As Hollywood complains about dwindling theater attendance while trotting out “Herbie: Fully Loaded” as this season’s hot new release, two smaller films are making waves with arthouse devotees.

Over the past 15 years, David LaChapelle’s glossy, highly saturated style has made him one of the world’s best known and most talented photographers. His iconic spreads in “Interview,” “Vanity Fair” and “Rolling Stone” are instantly identifiable, and lately he has directed music videos for everyone from Elton John to Christina Aguilera. His input on the big screen, however, has been limited to a classic dis of Dandy Warhols’ front-man Courtney Taylor in Ondi Timoner’s “Dig.”

That changes with his adventurous feature directing debut “Rize,” which is probably the most gorgeous documentary ever made. It profiles a dance phenomenon from the poorest parts of Los Angeles called “krumping” that LaChapelle saw for the first time while filming Aguilera’s “Dirrty” video (not his best work).

He knows his strengths and plays them up, capturing his subjects with a distinct visual identity that somehow seems glamorous and raw simultaneously. He never speeds the film up but sometimes slows it down so we can savor their complicated, wildly kinetic moves.

“Rize” is far from flawless: LaChapelle makes the mistake of trying to turn it into a morally uplifting junior “Hoop Dreams” by injecting a rigid storyline, and it’s always a little odd when a white millionaire from Connecticut tries to school us on the ghetto. But it’s worth noting that a still photographer as famous as LaChapelle chose to make a motion picture with an emphasis on the motion. He is liberated by the format, and he shares the dizzying freedom of the dancers he profiles.

Matthew Vaughn’s “Layer Cake” has been criticized as Guy Ritchie-lite, which is ridiculous because Vaughn, Ritchie’s best friend / producer / best man at his wedding to Madonna, is ten times the director Ritchie is. “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” caused a commotion when it was released seven years ago, and everyone tagged it as the British answer to “Pulp Fiction.” “Lock Stock” was a pleasant enough diversion, but was barely even that; nothing distinguishes it from a hundred billion other crime capers, and everything’s tied up so nice and neatly at the end that I thought I was watching a TV pilot (I kind of was, since it launched a short-lived series on the BBC).

Ritchie’s shortcomings as a filmmaker were further proven when his next movie, “Snatch,” was a de facto remake of his first movie to the point that the working title was “Lock, Stock and Six Stolen Diamonds.” He was originally attached to direct “Layer Cake,” but aside from the fact that it has a lot of criminals with British accents, they operate in separate universes.

Like “GoodFellas” and “The Sopranos,” “Layer Cake” is about how criminal life eventually kills a person — literally, spiritually or both — no matter how smart they are. Vaughn’s protagonist is an unnamed yuppie coke dealer played by the fantastic Daniel Craig with an alluring mix of dashing good looks and disturbing amorality. Craig’s character wants nothing more than to make a few million from his criminal enterprises and then settle into the mythical gangster retirement, but he never quite grasps that the people he’s dealing with aren’t nearly as levelheaded or concerned about their 401K as he is.

Though its setting may be familiar, “Layer Cake” isn’t your typical neo-noir; it’s shot in bright, minimalist swatches that one would find in Ikea, and no self-respecting genre film would score its most violent scene with Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World.” It rises above easy description and becomes a fascinating study of what happens when one tries to reason with unreasonable people.