It’s hard to fathom today, but at the height of his career, chess master Bobby Fischer was by certain accounts better known than any other living person in the world — athlete, entertainer, politician or otherwise. His 1972 World Championship match against Russian Boris Spassky, with the allegorical heft of its East-versus-West implications, helped spark a worldwide surge in the interest in chess, while his hermetic personality rendered him a compelling if inscrutable public figure far outside the realm of his area of expertise. Bobby Fischer Against the World, a new documentary which frames itself against the backdrop of the aforementioned high-stakes match but also tackles the iconoclastic nature of its subject both personally and professionally, makes a persuasive, emotionally involving case for the dark, troubled flipside of genius.

Fischer has been the subject of numerous books and a couple nonfiction films, and remains an intriguing subject both because of the headstrong way he tackled his sport, upsetting many defenders of the status quo, and also the manner in which he sort of disappeared, “retiring” in his early 30s after refusing in 1975 to defend his title. Directed by Emmy Award winner Liz Garbus, Bobby Fischer Against the World is appropriately titled, on several levels. It first sketches out the many structural advantages granted Russian players — where chess was embraced as a means by which to prove the intellectual superiority of Communist orthodoxy — whereas the self-taught Fischer, on the other hand, was the lone son of a working poor single mother who threw himself into the study of chess with an obsession that proved effective yet also alienating, even to those few close to him. The movie’s title also serves to underscore the manner in which Fischer’s rise to prominence within the chess world took on the qualities of a strange surrogate battle in the Cold War; when Fischer balked at some of the conditions surrounding his best-of-24-match showdown with reigning champion Spassky, and seemed ready not to show up, none other than Secretary of State Henry Kissinger beseeched him in a phone call.

Garbus captures the full breadth and scope of this drama without ever sacrificing its human qualities. Interview subjects include not only chess masters who provide personal and professional insights, but also Fischer’s brother-in-law, public figures like Kissinger and talk show host Dick Cavett, and more. The use of news clips show the prominent placement afforded Fischer’s showdown with Spassky in relation to Watergate and other important national news, and Garbus’ smart, occasional deployment of slick, groove-laden contemporary tunes like T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong,” Gary Glitter’s “Rock & Roll, Parts 1 and 2” and the theme from Shaft give the movie an additional pop currency.

The big 1972 chess match itself, the film’s centerpiece, is plenty fascinating. It’s incredible to think that this was broadcast nationally on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, complete with commentary from chess experts and even a sketch artist assigned to track Fischer from his hotel and sit in the gallery during matches. From Fischer’s amateur-level mistake in the first game and various no-shows by the participants over the course of its weeks-long schedule to increasingly far-fetched and paranoid claims of radiation or electrical disturbances implanted in lights and chairs, there’s a great and engaging tension to be found in the intellectual and psychological grappling.

Every bit as remarkable, though, is the film’s portrait of Fischer, the boy and the man. This material — of an almost otherworldly focused Fischer — provides a revealing counterpoint to his later withdrawal from society. Swallowed by fear (perhaps to live up to his oft-stated goal of retaining the world championship for a couple decades) and beset by depression, Fischer gave up competitive chess, and grew to increasingly entertain various paranoid delusions of both individual persecution and vast, anti-Semitic conspiracy.

It’s been said, many times and ways, that the line between genius and madness is a thin one. Bobby Fischer Against the World shows the truth in that statement, without ever casting unduly harsh judgment upon its subject. That which would trouble and haunt Fischer for so much of his life is also what made him perhaps the greatest chess player of all time. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films/Moxie Firecracker, unrated, 93 minutes)

The glut of studies — seemingly released almost weekly — showing the slippage and relatively poor international ranking of American high school students in core academic subjects like math, science and history is troubling, certainly, and indicative of a need to redouble efforts in those areas. But as anyone who still has a honest connection to their adolescence will admit, the role of extracurriculars and artistic electives is often integral to a teenager’s sense of engagement and self-worth, and certainly the type of well-roundedness that helps produce open-minded individuals who can work well with others. Not everyone has the aptitude to be a professional musician, artist or athlete, after all, but studying and taking part in these disciplines, and working within the confines of a team or group, helps teach leadership and life lessons that are broadly applicable, and also gives one a healthy lens through which to view the world.

This moral is on rich display in Thunder Soul, a new documentary about the music director at a predominantly African-American high school who, beginning in the late 1960s, transformed a mediocre jazz band into a dynamic, full-fledged funk powerhouse, empowering a generation-plus of kids along the way. When Conrad Johnson, widely known as “Prof” to his students, took over Houston’s Kashmere High, band was an often awkward clash of old musical standards and lax devotion. Instilling a sense of take-no-mess discipline while also encouraging his students to embrace their own inimitable style, Johnson grew an admirable technical proficiency through demanding practices, and then indulged and cultivated his students’ exuberance and burgeoning sense of showmanship.

The result was something special. Johnson’s talents as a composer — he wrote more than 50 original compositions, ladling funk on top of a jazz base — led to his students recording a series of hit records under the moniker The Kashmere Stage Band, with tunes like “Thunder Soul” and “Head Wiggle” blowing away the competition at heretofore staid stage band contests. Importantly, the band’s success (and the community’s pride in it) also worked as a sort of positive viral infection; Kashmere’s ROTC, hoops, football and debate teams all fielded winning squads, and the school was awarded more student college scholarships than any other Houston high school.

Executive-produced by Jamie Foxx, Thunder Soul is built around a 2008 reunion which finds more than 30 former stage band members spanning all sorts of different graduating classes — now all in their 50s, and many not having touched their instruments in decades — reuniting to play a special tribute concert for their beloved former teacher and mentor. An easygoing and heartwarming tale of emotional uplift, the movie is a bonafide crowd-pleaser, as evidenced by its Audience Award victories at the South By Southwest and Los Angeles Film Festivals, as well as a special “Crystal Heart Award” at the Heartland Film Festival and numerous other festival circuit plaudits.

Ninety-two years of age at the time of filming, Johnson is not necessarily in the condition to provide entirely accurate reminiscences, but director Mark Landsman does a good job of blending interview material that pays respect to his subject as both a unique musical talent and a man and teacher who knew how to get the most out of his students. If there’s a failing, it’s that while Thunder Soul is undeniably involving, Landsman also misses some key opportunities to tie in the Kashmere alumni to the school’s present day students, which could have proven quite interesting and added a whole other emotional level to the movie. That said, the film is still a compelling snapshot of how and why good teachers matter, as well as a case for the value of the continued study of the arts in high school curricula. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, meanwhile, click here. (Roadside Attractions/Snootdocs, PG, 88 minutes)

At 72 years old, Clarence Reid could be your cranky neighbor or arthritic uncle — until, that is, he slips on a homemade superhero costume and starts spitting out raunchy rhymes that would make 2 Live Crew proud. At once a sort of niche canonization along the lines of The Devil and Daniel Johnston and a more generalized travelogue documentary about the third-tier touring life for marginal and nostalgia musical acts, The Weird World of Blowfly, so named for Reid’s funky alter ego, is a nonfiction curio that gets by on the personality of its subject, and little more.

By day, Reid was a hit producer in the Miami soul scene of the 1960s and ’70s, co-writing Gwen McRae’s “Rockin’ Chair” and Betty Wright’s “Clean Up Woman” (the latter of which was ironically later sampled by Ghetto Boy Willie D in his take on the song, “Clean Up Man”), among many other tunes. By night, however, and on into the ’70s, he was a rapper — maybe even the first rapper — who was as at home and skilled at dropping refashioned, dirty lyrics over existent songs as he was coming up with his own naughty, tongue-in-cheek tunes of sexual prowess and destruction. To that end, the film deploys, in not always convincing scatter-shot fashion, a litany of industry and genre talking heads like Ice-T, Chuck D, author Jamie Lowe and others, to give props to Reid and his largely under-touted, overlooked legacy.

In general, The Weird World of Blowfly charts Reid through a couple tours and performances — one Stateside, comprised of about 10 dates in smaller clubs, and the other opening in front of festival and arena crowds as big as 13,000, for a German nu-metal group who were perhaps somewhat unlikely fans of his in their youth. The thing that the movie most has going for it is Reid himself, who remains this rather inscrutable but still magnetic and watchable figure. In that regard, the movie is not unlike an otherwise mediocre sports team being willed to the playoffs, and perhaps beyond, by the anchoring presence of one lone superstar.

The list of things wrong with the movie is significant. Well… not wrong, exactly. Just curious and incomplete is more like it. Jonathan Furmanski, a director of photography making his directorial debut, evinces no great sense of style, nor inquisitiveness; in fact, at times he seems more scared of his subject rather than in awe. It’s around the 75-minute mark that the audience first meets Reid’s mother, which would seem an interesting place to start given his stories of how he began singing dirty, made-up lyrics to popular tunes in an effort to antagonize the white, land-owning bosses at the family farm of his youth.

Also unexplained is the impetus behind Blowfly’s lucha libre-style costume, or why he keeps the fingernails on only one of his hands grown out several inches. Then there’s the matter of how Reid himself views his lifestyle, and various familial estrangements. By not getting Reid’s own take on his divorce and (seemingly) continued lack of a presence in the lives of his (now adult) children, Furmanski just kind of throws up his hands, and indicates none of this is worth exploring, which is of course malarkey. Instead, the film frames itself as a sort of unlikely “bromance” between Reid and Tom Bowker, a journalist turned drummer, and Reid’s manager and chief salesman to the outside world. Overall, The Weird World of Blowfly receives the slimmest of recommendations — for at least music fans, and those who enjoyed 2009’s similarly themed Anvil: The Story of Anvil — just because Reid is an interesting figure. For general audiences, though, the lapses in filmmaking judgment render this World more tragically unexplored than weird. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance Films, unrated, 89 minutes)

Taylor Lautner makes a bid for junior action hero status with Abduction, a wildly implausible money-grab for teen film-going dollars that seems outright allergic to exploring the most interesting thing about its concept, and instead beholden to lame notions of air-quote thrills. A highly recognizable adult supporting cast (including Alfred Molina, Sigourney Weaver, Maria Bello and Jason Isaacs) indicates the behind-the-scenes mechanisms being deployed to try to ensure Lautner’s viability as a 21st century leading man, but this dreary, unexciting misfire shouldn’t be the vehicle to do it. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, PG-13, 106 minutes)

Filmmaker Gus Van Sant, even at 59 years old, looks like the sort of guy who should be wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a hoodie. In face, body language and spirit, he retains a certain boyishness — perhaps in some small way infused, throughout the years, by his thematic preoccupation with unconventional romance and coming-of-age stories, and the idea of surrogate family. Restless, his latest effort behind the camera, and the first since Sean Penn scored a Best Actor Oscar for Milk, treads this same familiar ground, but to mostly pleasurable if still rather fleeting effect. A tenderly stylistic evocation of young love wrapped inside a New Wave-esque bundle of wistfulness and nervous, under-the-surface energy, it’s a movie whose graceful direction doesn’t merely trump its plotting, but instead helps elevate it. A kind of arthouse mash-up of Sweet November, One Day and Love and Other Drugs, Restless is a well constructed little diorama, but one whose elicited feelings do not, alas, linger. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics/Imagine Entertainment, PG-13, 95 minutes)

If one were to ruminate on the equivalent of a Mother Teresa-type figure for the advocacy of natural animal research and wildlife conservation, it would likely be Dr. Jane Goodall, a world-famous icon known for her groundbreaking scientific field work accrued while living amongst chimpanzees in Africa. Directed by Lorenz Knauer, the documentary Jane’s Journey offers up a biographical snapshot of both the personal and professional Goodall. Inclusive of some compelling piecemeal details, it’s a film that’s hard to assail with much enthusiasm or gusto, but the truth is that it’s an awkward and generally unfocused mash-up of mixed perspectives and mission statements. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Note: in addition to regular theatrical engagements this week and next, on September 27, Goodall will appear live on hundreds of movie screens across the country for a rare event that will include a screening of the film, interaction with theater audiences and in-studio celebrity guests. For theater and ticket information regarding that event, click here. (First Run, unrated, 105 minutes)

Centering on a group of young friends and deployed reservists from the shores of Lake Superior, on the northern tip of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Where Soldiers Come From delivers unto viewers a slice of somewhat meandering but nonetheless quite affecting blue-collar heartbreak. After all, the subjects, none older than 22 at the time, joined the National Guard together on something of a lark, drawn in — even in wartime — chiefly by a devil-may-care sense of fraternity and the benefits of a $15,000 signing bonus and college tuition assistance. This understated, delicately anthropological real-life coming-of-age tale tracks the end of their Stateside training, a rough tour of duty in Afghanistan, and the disillusionment and troubles that follow upon their return home. It’s not for all tastes, but these stories, alas, are the new back stories of many individual American tragedies and triumphs yet to be written. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (International Film Circuit, unrated, 91 minutes)

To frame it in the form of a simile that baseball fans will understand, Ryan Gosling right now is like Greg Maddux in 1994 and ’95, or Pedro Martinez in 1999 and 2000 — just absolutely crushing it, turning in casually dazzling performances in such a fashion that it will be virtually impossible for him to further forestall a People‘s “Sexiest Man Alive” magazine cover. Yes, in case there were any remaining doubts, after having danced around and avoided it for several years, not unlike Johnny Depp, Gosling is now taking the bullet train to stardom. His latest film, Drive, amply drives home that point.

The story finds the forthrightly named Driver (Gosling, oozing utterly unforced cool) a quiet loner who does movie stunt work during the day and serves as a for-hire criminal wheelman at night, falling under the spell of his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), a vulnerable young mother. When Irene’s husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) gets out of jail, it lights a fuse of danger. Driver agrees to do a job to wipe clean Standard’s prison debt, but things go sideways, resulting in the further, unwanted scrutiny of a syndicate of deadly criminals.

Working from an adaptation of James Sallis’ eponymous novel by Academy Award nominee Hossein Amini, director Nicolas Winding Refn (Bronson) delivers a movie that pulses with an unwavering, premium-unleaded sense of purpose, giving its no-frills story a sense of supremely heightened stakes. Eschewing freeways and landmarks, Refn and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel turn L.A. into an at once intimate, mystical and menacing place. The performances are top notch, and Drive‘s score (by Cliff Martinez) and music selections, too, are hypnotic and of a piece — nervous, pulsing and desirous gems that give the movie a dreamlike hold. Yes, this is somewhat recombinant terrain, previously tilled by Michael Mann, William Friedkin and David Lynch. But when it’s this utterly mesmerizing, who in their right mind is complaining? (FilmDistrict, R, 100 minutes)

Somewhere, no doubt, adult film actor and shameless publicity whore Ron Jeremy is kicking himself over finding out that there exists a movie entitled The Hedgehog in which he is neither the star, nor the beneficiary of a large life-rights check. No, director Mona Achache’s movie is no hairy skin-flick biopic, but instead a darkly comedic broadside aimed at stuffy French elitism, a movie very loosely of a sort with Gosford Park and the forthcoming The Women on the 6th Floor, written and directed by Philippe Le Guay. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (NeoClassics Films, unrated, 100 minutes)

A nicely photographed and initially intriguing character study of a road trip gone awry, and a sibling pair of foreign travelers waylaid in a land foreign to them, Littlerock quickly fumbles away any sense of delicate engagement, and ends up a collection of posed and meandering down-tempo moments in search of an inciting incident or clarifying signifier. Pleased with itself more than it ought to be, the movie seems to believe or feel that dawdling for dawdling’s sake is in the end its own kind of precious artistic statement, a fact only underscored by a heavy-handed political statement finale.

Written and directed by Mike Ott, Littlerock is one of those indie films where the actors (non-professionals or neophytes, one assumes) all play characters with the same first names. Whether this was because the film is “real,” and rooted in actual experiences and their personalities or just so no one got confused on set, one can’t be certain. Regardless, the story centers on brother and sister Atsuko and Rintaro (Atsuko Okatsuka, above, and Rintaro Sawamoto), Japanese tourists whom we glean through a small handful of narrated postcards written back home, have a rocky relationship with their father. The pair gets stuck in the title town, a sleepy ex-urb of Los Angeles, when their car breaks down. Later that night, the duo happen upon a party at a nearby hotel, and make friends with Cory (Cory Zacharia), a kind of feckless loafer with loosely defined ambitions to be an actor or model.

Rintaro speaks a little English, and Atsuko none at all. The next day they “site-see” with Cory, meet some more people, and then head to another party. Despite the language barrier, Atsuko bonds more with the locals than her brother, and when he presses her to continue north as part of their agreed upon itinerary, she balks and stays behind. Staying with Cory (who lives with his father), Atsuko further tethers herself to her new surroundings, striking up a quasi-relationship with another boy, and taking a job at the Mexican restaurant where Cory works when he feels particularly gripped by the urge. Will Rintaro ever return? And what is bonding Atsuko to this place? Ah, these are the mysteries of Littlerock, where twentysomething kids ride bikes for fun when they’re not enjoying some beer and a smoke.

Somewhat (very loosely) like the recent Bellflower or the Polish brothers’ 2001 dramedy Jackpot, Littlerock aims to be a portrait of arrested place and curious ambition. It means to be a sort of dusty, Southern California thematic companion to Richard Linklater’s SubUrbia, in which characters drink, smoke pot and passive-aggressively hassle one another while figuring out what to do with their lives. (Instead of parking lots, though, we get empty, rundown state parks and dingy apartments and RVs.) The problem is that there is no substantive and sustained outside force acting upon Cory, or Atsuko and Rintaro. Everyone is drifting, like a tattered leaf caught in a lazy breeze. Even when Cory is hassled over money he mysteriously owes an acquaintance, the stakes ($200) and pressure (a verbal berating, a poured-out beer) never amount to much of anything.

The performances, too, fail to engage. Okatsuka has a certain watchable mysteriousness, but that chiefly owes to the fact that she doesn’t speak any English. Zacharia, meanwhile, cycles through a thoroughly unconvincing catalogue of babytalk-inflected mannerisms in his dealings with Atsuko, whom his character is supposed to have a crush on. He comes across as an open-mouthed trout; it’s an annoying turn that only becomes more irritating when the script requires him to repeatedly fail to pick up on any nonverbal indicators. (At one point late in the film, he even gets cross and says, out loud, that it’s like Atsuko can’t understand him. Ummm… yeah.)

Most damningly, though, despite the ambivalence of its characters, Littlerock has no headstrong, purposeful sense of its own identity. Ott constructs a cutesy, willfully modest and submissive cultural mash-up, and proclaims it profound, or art, merely by virtue of its construction. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s web site. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance, unrated, 83 minutes)