Just how exciting can a documentary about eleven college kids on a boat sailing across the Pacific to Hawaii be? Roy E. Disney and Leslie DeMeuse, themselves seasoned veterans of the Transpacific Yacht Race from Los Angeles to Honolulu, Hawaii, conceived the idea of recruiting a crew of relative greenhorns and letting them man a rather expensive (!) custom-designed racing yacht over 11 days and 2225 miles… all by themselves. Why? As one of the crew tells us, “This is going to be my first story… an epic story.” Or “a big flop.” Well, if you find your attention wandering a little in the early going of this film, stick with it! The film is no flop. It’s a winner.

So… there’s Jack’s visions about the End of the World and a bloodied, dressed-up Samantha Darko who talks kind of like Bad Galadriel—and numerous fleeting glimpses of some glum kid in red pajamas. Not to mention a leather-bound volume about time travel. And ectoplasmic manifestations that stream periodically from characters’ chests like some leftover special effect from a James Cameron film. Still, its rabbit-trailing, time-tripping, future-shifting vision does make me think about Butterfly Effect-ish philosophy a little more deeply than I have in a while. I’m glad I watched the film for its final notion: very worthwhile, very poignant. But what a slog along the way.

It’s nice that the film’s producers bankrolled a couple of recognizable names for supporting performances; but fans of Jeff Fahey or Dee Wallace won’t be doing any cartwheels about their performances here. Fortunately, young Katherine McNamara is decently cast as Mary. I get a real strong sense that this is a very personal project for Whitus, a heartfelt tribute to the power of love and reconciliation; has he perhaps known a young girl like Mary, and been touched by her spirit? But I just can’t muster up much enthusiasm for encouraging you to have a look.

To a certain extent, Moscow Chill has much of the feel of a Guy Ritchie film while aspiring to the grandness of something like Children of Men. It wants to be hip and irreverent, but meaningful, too. Toward that end, director Chris Solimine shrewdly casts low-rent cult hero Norman Reedus as kidnapped computer hacker Ray; Reedus’ lazy energy is always compelling, and he is as good here as he has been anywhere else. Sadly, the cast surrounding Reedus is not up to snuff, and most of the time Reedus looks as trapped as Ray.

Ted Baehr has compared the film to Ray Bradbury’s work, and for once I agree with Movieguide. First-time feature director Mark Freiburger has cribbed from his own short film of the same name, infused it with the period spookiness of Something Wicked This Way Comes, and upped the ante with macabre touches hinting of Tennessee Williams… and the lighter moments of Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me. When young Jackson Patch leads into a ghost story with “It’s one of the scariest things ever,” his pal Phillip replies, “Tell me.” And that’s our response to Freiburger’s tale precisely.

This is a straightforward retelling of Angus Buchan’s journey from angry, hardscrabble Zambian farmer to gentle, loving, dynamic South African stadium evangelist. Its central metaphors are a stubborn stump and an against-all-odds crop of potatoes; and while it takes a serious look at the role of the miraculous in our daily trials of faith, it also addresses the more mundane illusion of self-sufficiency. If you do much research into the real story behind the film, I think you’ll find it more compelling than the film itself—which I don’t think I’d go out of my way to track down. But if the film has helped get the word out about God’s message, through Buchan, then I imagine it has done its job.

In this sprightly, if methodical, little documentary, Missoula Children’s Theater Executive Director Michael McGill explains that the goal of their week-long dramatic-arts marathons is not to “play a character from the Holocaust”; that is, MCT’s productions are not intended as High Art, nor are the children expected to be the next Laurence Olivier or Olivia de Havilland. Instead, he says, the productions “are a means to an end,” a teaching mechanism by which children who are otherwise stifled or pigeonholed might have, perhaps, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be someone else, to succeed, to shine, to matter.

You may have heard about the devastation of Greensburg on the news, or seen Greensburg City Manager Steve Hewitt at President Bush’s 2008 State of the Union Address. And like me, the story may be so intriguing that you’d jump at the chance to buy this series on DVD and watch all 13 episodes of “Season One.” Not so fast, bucko. You might not be getting quite what you expect, as the series is not so much a documentary as it is a reality-TV show that latches onto a few interesting small-town personalities before it wears out its welcome. But anyone with a modicum of interest in sustainability will appreciate Greensburg’s trials and spotty successes.

There’s an awful lot to like in this small movie that plays like a cross between Dreamer, October Sky, and Footlose. Best of all, the film’s script takes an awfully adult approach to standard teen-fare topics. When Joe tells Brooke, for instance, to “feel like a winner” and “think like a winner,” those are not just Flashdance- or Footloose-style platitudes dressing up dance sequences. This is the kind of film that just about every parent wishes they had lining their entertainment room walls… and it’s one that an awful lot of young, overstimulated teens would probably enjoy watching with them.

At one—and the most successful—level, the film lampoons “in search of documentaries” such as Morgan Spurlock’s latest effort, Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? In this case, the fictional object of the search is small-town loser and legendary eccentric Lucky “Cucumber” Cavanaugh—a less-than-average guy who sabotages bathtub races with Molotov cocktails and lives with his grandfather in a cave. But the object of the satire here is not Lucky so much as it is the doc’s fictional filmmakers Phillip Fellini and Forrest Fonda. Granted, the Jackass and South Park mode of lunacy hits the mark from time to time, as Lucky Cucumber is actually more focused than many of the films it apes. But the film wanders and never really finds its stride, and jumps the rails entirely with idiotic diversions. This is bachelor party material at best.