‘Gospel’ truths about life

Rob Hardy’s “The Gospel” is another solid entry in the burgeoning African American faith-based genre that favors inclusiveness over preachiness and presents multidimensional characters. Featuring a number of noted gospel singers, “The Gospel” is rousing, affirmative entertainment.

Upon the death of his mother in 1992, David Taylor (Boris Kodjoe) turns his back on his workaholic Atlanta preacher father, Charles (Clifton Powell). Handsome and sexy, David becomes a rock star, and his “Let Me Undress You” is riding the top of the charts when he learns his father is terminally ill.

David postpones a tour and heads home -- into a hornet’s nest. The church is in financial straits, and the assistant pastor (Donnie McClurkin) clashes with the senior Taylor’s handpicked successor, the egotistical and ambitious Charles Frank (Idris Elba). Eager to save his father’s church, David organizes a benefit gospel concert, but he is genuinely conflicted over what role he has to play in his father’s church and its future. In the meantime he’s drawn to the self-possessed choir singer Rain (Tamyra Gray).

Of course, “The Gospel” offers positive solutions but never suggests it’s easy for an individual to sort out his priorities in working toward salvation. “The Gospel” earns its emotional impact, and Kodjoe has a star’s presence.

-- Kevin Thomas

“The Gospel,” Rated PG for thematic elements, including suggestive material and mild language. Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes. In general release.

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Home life gives him the ‘Blues’

Tennyson Bardwell’s “Dorian Blues” is a no-frills account of a young gay man (Michael McMillian) looking back on his struggle to accept himself while coming of age in an upstate New York family dominated by his sarcastic, homophobic father (Steven C. Fletcher), who doesn’t bother to hide his contempt for his son while idolizing the boy’s brother (Lea Coco), a star athlete. Meanwhile, Dorian’s mother (Mo Quigley) deals with family tensions by escaping into household trivia.

With rueful humor and keen insight, Bardwell charts Dorian’s ordeal, his escape to NYU, the joy and pain of fleeting first love and the realization that he’s got to overcome a personality that in its flip, critical anger is too much like his father’s. With its moments of comic relief overly exaggerated and at odds with its realistic tone, “Dorian Blues” is at its best at its most serious. The linchpin relationship is the underlying deep bond between the two brothers, and the scenes between McMillian and Coco are well written and equally well played.

-- Kevin Thomas

“Dorian Blues,” Unrated. Blunt language, adult themes. Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes. Exclusively at the Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500; the Playhouse 7, 673 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 844-6500; and the Art Theater, 2025 E. 4th St. (at Cherry Avenue), Long Beach, (562) 438-5435.

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Treasures inside a Russian jewel box

Joshua Waletzky’s splendid one-hour documentary “Sacred Stage: The Mariinsky Theater” is a story of survival -- of how one of the world’s great cultural centers, with its home a giant Baroque czarist jewel box in St. Petersburg, endured two wars and two revolutions in the 20th century alone.

The imperial city with its great palaces and museums survived because Lenin’s cultural czar was a balletomane who saw that the treasures of the elite could become those of the people. The Mariinsky survives in the post-Soviet era largely because of its venturesome artistic director and principal conductor, Valery Gergiev, a man of whom Vladimir Putin has said, “I will serve my term and disappear, but Gergiev will last forever.”

The first task for the visionary Gergiev was to bring its music up to the level of its legendary Kirov Ballet to revive the Mariinsky as a world-class center for the performing arts so that it could survive in a newly capitalist society. Gergiev says “the evil side” -- the fiscal challenges and everything else that might endanger the Mariinsky -- still persist, but it now has a fighting chance to endure.

Waletzky deftly locates the Mariinsky in Russia’s cultural and political history, and had the inspired idea of providing revealing glimpses of the Kirov’s sumptuous “Sleeping Beauty” and its boldly innovative staging of “Boris Godunov” as a way of showing how these signature works are metaphors for Russia’s turbulent history and by extension how the Mariinsky has sustained the Russian people while setting world standards in the arts.

“Sacred Stage” benefits from apt commentary by dance critic and historian Elizabeth Kendall and Placido Domingo, among others.

This beautiful, succinct documentary is a presentation of Dance Camera West.

-- Kevin Thomas

“Sacred Stage,” Unrated. Appropriate for all ages. Running time: 1 hour. Exclusively at the Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869. Dance Camera West: (213) 480-8633.