Anita Gates

The most horrifying thing in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's fiercely original, thrillingly creepy Pulse (released as "Kairo," or "Circuit," in Japan) is the way the ghosts move.

An enthralling documentary.

Makes its case with breathtaking force.

The pleasant surprise is that the film is a delight.

There is no gore here, and no on-screen violence, but this is in every way a horror movie. With a devastating ending.

The burning question is why Mr. Hyde’s story has never been made into a feature film. You’ve got big sky, a crazy but magnetically confident old coot, a noble but seemingly hopeless quest and a triumphant ending.

The production doesn't resolve the paradoxes in Newton's life, but it does give viewers some idea of what it might have been like to be inside his head.

In Peter Sanders’s sassy documentary Altina... there’s plenty of interesting ground to cover.

In some ways, this is just another underdogs-go-for-it sports movie. In others, it is as sensitive and observant as an Edith Wharton novel.

Joanna Lipper’s documentary shapes one country’s recent history into an accessible and tragic family drama.

The first half of Behind the Blue Veil makes a case for the noble cause of preserving a way of life; the second half admits its near-futility.

The film benefits from nice performances and nice work by Mr. DiFolco (making his directorial debut), even if the ending is not as psychologically complex as earlier scenes lead us to hope.

Ms. Kapoor, in her early 20s, gives a performance that seems to reinvent female confidence.

The two leads are so low-key that they almost disappear at times, but The Quitter is a textured, heartfelt drama that achieves its modest goals.

This is a sweet adventure story for children. (Surely, American parents can deal with the bare breasts of one talking painting.) For adults it is short on narrative sophistication but visually a true objet d’art.

If the film is workmanlike at times, it is also elegantly cleareyed.

Advanced Style is undeniably captivating, even uplifting at times. But Mr. Cohen and Lina Plioplyte, the director, present a disconcerting mixed message.

[A] thorough, powerfully straightforward documentary.

Mr. Takata deserves praise for refusing to oversimplify the situation, although his film doesn’t always bring the conflict fully to life.

In between the rampant four-letter words and the occasional partial nudity are likable attempts at humor — some sweet, some saucy.

William Powell and Myrna Loy may not have invented star chemistry but they perfected it.

Beatocello’s Umbrella could have been a terrible movie. In theory and largely in execution, it is little more than a promotional video for Kantha Bopha, a group of hospitals in Cambodia, and Dr. Richner, who has run them since the early 1990s. But what a guy!

Articulate and sympathetic experts, a calmly authoritative narrator (Alfre Woodard), powerfully conversational subtitles and breathtaking scenery enliven the film’s message.

Touching, intelligent and admirably thoughtful, but more action-packed than its predecessors, thanks to escaped convicts, a local murder and a truly suspenseful finale, with lives at stake.

It’s a quietly compelling story.

It will probably please fans of this simple genre with its solid suspense, murky lighting and “gotcha!” scares.

Rick King's stirring documentary Voices in Wartime is not, as you might guess from the title, a compilation of soldiers' battlefield letters to their families back home. This intense little film is about poetry, and not just Homer's "Iliad."

In this splattery George A. Romero movie from 1977, the title character is not your typical vampire. In fact, he may not be a vampire at all. I mean, did Count Dracula ever need hypodermic needles (for sedation) or razor blades? Mr. Romero, the director who gave the world the ravenous 20th-century zombies of Night of the Living Dead, plays around with the possibility that Martin is just certifiably psychotic.