A.O. Scott

The brutality in the film is pervasive and often stomach turningly graphic, but what is perhaps most unnerving is the tact, patience and care with which Mr. McQueen depicts its causes and effects.

However frustrated they may be by political paralysis, corporate trickery or plain human stupidity, none of them seem inclined to give up. When they do, we really will be screwed, and we won't have or need movies like this to tell us so.

The internet is an elusive quarry. It’s a marvel and a menace, a banal fact of life and a force for incalculable change. But it’s also less the subject of this captivating, uneven film than an excuse for its director to add to his collection of memorable faces and voices.

The movie itself is an effective nightmare, and a solid piece of filmmaking, strong enough to make you wish that it could have borne the full weight of the tragedy it set out to depict.

Dear John carefully distills selected elements of human experience and reduces them to a sweet and digestible syrup. It may not be strong medicine, but it delivers an effective, pleasing dose of pure sentiment and vicarious heartache.

The film offers an easygoing and generous blend of wish fulfillment, vicarious luxury, wry humor and spiritual uplift, with a star, Julia Roberts, who elicits both envy and empathy.

Its enchantments are dark, its ideas somber and brutal.

Though it lacks the artful, headlong immediacy of "The Circle" and "Offside," Jafar Panahi's films about women in Tehran - and the breakneck exuberance of Bahman Ghobadi's "No One Knows About Persian Cats," about Tehran's underground music scene - Circumstance ripples with the indignant energy of youthful rebellion.

Mr. Garrel is always worth attending to when he takes up the rhythms and paradoxes of love, and even though this is a minor entry in his canon of melancholy romances, it is brief, brisk and intermittently affecting.

In spite of Mr. Giamatti's ferociously energetic performance Barney's Version never figures out just who Barney is.

The power of Ratcatcher comes from its hushed lyricism and Ms. Ramsay's talent for conveying emotional complexity.

Mr. Rock has not only done his best work as a director and screenwriter but has also made an unusually insightful and funny mainstream American movie about the predicaments of modern marriage.

A sleek, swift and exciting adaptation of J. K. Rowling’s longest novel to date.

More a self-portrait than a profile, Val tells the story of a Hollywood career with a candor that stops short of revelation. The tone is personal but not quite intimate, producing in the viewer a warm, slightly wary feeling of companionship.

Unlike its beer-soaked protagonist, Everything Must Go remains dry, serving up its catharsis in wry, moderate doses and making the most of its modest, careful virtues. It is a sober movie, but also sad and satisfying.

Ms. Rapace, tiny and agile, her steely rage showing now and then the tiniest crack of vulnerability, belongs to another dimension altogether. She makes this movie good enough, but also makes you wish it were much better.

The film dwells on the logistical and bureaucratic details of the process, and if it does not exactly write a fresh chapter in the history of art, it stands as an exemplary study in the sociology of art administration.

If there is a bit more humor on display here -- some of it evidence that an element of self-conscious self-mockery is sneaking into the franchise -- there is also more violence, and, true to the film’s title, a deeper intimation of darkness. What there isn’t, as usual, is much in the way of good acting, with the decisive and impressive exception of Ms. Stewart, who can carry a close-up about as well as anyone in movies today.

Desmond Doss was calm, humble and courageous, qualities Mr. Gibson honors but does not share. It is possible to be moved and inspired by Desmond’s exploits while still feeling that his convictions have been exploited, perhaps even betrayed.

The sweetness at the core of the raggedy low-budget romantic comedy Jump Tomorrow is hard to resist.

Engrossing and at times impressive, a pretty good movie that is disappointing to the extent that it could have been great. Is this the way the world ends? With polite applause?

It may be asking too much of The East — which is, after all, a twisty, breathless genre film — to wish that it would frame the contradictions of contemporary capitalism more rigorously. The movie is aware that they exist, and wishes that they could be resolved more or less happily, which is hard to argue with, though also hard to believe.

The twisting and cracking of the British class system is always fascinating to observe, and The Little Stranger traces the details of its chosen moment of social change with precision and subtlety, and with its own layers of somewhat dubious nostalgia.

A modest superhero picture may sound like a contradiction in terms, but really it is a welcome respite.

There is something undeniably exhilarating about the film’s honest assessment of the never-ending conflict between decency and cruelty that rages in every nation, neighborhood and heart.

This film is a document of hope, progress and idealism but also a reminder that the deep springs of bigotry and violence that fed a long, vicious campaign of domestic terrorism have not dried up.

It is frequently gripping and sincere in its intentions, but never quite as revelatory, or as devastating, as it should be.

Mr. Zandvliet is less interested in the stark battle between good and evil than in the shifting ground of power and responsibility, and the way that every person carries the potential for decency and depravity.

A Marvel movie, for sure. But a pretty interesting one, partly because it’s also a Ryan Coogler film, with the director’s signature interplay of genre touchstones, vivid emotions (emphasized by Ludwig Goransson’s occasionally tooth-rattling score) and allegorical implications.

There must be a name for a picture so inconsequential, in which the music provides so much of the chemistry that you get the feeling Bossa Nova would be funereal without it.

You suspect, before long, that there is no strong reason for this production to exist, but it is reasonably good fun all the same.

When Animals Dream is a beguiling parable of cruelty and the resistance to it. Its special effects are pretty minimal, its scope is modest, and it is, in the end, more touching than terrifying, intent on jolting its audience not with dread but with compassion.

A charming, earnest, sometimes ungainly mixture of history, criticism and high-minded gossip, Notfilm testifies to an almost inexhaustible fascination with the pleasures and paradoxes of cinema.

The film’s struggle against simplification — against the sentimentality, wishful thinking and outright denial that defines most Hollywood considerations of America’s racial past — is palpable, almost heroic, even if it is not always successful.

One of Mr. Brisseau's subjects is the volatility of desire, the way the path of erotic curiosity can swerve from satisfaction into recrimination and confusion. A porno-philosopher in the venerable French tradition, he blends a frank appeal to the audience's nether regions with some teasing attention to its mind.

And yet something vital here works. There are, come to think of it, a lot of little things.

To take Mommy as an undisciplined outpouring of aggression and angst is to underestimate its artistry. [Mr. Dolan] has both advanced beyond the romanticism of “Heartbeats” and “Laurence Anyways” and regressed toward a more primal and confrontational mode of storytelling. Mommy may seem out of control, but it knows exactly what it’s doing.

Money Monster begins with a jolt of satire, proceeds through a maze of beat-the-clock exposition and lands on a surprisingly gentle, sentimental note.

The movie, uneven as it is, has terrific momentum and passages of concentrated visual beauty. The acting is strong even when the script wanders into thickets of rhetoric and mystification. And despite its efforts to simplify and italicize the story, it’s admirably difficult, raising thorny questions about ends and means, justice and mercy, and the legacy of racism that lies at the root of our national identity.

The Notebook is a skillfully made movie, with sequences that may haunt you after you leave the theater. But it lacks the power to turn its virtuosity, or the emotional discipline of its remarkable young leads, into a source of insight.

Mr. Reiner and Mr. Kudlow may not quite merit full-metal glory, but they don't deserve oblivion either, and Anvil! The Story of Anvil makes both a case and a place for their band.

Moss, brazen and witty and seeming to push herself to the very edge of control, is a galvanizing presence, convincingly wild even as she’s trapped in a hothouse of sometimes dubious ideas.

Though it is an ambitious - at times mesmerizing - application of the latest cinematic technology, the movie tries to recapture some of the menace of the stories that used to be told to scare children rather than console them.

The Orphanage, a diverting, overwrought ghost story from Spain, relies on basic and durable horror movie techniques.

There are worse things than loutish, laddish cool, and as a series of poses and stunts, Sherlock Holmes is intermittently diverting.

Fans will enjoy the backstage access, the home movies, the snapshots and the reminiscences, but the movie keeps you at a distance, while implying that it may be just as well not to get too close.

The obsessive crosshatching of allusion, spoof and homage that gives Grindhouse its texture is the product of a highly refined generational sensibility.

Directed by Betsy West and Julie Cohen, the film is a jaunty assemblage of interviews, public appearances and archival material, organized to illuminate its subject’s temperament and her accomplishments so far.

In the House weaves a pleasant and clever spell, manipulating the viewer much in the way that Claude plays with Germain.

Within this gore-spattered, superficially nihilistic carapace is an old-fashioned platoon picture, a sensitive and superbly acted tale of male bonding under duress.

The gravity and force of Mr. Phoenix’s performance and Ms. Ramsay’s direction are impressive, but it’s hard not to feel that their talents have been misapplied, and that there is less to the movie than meets the eye.

A thin, unconvincing movie made likable by the charm and skill of its cast and by a script peppered with wit and insight.

Mr. Abu-Assad shows a world from which all trust has vanished, where every relationship carries the possibility — perhaps the inevitability — of betrayal and where every form of honor is corroded by lies.

A Christmas Carol -- I mean the source material, without a corporate possessive attached to it -- remains among the most moving works of holiday literature, and Mr. Zemeckis has remained true to its finest sentiments. He is an innovator, but his traditionalism is what makes this movie work.

A bit of a puzzle. This is a good thing, since most movies plop down in easily recognizable categories and stay there, troubling neither their own intellectual inertia nor that of the audience.

The real flaw is that the movie's best features -- the aching clarity of its central performances -- threaten to be lost in a wilderness of metaphor and mystification.

The film, beautifully shot and cleanly edited, has the economy of a short story, unfolding in a mood of slightly sentimental masculine stoicism.

The laughter is mean but also oddly pure: it expels shame and leaves you feeling dizzy, a little embarrassed and also exhilarated, kind of like the cocaine that two of the main characters consume by accident.

The plot of “Dancing the Twist” is busy, the emotions big, and the screen sometimes as crowded with character and incident as a page of Dickens.

The charm of Radio Unnameable is, finally, elegiac. It can make you wish - or, if you're lucky, remember - that you were a sleepless New Yorker in 1967, kept from loneliness by a gentle, soulful voice on the radio.

Once you have seen a sheep munching on a bloody human leg, you may think twice about your next leg of lamb. On the other hand maybe you'll be inspired to seek vengeance. To provoke one of these responses -- vegetarianism or a defiant meat eating -- may be the point of this odd, amusing film.

Its intentions are, to some degree, corrective: It mocks some of the popular corruptions of faith so as to invite the audience to reflect upon what real faith might be.

Works so hard at celebrating wide eyes and naïve joy that it comes close to spoiling its own intermittent wonderfulness.

The movie, in other words, belongs solidly to Mr. Radcliffe, Mr. Grint and Ms. Watson, who have grown into nimble actors, capable of nuances of feeling that would do their elders proud.

Some of the underdog appeal is gone, but a victory lap can be its own kind of fun, and more is not necessarily something to complain about, especially when what there is more of is Fat Amy.

It's in the small touches that this movie comes alive, and it's rare that directors can pull off this kind of thing.

Mr. Nemes orchestrates a tour de force of suspense, a swift symphony of collisions, coincidences and reversals that is almost unbearably exciting. His skill is undeniable, but also troubling. The movie offers less insight than sensation, an emotional experience that sits too comfortably within the norms of entertainment. This is not entirely the director’s fault. The Holocaust, once forbidden territory, is now safe and familiar ground.

Does a thoughtful job of streamlining the bloody realities -- both literal and psychological -- of China's Cultural Revolution into roughly two hours of film.

Mr. Schiffli shoots in a fluid style, tweaking colors and focus to register changes in perception and feeling. Anxiety dissolves in sunshine and dreamy music, gathers up again in darker colors and more dissonant sounds and then winds up to a pitch of panic.

Until its devastating final scenes, the way “I Do Not Care” makes its points is discursive rather than dramatic.

Regrettably, it is not a home run or a perfect game, but it isn't a wild throw, an errant bunt or a dropped fly ball either. Trouble With the Curve is either an off-speed pitch that just catches the edge of the strike zone or a bloop single lofted into right field. The runner is safe. The movie is too.

Nothing too grand or grave is at stake here. No special cultural or historical importance can be derived from the Borg-McEnroe battle, but sports don’t always carry that kind of significance. Borg vs. McEnroe is a modest, tactful movie about two guys who, at their peak, were neither.

The film’s plots are soft and flimsy, and they don’t mesh as gracefully as they might, but they do serve as an adequate trellis for Mr. McKellen’s performance, which is gratifyingly but unsurprisingly wonderful.

The Purge: Election Year takes itself just seriously enough to provide the expected measure of fun — a blend of aggression, release and relief. A lot of people die, but no one really gets hurt.

Brazenly self-confident in its refusal to pander to the imagined sensitivity of its audience. In this it differs notably from Albert Brooks's "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World," which approached some of the same topics with misplaced thoughtfulness and tact.

This film, Mr. Caetano's feature-length directorial debut, has an emotional integrity that's concise and direct.

A sometimes intoxicating, sometimes headache-inducing cocktail: a sweet, libidinous love story; a candid comedy of bedroom and workplace manners; and, most bravely, if also most jarringly, a medical melodrama involving a chronic and very serious disease.

The blossoming of her ambition, as much as her love life, drives the story forward, and turns Coco Before Chanel into a costume drama worthy of the name.

Ms. Johnson and the screenwriter, Mark Jude Poirier, have transformed a taciturn masterpiece into an absorbing, messy, modest story of damaged relationships.

Tangled is the 50th animated feature from Disney, and its look and spirit convey a modified, updated but nonetheless sincere and unmistakable quality of old-fashioned Disneyness.

October Country feels at once personal and objective, a fascinating hybrid of two important tendencies in the modern documentary.

It’s easy to root for Malcolm, to admire his pluck and share in his enthusiasm. It may be a little harder to buy what he and Dope are selling.

Relax, the staging of the action sequences is as viciously elegant as you've been primed to expect, though there is a dispiriting more-of-the-same aspect to the picture.

The satire may be a little too gentle, but there is something disarmingly tender about the way Mr. Lee dramatizes young Billy’s predicament. You may be surprised at how sweet this movie is and also, in retrospect, startled by how bleak its vision turns out to be.

The movie's advertising tagline ("Starsky & Hutch — they're the Man") needs to be amended. The film belongs, completely and utterly, to Snoop Dogg.

It is Porumboiu’s most elaborate feature and in some ways his least ambitious. Like a meringue or like a whistle, its substance is mostly air.

The characters and situations are interesting enough, and the filmmaking is sufficiently skilled to provide a measure of reasonably thoughtful entertainment.

World on a Wire, while too slow and diffuse to count as a lost masterpiece, is valuable in expanding our sense of what Fassbinder could do and is also a source of much visual and intellectual pleasure in its own right.

Unlike his precursors Georges Franju and Luis Buñuel, who reveled in the shock of incongruity, Mr. Ruiz took it in stride. His gliding, floating camera could make wild impossibilities look utterly natural. And so it is in Night Across the Street, where the present commingles with the past, and seeming is another way of being.

Slight, charming and refreshingly candid little picture.

Beloved is at once whimsical and heartfelt, alive to the absurdity and perversity of amorous behavior and also to the gravity and intensity of human emotions.

As The Debt grows more complex and suspenseful, it also becomes more literal, losing some of its dramatic intensity.

The movie, in all its mess and glory, belongs almost entirely to Ms. Lawrence. She is the kind of movie star who turns everyone else into a character actor. This is not a complaint but an acknowledgment of both her charisma and her generosity.

Many of the funniest parts seem to arise spontaneously from Mr. Hart’s uncensored brain and fast-moving mouth. He can swerve from tears to mock outrage to anatomically detailed obscenities faster than just about any other comic performer working today, and in Ms. Hall he has found an excellent match.

If Dormant Beauty does not rank among Mr. Bellocchio’s best movies, it nonetheless still occasionally shows him at his best. His eye for the latent beauty and evident absurdity of Italian life remains acute, as does his appreciation for vivid performance.

Like its hero, Mid90s struggles to figure out what it wants to be, and the struggle makes it interesting as well as occasionally frustrating.

Not everything that happens in Fighting entirely makes sense -- it’s a fable, after all, and a fable doesn't necessarily have to -- but it breathes with a rough, exuberant realism that you rarely see in movies of its kind.

This isn’t “Lucio for Beginners” by any means. Nor is it a greatest-hits anthology or a “behind the music” tell-all. It’s a tribute and an invitation to further research.

The comedy is more wry than uproarious, the melodrama gently poignant rather than operatic, and the sentimentality just sweet enough to be satisfying rather than bothersome.

Less a conventional movie adaptation than a splashy, trashy opera, a wayward, lavishly theatrical celebration of the emotional and material extravagance that Fitzgerald surveyed with fascinated ambivalence.

An energetic, enjoyably preposterous compound - it's a paranoid thriller blended with pseudo-neuro-science fiction and catalyzed by a jolting dose of satire.

Dan in Real Life is neither wildly farcical nor mockingly cruel, but rather, for the most part, winningly gentle and observant.

The mood is not one of misery, but of quiet, weary endurance punctuated with moments of joy.

In spite of its raw, explicit moments, the film is at heart a sturdy morality tale about innocence and corruption, wealth and want, sex and power.

The hope that infuses this movie makes it all the more upsetting to walk out of the theater and contemplate a looming disaster that the world's leaders seem unable to prevent.

Win Win goes a bit soft in places, protecting its characters from serious danger or tough moral reckoning. But the film's niceness is also central to its appeal, because nearly all of the characters are people you enjoy spending time with.

Mr. Bulger, a former boxer and model before he turned to journalism and then filmmaking, does not let "Behind the Music" sensationalism overwhelm the music itself, which is Mr. Baker's great passion and the only reason anyone should take an interest in him.

The sophistication of the stylized minimalism here in Infernal Affairs is dazzling.

The charm of The Strange Case of Angelica lies in the way it balances this mysticism with a thoroughly secular sense of the business of everyday life.

The virtuosity on display makes the weakness of the story all the more frustrating. I'll avoid spoilers here, but Prometheus kind of spoils itself with twists and reversals that pull the movie away from its lofty, mind-blowing potential.

It reminds you of an extraordinary feat and acquaints you with an interesting, enigmatic man. But there is a further leap beyond technical accomplishment — into meaning, history, metaphysics or the wilder zones of the imagination — that the film is too careful, too earthbound, to attempt.

Because of the movie's wonderful shamelessness, its mordantly funny chills and fights are huge turn-ons. A B picture in love with the zest of its comic-book origins, it embodies that medium's pulse-pounding spiritedness and silliness.

The movie, true to its own PG-13 rating, opts for mildness, modesty and chastened optimism. At the same time, though, it seems to know that a crueler, more cynical rendering of its story - a "Bitter, Hopeless, Love" - lurks between the lines.

Mr. Roskam’s direction is gratifyingly loose. He lets the story, which is really the least interesting part of the movie, more or less take care of itself, allowing us to savor pungent morsels of dialogue and bits of low-key actorly showboating.

Zombieland: Double Tap sets the bar low and steps easily over it, which makes it better than a lot of recent big-screen comedies. It doesn’t have much on its mind, but it isn’t completely brain-dead either.

Though it is modest, almost anecdotal, in scale, 12:08 East of Bucharest is also characterized by a precise and sneaky formal wit.

The film presents a compact, tactful biography and also a valuable explication of the Keatonesque in its most sublime varieties. Coming ahead of a digital restoration of Keaton’s major films, it serves as both a primer and refresher, as well as a promise that he will not be forgotten.

The plot of Alan Partridge (also known as “Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa”) is designed not for coherence but to maximize the chances for Mr. Coogan to riff in character and to bring his alter ego to the very edge of either improbable likability or utter awfulness.

The images in Endless Poetry are arresting and sometimes disturbing, but there is an earnest commitment to ecstasy and authenticity that renders moot any question of offensiveness or exploitation.

Neighbors is not a great film and does not really aspire to be. It is more a status report on mainstream American movie comedy, operating in a sweet spot between the friendly and the nasty, and not straining to be daring, obnoxious or even especially original. It knows how to have fun. How very grown-up.

The time does pass agreeably enough, and if Cairo Time does not amount to much, it does evoke a wistful state of feeling and a complicated city with enough skill and sensitivity that you wish it had dared more.

In its sweet, lackadaisical way, Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind illuminates the pleasures and paradoxes of movie love.

If the extremity of Hallam's temperament tests the limits of our sympathy as well as our credulity, Mr. Bell's ability to seem by turns sweet and scary prevents us from losing interest entirely.

Good pulp depends, above all, on a ruthless sense of economy, and Three Monkeys is just a bit too profligate, too fancy, to be entirely convincing.

The movie is an unapologetically rarefied undertaking and at the same time a gracious and inviting film. And it embodies an elegant and melancholy paradox: What looks like tourism is really the pursuit of truth and beauty, and vice versa.

A sad and spirited elegy for the Carnegie Hall Studios, which for more than a century provided working, living and teaching space for all kinds of artists on the floors above the famous concert hall.

Like its protagonist, sensitively and shrewdly played by Lakeith Stanfield, the film is soft-spoken and thoughtful, with sweet, lyrical touches that alleviate some of the grimness without blunting the cruelty and injustice of what happened.

Unabashedly polemical and rigorously pessimistic, a sustained Marxian indictment of 21st-century capital. The narration, by Mr. Sekula, is at times lyrical and rarely subtle, but the film is most graceful and moving when its argument slows down or wanders into an interesting tangent.

While Frankenweenie is fun, it is not nearly strange or original enough to join the undead, monstrous ranks of the classics it adores.

Originally intended as a cable television series, Middle Men bears some telltale scars of hasty, clumsy truncation. Still, there is a raffish vigor that makes the movie watchable despite all-over-the-map storytelling and a fuzzy, superficial grasp of the salient themes.

Every effort to expand the range of feature-length animation beyond the confines of cautious family fare is to be welcomed, and budding techno and fantasy geeks are likely to be intrigued and enthralled.

A valuable and intelligent introduction and tribute to their anarchic, uncompromising and absolutely peculiar genius.

Ms. McKinnon is too inventive to make the character a standard, zany rom-com sidekick. There is no real precedent for her highly disciplined comic anarchy, but Ms. McKinnon reminds me a little of Peter Sellers in her command of voice, face and body and her ability to turn every scene into a popcorn popper of verbal and physical surprise.

The Banshees of Inisherin might feel a little thin if you hold it to conventional standards of comedy or drama. It’s better thought of as a piece of village gossip, given a bit of literary polish and a handsome pastoral finish.

With its pointed narrative, the film makes its case with a minimum of pushiness and a subtle nod to its crowd.

I suspect that he would have approved of Mr. Lee's film, and not only because it approves so unreservedly of him. Paul Goodman Changed My Life may not have that effect on every viewer, but it has a passionate, almost prophetic sense of the impact that a writer and thinker can have on his times and the future.

The dazzling, high-flying silliness is quite an achievement. The movie is better than it deserves to be, given its origins: a ride at Disneyland and Disney World.

There are many lovely and memorable moments in this film, which is in every way the opposite of a vanity project. If anything, Ms. Portman seems constrained by her own modesty, by a justified but nonetheless limiting reverence for her source material.

The directors Andrew Rossi and Kate Novack may not be great filmmakers -- it's hard to tell, based on this bare-bones picture -- but they know a great story, and more important, how to tell it.

Can't redeem the moves toward its predictable happy ending. But the movie has a protagonist who has a great time getting there.

The Portuguese Nun has wit and feeling, though the wit is at times almost imperceptibly subtle and the feeling somewhat stylized.

[The film] is not perfect, but it is fast-moving, intermittently witty and pretty good fun.

You might not learn everything there is to know about Tesla — that’s what the internet is for — but you will nonetheless feel illuminated by his presence.

The film is touching and small, but also thoughtful and assured in a way that lingers after the inevitable tears have been shed and the obvious lessons learned.

Simon Brook used five hidden cameras, and the audience has a sense of witnessing intimate moments rather than watching a performance.

A somber, absorbing and only moderately preposterous new thriller.

A comforting, sentimental tale of a kind that would be insufferably maudlin if made in Hollywood and unbearably affectless if it showed up at Sundance. Somehow it’s easier to take in French.

This is a calm film about strong emotions, but it does find a reservoir of intensity in the two central performances, in particular Mr. Del Toro’s.

You might feel like you’re in the company of a manic cinephile friend breathlessly recounting his favorite movie scenes in no particular order. You admire his devotion, his taste and his scholarship, but in the end the experience is probably more satisfying for him than it is for you. Still, the company isn’t bad.

Like birding itself, The Big Year rewards patience. It respects both the integrity and the eccentricity of the avian obsession, and it communicates something of the fascinating abundance and weirdness of the animals themselves.

A lively minor addendum to the grand tradition of Italian fraternal cinema.

A playful parlor trick, a departure from the performance-art films that have made this director's reputation. In keeping with his lighter side, *Corpus is also fun; imagine a Looney Tunes segment or an episode of Nickelodeon's "Kablam!" directed by Red Grooms.

Its frank good humor stands in sharp contrast with the strange combination of timidity and exploitiveness of more widely distributed recent teenage comedies.

Accomplishes the depressingly familiar mathematical trick of being both more and less than its predecessor.

It's more of a mash note than a formal documentary, and there's nothing wrong with that.

What gives the movie its power is that even the most innocuous scenes in the boys' lives are shadowed by dread.

Pootie Tang may be raw and slovenly -- hey, it often is raw and slovenly -- but it succeeds as a laugh getter because of the spot-on satirical notes. You might say that the movie walks it like it talks it; I'm not sure what Pootie would say.

The reckoning with the past, which has occupied West German society since the 1960s, has been painful and divisive, which makes the calm, empirical spirit of this film all the more impressive.

If a movie of this kind didn't traffic in overstatement, it wouldn't be doing its job, which is to provide a strong dose of simple, rousing emotion.

Much of the fun in Enemy, which is tightly constructed and expertly shot, lies in Mr. Gyllenhaal’s playful and subtle performances.

The Counterfeiters is a swift and suspenseful thriller, and perhaps a little too entertaining for its own good.

This is neither a simple satire of privilege nor a mock-provocative comedy of diversity and its discontents. It’s about a clash of values, about unresolvable contradictions. Or to put it another way, about good and evil.

Mr. Soderbergh once again offers a master class in filmmaking. As history, though, Che is finally not epic but romance. It takes great care to be true to the factual record, but it is, nonetheless, a fairy tale.

The film’s sensitivity, though it is an ethical strength, is also a dramatic limitation.

Parker...is not a great movie....But Parker is nonetheless great fun. It is part of a welcome trend, or counter-trend, in action filmmaking, an effort to strip away the apocalyptic bloat and digital fakery that have overtaken the genre and return to its pulpy, nasty, mechanical roots.

The blithe cruelties of outdoor living mount up, but the filmmakers refuse to exaggerate or sensationalize their material.

As usual, the characters — and the performers playing them — step unto the breach to provide just enough wit and feeling to make Days of Future Past something other than a waste of a reasonable person’s time.

Shot in rich, wide-screen color, with minimal camera movements (except when a small camera is attached to a falcon’s restless head) and almost no dialogue, it is detached almost to the point of abstraction.

The result is imperfect, but its roughness is entirely consistent with the way the filmmakers understand the traumatic experiences of displacement, loss and deprivation.

The Five-Year Engagement dutifully hits the marks of its genre, but it is also about the unpredictability of life and the everyday challenges of love. The sensitivity and honesty with which it addresses those matters is a pleasant surprise.

Syndromes and a Century, like its curious title, has the logic of a dream, a piece of music or perhaps a John Ashbery poem. Its coherence is evident; it is too lovely and lucid to be frustrating or dull. But it takes place just on the other side of conscious apprehension.

The story risks being overwhelmed along with its protagonist — pulled apart by too many competing arcs that collide in ways that aren’t always graceful. But on the other hand, too neat a movie might risk inauthenticity.

Mr. Kitano directed, edited and wrote Brother -- and his style of close-to-the-vest brutality travels extremely well.

The actors draw out both the spiritual and the psychological dimensions of their characters. The interplay, a duet with sweet and eccentric harmonies, is fascinating to observe, even as it undermines the overall structure of the narrative.

Mister Lonely, self-enclosed though it may be, nonetheless demonstrates that Mr. Korine, who showed his ability to shock and repel in earlier films, also has the power to touch, to unsettle and to charm. This is undoubtedly a small movie, but it's also more than that: it's a small, imperfect world.

Where’s My Roy Cohn?” is most interesting for the questions it doesn’t explicitly ask. Those have to do with not with Cohn’s blatant amorality, but with the moral compromises of the elite who tolerated his company and found uses for his talents.

The Red Turtle practices a minor, gentle magic. It wants you to smile and say, “Ahh,” rather than gasp and say, “Wow.” But somehow the understatement can feel a bit overdone, as if the film were hovering over you, awaiting an expression of admiration.

Ms. McTeer's sly, exuberant performance is a pure delight, and the counterpoint between her physical expressiveness and Ms. Close's tightly coiled reserve is a marvel to behold. The rest of the film is a bit too decorous and tidy to count as a major revelation, but it dispenses satisfying doses of humor, pathos and surprise.

Is this chronicle of their combat an occasion for nostalgia or a cautionary tale? The film’s perfectly sensible, not entirely satisfying answer is “both.”

Something about the strangeness of the people and the harsh indifference of the nature that surrounds them feels real, even if realism in the conventional sense may be the last thing on the filmmaker’s mind.

There is something apocalyptically awful about Onkalo, to be sure, but the impulse behind it is noble, and the installation itself has an undeniable grandeur.

La Flor is perhaps more fun to think about than to sit through, though there are some exquisitely beautiful sequences.

It is gripping and haunting, but also coy and elusive.

There is no denying the film’s uncanny power or its visual discipline. It’s a luminous puzzle with a few pieces missing.

Its powerful narratives leaves you with the strong suspicion that the whole story has not yet been told.

The grunts and howls seem every bit as mannered as the florid diction of Olivier and Oberon, perhaps even more so. Their artifice, like Brontë's own, was overt, whereas Ms. Arnold strives to disguise hers in the trappings of authenticity. And as a result, the impact - the grandeur, the art - of Wuthering Heights is diminished.

The most startling aspect of Robot Stories is not the mix that the director built from spare parts left on the curb but the evolving dramatic acumen of its maker; he's a talent with a future.

It takes a perverse effort of will to love “Maps to the Stars.” It’s a little too chilly, and in some places too easy. But you may find yourself drawn back to it, and retracing its route from the familiar to the uncanny, from entertainment to revulsion, from dream to nightmare.

John Cusack gives one of his wiliest performances in some time, and one of his most mature, as Nick Easter, an aging slacker drafted into jury duty. He subverts his protracted-adolescent cheekiness and pours the melted charm into something far bleaker.

It communicates the delights of pastiche rather than the thrill of original creation, a secondhand movie love that is seductive but not entirely satisfying.

There are a lot of loose ends and a few forced conclusions. But, then again, the acceptance of imperfection is Mr. Apatow's theme, so a degree of sloppiness is to be expected. That's life.

A faithful and disarmingly earnest attempt to honor some venerable and popular Chinese cinematic traditions.

The three-part story, spread over nearly two and a half hours, represents a triumph of sympathetic imagination and a failure of narrative economy. But if, in the end, the film can’t quite sustain its epic vision, it does, along the way, achieve the density and momentum of a good novel.

It’s less a biography than an extended essay, which is entirely a good thing. If you want a thorough documentation of everything Morrison has done and everyone she knows, there’s always Wikipedia. But if you’d prefer an argument for her importance and a sense of her presence, then you won’t be disappointed.

Pacific Rim, with its carefree blend of silliness and solemnity, is clearly the product of an ingenious and playful pop sensibility.

Southern Comfort sent shock waves through this year's Sundance Film Festival, even though it is as much about generosity and courage and tolerance as it is about a potentially discomforting subject.

Farhadi’s choreography of the shift from rowdy celebration to frantic desperation is the most effective part of the movie, and he keeps the suspense going on several fronts.

A tour de force of meticulous cruelty, a comic melodrama that elicits laughter and empathy and then replaces those responses with squirming discomfort.

Its clever final plot twist adds a gratifying jolt of the uncanny to what is otherwise a charming, bittersweet meditation on the passage of time and the equivocal power of images to capture an older world at the moment of its disappearance.

It’s a story very worth telling, told pretty well, with self-evident virtues and obvious limitations. Viewers who see it out of a sense of duty will find some pleasure in the bargain. Call it the banality of good.

In the arresting Red Road, the dire Orwellian warning that Big Brother is watching has evolved from a grim fantasy of totalitarianism into a banal fact of life.

Unfortunately One Hour Photo turns everyone but the central character into a cutout.

The whole affair is pulpy, jokey, sometimes touching and frequently nonsensical: a big mess and, mostly, a lot of fun.

Primarily a riveting genre film that neatly exhibits the director's growing assurance -- Donald Goines would be proud.

Its affection for its characters feels protective; the film is reluctant to spill any secrets or cause any embarrassment. There is admirable kindness and impressive loyalty in this approach, but it also puts a bit of a damper on the party.

Given that Untold Scandal is, like its predecessor, an epic story of spreading displeasure, the director's ability to keep it from feeling petty is a major feat.

Informative but not overwhelming, it blends biography and appreciative analysis in 90 brisk, packed minutes.

Mr. Li will come out of Kiss of the Dragon smelling like a rose; the combat couldn't be better. But next time around, he should leave the script to more capable hands.

Gorgeously shot, moving through the decades in a gentle adagio, it is less a chronicle than a tribute -- and also, to non-initiates in the game of go, a bit of a puzzle.

Franz Jägerstätter’s defiance of evil is moving and inspiring, and I wish I understood it better.

The film's ideas are interesting, but don't feel entirely worked out, and Mr. Rockwell's intriguingly strange performance (or performances) is left suspended, without the context that would give Sam's plight its full emotional and philosophical impact. The smallness of this movie is decidedly a virtue, but also, in the end, something of a limitation.

Refreshingly tart and lean, forgoing the usual schmaltz and syrup.

Sicko is the least controversial and most broadly appealing of Mr. Moore’s movies. (It is also, perhaps improbably, the funniest and the most tightly edited.) The argument it inspires will mainly be about the nature of the cure, and it is here that Mr. Moore’s contribution will be most provocative and also, therefore, most useful.

As it develops, Dare lays out some interesting psychological puzzles, though the filmmakers lack the technique to explore them as thoroughly as you might wish.

The intoxicating madness of Tears of the Black Tiger is in the end too willed, too deliberate, to be entirely divine.

As ever, Mr. Chabrol’s style is delicate and precise. Comedy of Power is not his deepest or most ambitious film, and its stance of knowing resignation in the face of corruption can feel a little glib. But Ms. Huppert's ferocity compensates for the director's detachment; no French actress is as riveting to watch once the gloves come off.

If Intimacy does anything well, it portrays desperation, in many different forms.

What Mr. Hanson has done with 8 Mile is make a pop movie instead of a movie about pop. There's nothing disreputable about this.

Precisely because their attitudes are so bluntly hedonistic and apolitical, Harold and Kumar manage to be fairly persuasive when they get around to criticizing the status quo, which the movie has the wit to acknowledge itself as part of.

In a manner that is patient — and sometimes even playful — rather than polemical, “All Light, Everywhere” contributes to debates about crime, policing, racism and accountability.

What is most impressive is the care with which Mr. Chung manages this risky undertaking. He seems to have made this film above all by listening and looking.

Loads of fun. It has a jamming B-picture buzz -- the kind of swift filmmaking and high spirits that have been missing from movies for a while.

When the turmoil of the last 12 months has receded and the 10th-anniversary deluxe collectors edition comes around, this strange, numb cinematic experience may seem fresh, shocking and poignant rather than merely and depressingly true.

Mr. Escalante is an exceptionally deft and subtle realist, and you sometimes feel, in “Heli” and even more so in The Untamed that he is drawn to extremity partly out of boredom with his own skill.

It’s a swift-moving, detailed biography, recounting a life that was long, eventful and stippled with tragedy and regret.

There is something graceful and effortless about this performance (Mr. Smith's), which not only shows what it might feel like to be the last man on earth, but also demonstrates what it is to be a movie star.

Regards its characters with affectionate detachment, and assures its audience that no great calamities or revelations are in store. Instead, there are a series of small crises and tiny epiphanies, all adding up to a story that courts triviality in its pursuit of charm.

An enjoyable and charming if overactive fantasy.

The opening shots, of Farmer on horseback in his space suit, hint at a strangeness that the rest of the movie never quite lives up to, but it does have a visual freshness that makes the bromides and clichés palatable.

At times The TV Set seems to unfold almost entirely without exaggeration.

This is a high-concept comedy, and none of the jokes are forced, which makes Meet the Parents a singular achievement.

[Mr. Odar] allows the story to unfold at a deliberate pace, emphasizing the psychological nuances of the mystery rather than its procedural details, and using graceful wide-screen compositions and haunting sound design to create a compelling mood of menace, anxiety and sorrow.

An admiring, clever remake of Kim Ki-young's legendary film of the same title from 1960, this version, directed by Im Sang-soo, is at once more explicit than the original and less kinky.

It is interesting and ingenious, even if some of the kinky, queasy fascination that had been so intoxicating in the earlier scenes ebbs away.

Although it is composed mainly of archival footage and touches on a great many actual events, Double Take, as you may already have gathered, is not quite a documentary. It is, instead, a meditation on a series of loosely related themes drawn together, somewhat tenuously, by the familiar yet elusive sensibility that Hitchcock brought to Hollywood and then to American television.

Has a winningly pulpy, jaunty, earnest spirit.

The subtlety of the film is both an accomplishment and a limitation. It’s hard not to want more for these women, and to wish you could see more of them.

The film's seductive lack of pretension will make a fan of you.

It is a modest, competent, effective movie, concerned above all with doing the job of explaining how the job was done.

The charm and audacity of this film lie in the way it blends the commonplace and the bizarre.

Part courtroom drama, part rumination on what separates human beings from other animals, the film is above all a sympathetic portrait of an advocate.

The extravagance of the sets and costumes increases the theatricality; Chunhyang is an almost childlike delight for the eyes.

It’s not only Mister Rogers’s kindness that hovers over “Beautiful Day,” but also his creative spirit. Paying tribute to his skills as a composer, performer and puppeteer, the movie affirms his status as a hero of the imagination.

The charms of Sing Street should not be underestimated. Partly because its manner is unassuming and its story none too original...it’s easy to overlook Mr. Carney’s ingenuity and sensitivity.

[Ms. Tsangari's] inquiry stops short of the hearts of these men, and she seems content to dramatize some of the sad, ridiculous and tender ways that boys will be boys.

With the help of some solid performances and James Horner’s heart-squeezing, throat-constricting score (one of the last he composed before his death in June), The 33 holds your attention and pushes the required buttons.

The real fun is the insect shtick.

Never Look Away bristles with half-formed thoughts and almost-heady insights, and hums with an ambition that is exasperating and exhilarating in equal measure.

The Imitation Game is a highly conventional movie about a profoundly unusual man. This is not entirely a bad thing.

To some degree in spite of Ms. Poitras’s journalistic intentions — though very much as a consequence of her rigorous honesty — the picture that emerges is complicated, unsettling and intriguingly ambivalent.

The Bling Ring occupies a vertiginous middle ground between banality and transcendence, and its refusal to commit to one or the other is both a mark of integrity and a source of frustration.

It is suspenseful, horrifying and at times intensely moving. But the ease with which it elicits these responses from the audience feels more opportunistic than insightful.

Wants to blend thrills and pathos, getting at the many sides of what is, as Mr. Blaustein describes it, a carny act.

Its tone is quietly comical, with each chapter treated as an extended joke, or as an R-rated O. Henry story angling toward a neat concluding twist.

You are likely to remember this charming film, directed by Nadine Labaki, less for its gently comic, mildly melodramatic plot than for its friendly and inviting atmosphere.

The old "Fright Night" was both self-aware and effectively scary, and if this one seems to prefer gruesome digital effects to old-fashioned bump-in-the-night spookiness, it still succeeds in keeping the audience both tickled and anxious.

At its best, The Nativity Story shares with "Hail Mary" an interest in finding a kernel of realism in the old story of a pregnant teenager in hard times. Buried in the pageantry, in other words, is an interesting movie.

More likely to be recalled as a moderately satisfying entertainment than remembered as a classic.

The most gratifying thing about "Eames" is that it shows, in marvelous detail, how their work was an extension of themselves and how their distinct personalities melded into a unique and protean force.

Unfortunately, it is also less than the sum of its parts -- overly long, lacking in narrative momentum and too often choosing sensation over coherence.

The emotions are quiet, and the connections among the characters feel tentative and fragile. Though it makes no reference to the current economic and political crisis in Greece, Attenberg is suffused with a sense of malaise - of stasis, if you prefer a Greek word - that way well reflect the contemporary national mood.

The new movie, directed by Dean Parisot, is an amiable, sloppy attempt to reassert the value of friendliness and crack a few jokes along the way.

A thriller, a murder mystery and a somewhat self-conscious literary puzzle. All of that is entertaining enough, if a bit preposterous and overdone, but the twists and convolutions of the film’s beginning and end enable a middle that is dizzying domestic comedy.

Ms. Bening's precise, pitiless tracing of her character's decline from feisty defiance to pathetic, overmedicated self-delusion gives the film an emotional weight it might not otherwise have.

Is this evidence of cultural decline? It's hard to think of a short answer that wouldn't be made more vivid by the insertion of the forbidden word. So skip it. No, not the movie. What, are you kidding me? No way. Go. Help yourself.

How much intensity and suspense can you drain from a movie about cops and robbers without having the thing collapse into anecdote and whimsy? The Old Man & the Gun kind of does just that, but it’s hard to mind too much.

The girl-boy-girl threesome, which turns out to be short-lived, is perhaps the most straightforward emotional configuration in this odd, witty, touching film.

Much of All About Lily Chou-Chou is mesmerizing: some of its plaintiveness could make you weep. If only Mr. Iwai trusted the material enough.