My Kid Could Paint That is a documentary that pushes a lot of buttons - the pretentious joke called modern art and its values, stage parents, the celebrity-crazed press puffing reputations up and then tearing them down - even whiffs of the media's hounding missing girl Madeline McCann's mother and father. But the film gets under your skin especially, if like me (and no one I know shares this opinion), you're utterly creeped out by the Chuck Jones cartoon classic "One Froggy Evening." That's the one where a laborer discovers that miraculous frog that sings and dances - but never when anyone else is looking. Poor guy's entire life collapses because he can't prove he owns a dancing frog. I found that "comedy" short unbearably depressing, today and back when I was very young.

Maybe I was even as young as the documentary's enigmatic subject, Binghamton, New York native Marla Olmstead, adorable offspring of two good-looking parents. She entered the spotlight a few years ago as an abstract-expressionist phenom, her canvases compared to Jackson Pollock's and selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars - and she was only 4. Filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev follows Marla's meteoric story, with the offers to go on talk shows pouring in. The child's Stepford-handsome parents Mark (a sometime painter who manages a Frito-Lay plant) and Laura (who works in a dentist's office) always say all the right things. They maintain, "Oh, we never expected this miracle; we're putting all the money earned into a trust fund for little Marla; she's just shy and quiet and expresses herself mainly through her art; we don't want her exploited, etc."

Then, a 60 Minutes segment finds a skeptical art expert to examine Marla's work and snort that no toddler painted that. It's noted that Marla only seems to execute the most intricate and mature canvases when she's alone with her father. Recorded statements implicate his hand at the brush. There's a hint the gallery owner who first promoted Marla may have had motivation to perpetrate a hoax. You might remember a great art-world scandal of the 1920s, "Disumbrationism," in which a guy palmed off deliberately abominable paintings as examples of a new breakthrough by a (fictitious) Russian artist. Once the joke was revealed, spectators still mobbed galleries to see the stuff. In today's big-money art market, however, the rumors of fraud undermine the monetary-investment worth of Marla Olmstead's oeuvre. Hate mail pours into the household. Even filmmaker Bar-Lev questions whether he's being manipulated by these nice-seeming people, who granted him more access than other paparazzi. And it suddenly becomes crucial to get satisfactory proof of Marla painting, unassisted, on camera.

As in Orson Welle's F For Fake (an art documentary that started out, anyway, being about forgery), the filmmaker's own penchant for artifice, a need to selectively edit and impose three-act structure and drama, comes into play. Amir BarÐLev may be accused of lazy post-modernism in lieu of a stronger ending, as he steps back and ponders his own role in melodrama. But the story remains fascinating and fodder for apres-film discussion. While My Kid Could Paint That briefly mentions examples of child prodigies in the field of music, sports and acting (no names, but Shirley Temple is in a clip), it might have been advisable to note the likes of Amanda Dunbar, Akiane Kramarik, Olivia Bennett, Amanat P. Singh and others who have been promoted (and sold) as astoundingly precocious young painters. Some of their Web sites have taken to posting actual footage to prove that, yes, these tadpoles can dance. - Charles Cassady Jr.

My Kid Could Paint That - ***1/2

Opens Friday at the Cedar-Lee Theatre

Black Sheep - **

Where's PETA when you need it? In Black Sheep, the too-hip-for-its-own-good New Zealand horror parody, a flock of bloodthirsty sheep begin attacking people in the Kiwi countryside. Filled with gross-out effects and close-ups of sheep munching on human flesh - courtesy of Peter Jackson's WETA Workshop - music video director Jonathan King's feature debut might pick up a small cult following on DVD, but fright fans weaned on boogeymen like Freddy and Jason aren't likely to give a hoot. Or is that a "b-a-a-a"?

Wimpy Henry (Nathan Meister) returns to his family's sheep farm after a lengthy absence to discover that Alpha Male big brother Angus (zealous overactor Peter Feeney) has been tinkering in genetic research with the aid of a mad scientist (Tandi Wright). Before you can say "mutton chops," a mutant sheep fetus escapes and begins devouring everything in sight. It's up to Henry - who's still combating a crippling childhood fear of the woolly critters - and kooky-cute animal rights activist Experience (Danielle Mason) to stop the plague of monster sheep before the entire community is infected or gnawed to death.

Too "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" to be truly funny (or frightening), Black Sheep coasts on snarky attitude, clunky one-liners ("The sheep are revolting!") and beaucoup gore. Sam Raimi's Evil Dead flicks and Jackson's outré pre-Lord of the Rings oeuvre (Dead Alive, Meet the Feebles) were a lot more successful at juggling blackout humor and heart-palpitating horror. King is more fanboy poseur than visionary auteur, and his film lacks the wit or originality to stand out from a pack of other recent micro-budgeted genre wannabes (Severance, Evil Aliens, et al). Just call it Homage Without a Clue. - Milan Paurich

Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque.

At 9:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 10

Exiled - ***

Next to Japanese provocateur Takashi Miike, Hong Kong's Johnnie To is the most prolific Asian genre director working today. Nipping at the heels of his epic Yakuza melodramas Election and Election Triad, both of which were released in the US this year, Exiled is a To mob flick with a difference. Friskier and more purposefully digressive than the lean and ferociously disciplined Election films, Exiled borrows the stylistic tropes of spaghetti Westerns - well, all Westerns - and gives them a gangster movie spin. The irresistible, go-for-broke results are the stuff of fanboy nirvana. There's even a campfire scene, albeit one with cell phones instead of baked beans.

Two competing hitman squads (Anthony Wong and Lam Suet; Francis Ng and Roy Cheung), both looking for someone named Wo (Nick Cheung), show up at the same Macau address one day. The nattily attired hired killers wave at each other on the street as Wo's wife (Josie Ho) nervously watches from an upstairs window. They smoke cigars to pass the time, or maybe just because it looks cool. When Wo finally arrives, the four desperados follow him upstairs, guns cocked and ready to rumble. But wait. Two more guys show up in a car: Are they hitmen or cops? It's kind of hard to tell since everyone is dressed alike; they could all be characters from a Jean-Pierre Melville crime noir. That's just the opening scene in Exiled, which gets progressively goofier, and more absurdly entertaining, from there. A berserk restaurant shootout in which the bullets fly faster than cherry bombs at a Fourth of July picnic is topped by an even more spectacularly exciting - and giddily violent - gun battle inside a cramped apartment. Both sequences deserve to become action-movie classics.

Exiled isn't always easy to follow on a moment-to-moment basis; I could never figure out just how many Macau crime bosses were double-crossing each other. Yet, by the time our original quartet of gunmen stage a daring heist of an armored truck containing $100 million in gold, I was too blissed out on To's pedal-to-the-metal kineticism to care. - MP

Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque.

At 9 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 8

and 9:15 p.m. Sunday, Nov.11

Ghosts of Cite Soleil - ***

Ghosts of Cite Soleil is a sad documentary that must have been a heroic act for filmmakers taking cameras into Haiti's heart of darkness, one of the poorest neighborhoods of the Western hemisphere, under virtual civil-war conditions, to chronicle two brothers, notorious gangster chieftains. Whether it's out of preference or necessity (covering up missing or inferior footage, for example) or just the fact that music stars Wyclef Jean and Jerry "Wonda" Duplessis are executive producers and soundtrack composers, a music-video aesthete predominates, a throbbing narrative not so much cinema verite as cinema reggaeton.

The choice is somewhat defensible, given the personalities of sibling street lords Bily and "2pac" and their crews, the chimeres (dubiously translated as phantoms or ghosts). Both are volatile, armed ghetto thugz, humanized, to some extent, by the fact they're baby daddies and dote on their children (the mothers are, of course, invisible). Both coast on the Robin Hood myth that they're champions of their people, their "niggers." And 2pac, you might guess, is a wannabe rapper, promising that he'll live on through his hip-hop freestyling that keeps it real from the streets, yo! about the oppressive Aristide government and police. But 2pac's rebel pose is an awkward one. The embattled President Aristide, in a move so dumb you can believe we'll try it in Iraq, tries to cement the authority of his crumbling Lavalas political party by paying feral gangs as security forces and marauders against opposition; they've already got guns and bully-boy attitudes. But the chimeres turn against Aristide. A new government, supported by US troops, starts a slum-cleanup operation (you're so immersed in this nocturnal gang world it's a shock to meet an actual policeman), and Bily and 2pac's future looks bleak. It would have been at any rate. There are no old men here. 2pac says, "All we need is peace, baby," but when his crew clashes with Bily's, the latter says, "If 2pac was not my brother I'd kill him already." No surprises there.

A fascinating, baffling third character is a pretty blonde French relief worker named Lele, who both brothers find flirty and attractive, and who crosses the line and (possibly) lights a fuse between the duo. Maybe only nuns like Mother Teresa are fit for this work. If/when Ghosts of Cite Soleil becomes a big-budget scripted film, Angelina Jolie is Lele, definitely. She'll adopt half the juvenile extras anyway. Occasionally 2pac puts a call in to the distant Wyclef Jean, whom he worships, talking about record deals and other farfetched dreams. Wyclef says that these Haitians don't just listen to violent American gangsta rap, they live it - and one wishes he didn't seem so pleased about that. - CC

Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque

At 9:15 p.m. Friday, Nov. 9

This is England- ****

If Antoine Doinel from Francois Truffaut's new wave classic The 400 Blows had grown up in 1980s Great Britain instead of 1950s France and become a skinhead, he might have been Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), the prepubescent protagonist of Shane Meadows' autobiographical coming-of-age drama, This Is England. Ahhh, the '80s! Duran Duran, Rubik's Cube, Pac-Man, the Falklands War… that poisonous decade in which a neanderthal demagogue like Ronald Reagan rode roughshod over the entire world with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher serving as his chief enabler will forever live in infamy. But with England, Meadows - who has steadily amassed an impressive body of work over the past decade (including twentyfourseven and Once Upon a Time in the Midlands) without quite breaking out - somehow manages to turn the chaos and pestilence of that era into the stuff of great art.

Meadows blends the kitchen-sink social realism of '60s British cinema with the poetic naturalism of contemporary artists like Terrence Davies (The Long Day Closes) and Neil Jordan (The Butcher Boy) to brilliant, quietly devastating effect. This Is England is arguably his finest, and certainly most personal, film to date. Young Shaun lives with his financially strapped single mom (the excellent Jo Hartley) in a seaside town halfway between Yorkshire and Nottingham. Since his dad died a year earlier in the Falklands War, Shaun is naturally vulnerable to the fatherly ministrations of teenage skinhead Woody (Joe Gilgun). When National Front sympathizer Combo (Stephen Graham in a volcanic performance), Woody's former mentor, shows up after having served a stint in prison, Shaun immediately falls under his sway.

Woody represents skinhead culture at its most benevolent: He's an affable, reggae-loving lug with no real axe to grind. The volatile Combo, however, is every good liberal's worst nightmare of skinhead neo-fascism. It takes a tragedy for Shaun to learn the difference between his two surrogate dads, but it's a lesson he'll take to his grave. The final scene is as bleakly haunting, yet cautiously optimistic as Truffaut's legendary freeze-frame at the end of The 400 Blows. Only a filmmaker as assured and prodigiously gifted as Meadows could pull off that sort of homage without looking hopelessly jejune. - Milan Paurich

Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque.

At 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 8

and 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 10

White Palms - ***

Compassion is at the core of this Hungarian film about an Olympic gymnast trying to rebuild his life in Canada. Having grown up in communist Hungary, Dongo (Zoltan Miklos Hajdu) suffered under a violent coach. Granted, he won numerous medals during that time, but the abuse has been hard to shake off. Once he starts coaching aspiring gymnasts in Calgary, it's difficult for him to not dish out the kind of harsh instruction he received. After he smacks one of the kids he's training, he's assigned to the most obstinate (and talented) student in the class (Kyle Shewfelt), and the two develop a rivalry of sorts that finds Dongo returning to competition. Nominated as Hungary's entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, White Palms is a terrific film about a man trying to make sense of his troubled past. - Jeff Niesel

Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque

At 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 10

Wristcutters, A Love Story - ***1/2

Developed by the Sundance screenwriting lab, this mordant little gem is the quintessential film-festival movie. It's an adaptation by writer/director Goran Dukic of Israeli author Etgar Keret's short story "Kneller's Happy Campers," also published as a graphic novel called Kamikaze Pizza. The story imagines an afterlife reserved especially for people who commit suicide - a dreary place where the sky has no stars, no one smiles, and everyone wears the scars of their suicide. A young man named Zia (Patrick Fugit) slashes his wrists after his girlfriend Desiree leaves him and finds himself in this metaphysical wasteland. He gets a depressing job at Kamikaze Pizza, has an irascible Austrian roommate, and hangs out at a bar where the music is Joy Division and people entertain themselves by speculating on how the others "offed" themselves.

When Zia finds out that Desiree (Leslie Bibb) killed herself shortly after his funeral, he sets out to find her with his randy Russian rock-musician friend Eugene (Shea Wigham, playing a character based in part on Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hutz) in a beat-up Toyota. Along the way they pick up hitchhiker Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon), a gamine cutie who insists she doesn't belong there and is searching for the "people in charge." Mikal tries to cheer up the place by altering the posted signs: "Do Not Smoke" becomes "Do Not Smoke Unless You Want To!" This quirky Wizard of Oz journey takes the trio to a campsite run by Kneller (Tom Waits), a scruffy, inscrutable fellow who performs minor miracles. Everything is impeccably handled; the performances are endearing and authentic, the writing achieves a perfect balance of humor and sentiment, and the cinematography creates a persuasive purgatory that resembles the barren outskirts of most American towns. - Pamela Zoslov