which gets the mood right, but badly miscalculates when it comes to Michael Shannon’s lead performance as detective John Rosow.

SOMETIMES ALEXANDER SOKUROV,Werner Herzog and Pedro Almodóvar are ingenious, but their newest releases regress. Sokurov’s gorgeous bullcrap in The Sun is the definition of hagiography. He elegizes Emperor Hirohito’s deposition of his own divinity at the end of WWII as a confrontation between rationality and superstition, poetry and politics, tradition and personal expediency. Sokurov’s usual spiritual mysticism dreamily suggests Hirohito possessed a skeptic’s interest in science and historical fact.

Liz Taylor was right in her now famous Tweet about Michael Jackson’s This Is It. My Lincoln center program about MJ’s music videos (Keep Moving: Michael Jackson’s Video Art at the Walter Reade Theater, Nov. 22) was planned before This Is It, but it ought to confirm Dame Liz’s enthusiasm. It’s designed to show film enthusiasts who wonder: “What happened to the movie musical?” or “Why wasn’t Michael a film star?” Despite race, class and puritanical obstacles, Jackson advanced the movie-musical genre his own way—working with the best, trusting his instinct and raising the promo film to an art form every time out.

Sandra Bullock brings sanity to the madness currently infecting the movie scene. Her intelligent, affecting new movie The Blind Side uses a double metaphor (alluding to both a football player’s vulnerability and racial color blindness) to dramatize how people can overcome race and class barriers to achieve their fuller humanity. Bullock’s film is upfront about the attitudes mangled and suppressed in media hype for Precious. The past week’s Preciousmania featured outrageous displays of self-righteousness, fake compassion and gullibility—from white journalists wondering if their instant recoil from the gross figure of Precious was proof of prejudice to a black journalist proposing “There’s a Precious inside all of us.”

The 10 women—mothers, porn stars, hookers, bartenders, stewardesses, shrinks—of Sebastian Gutierrez’s interconnecting stories in Women in Trouble may not get into very inventive scrapes considering the title and the cast, but a lucky alchemy of writer and cast turns what could have been an indie bore into something surprisingly uproarious. Snagging the industry’s strongest supporting actresses and then giving them star turns was a canny casting strategy, one that vastly improves Gutierrez’s frequently recycled stories.

The best thing about Fantastic Mr. Fox? Director Wes Anderson liberates commercial animated cinema from the limits of children’s movies. With Henry Selik’s Coraline and Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, this amounts to the most noteworthy film movement of 2009—striking a necessary blow against Pixar’s brainwashing, which has dictated most people’s expectations of what animated movies should be.

FOR ALL THE elaborate apocalyptic imagery in Roland Emmerich’s latest F/X marathon 2012, there’s not a single witty or memorable sight. Not much story either: U.S. geologist (Chiwetel Ejiofore) discovers that the Earth’s crust is shifting due to enormous solar flare eruptions. Neutrinos heat up the Earth’s core “like a microwave,” which gives Emmerich’s CGI team the chance to design various destruction scenarios. It’s a demolition field day—breaking landmarks from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., to the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica.

The Hand of Fatima fits squarely into the ever-expanding genre of films documenting a director’s journey into his or her familial past. The public recording of what, in theory, is an intensely private experience, these filmmakers must create enough emotional legibility for the outside viewer to connect with their subjective state, while maintaining that intensely personal quality that brings their film the sheen of authenticity.

Despite the many things wrong with Brian De Palma’s Redacted, the acting was superbly on-point. De Palma’s little-known cast got class differences right, even while the film’s rhetorical concept was slanting them into the typical Blue State condescension about working-class grunts. This bias infects the latest Iraq War movie, The Messenger, by writer-director Oren Moverman, who lacks De Palma’s instincts for actorly (human) truth. This story about two veterans (Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson) assigned MOS duty to deliver death notices to the deceased’s NOK (next-of-kin), is so bungled up with fashionable ambivalence about the Iraq War that every single behavioral detail is not just prejudicial but wrong.