A documentary by Thierry Demaiziere and Alban Teurlai.

Aside from its gorgeous footage of some of the top dancers in the world, Reset has one big thing going for it: Benjamin Millepied. A former star at the New York City Ballet, he's best known as the man behind the dance in Black Swan--and the guy who married Natalie Portman after that movie came out. Here, he's taken over the Paris Opera Ballet and is preparing the opening night for a season of momentous modernization.

The guy is simply mesmerizing to watch, even when he is doing nothing--or at least bopping around his office with his headphones on, as he often does, developing god knows what kind of kinetic genius in his mind. With piercing blue eyes and the kind of confidence you can only acquire through genes, he's an innovative rebel in a tightly buttoned world. 

His gift is that he discovered what he calls "le plaisir" of dancing growing up before he learned strict technique. "You don't learn to love it by getting yelled at as a kid," is how he puts it. He wants to shake up the traditionally strict Paris Opera Ballet, because he says he doesn't want his dancers to be robots. At one point the perfectly bilingual choreographer tells two dancers to move like "faire amour".

His other bold moves here: casting the company's first mixed-race dancer in a lead role and launching a digital venue. What he isn't great at is managing the company's bureaucratic necessities, resulting in many amusing scenes of his harried secretary-assistant trying to find him in the hallowed institution's labyrinthine corridors and studios.

Perhaps that's why Millepied left the company only a year after this movie was shot. We'll never know the real reason, and the film certainly doesn't dig deep enough to find what conflict may have arisen. Instead, it focuses on the creation process of Millepied's first, opening-night piece for the company as artistic director, from its formative stages with him alone in the studio, to rehearsals and the addition of live music and costumes (with appearances by composing sensation Nico Muhly). There's a little biography of Millepied thrown in, too, along with a wealth of behind-the-scenes shots and extended dance segments in its elegant studios. Dance fans will revel in the slo-mo movement here, lushly shot from all angles.

It's all artfully, frantically edited, with Thierry Demaiziere and Alban Teurlai trying to ramp up tension with loud yellow intertitles and count downs to opening night. But, aside from the odd bloody nose and a near-strike by tech workers, precious little actually goes awry here. Go to Reset to see beautiful contemporary ballet and watch a creative genius do his thing and think of this zippily edited doc as a sort of glossy, more humanized bookend to Frederick Wiseman's more meditative POB documentary La Danse. But if you're searching for drama, conflict, or simply the dirt on Millepied's short but influential reign, look elsewhere.