A.O. Scott

Mr. Coogler, with a ground-level, hand-held shooting style that sometimes evokes the spiritually alert naturalism of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, has enough faith in his actors and in the intrinsic interest of the characters’ lives to keep overt sentimentality and messagemongering to a minimum.

Frequently brilliant, finally baffling film.

The value of Diplomacy is that it produces at least as much unsettlement as relief, compelling the viewer to remain haunted by nightmarish thoughts of what might have happened.

This isn’t a perfect movie — sometimes the machinery of plot-focused screenwriting hums a little too insistently, especially toward the end, disrupting the quieter, richer music of everyday life — but its clearsighted sensitivity makes it a satisfying one.

Mr. Johnsen offers viewers the challenge and pleasure of an important artist’s company, and a chance to appreciate anew his wisdom, his wit and his bravery.

The Guardians is a historical drama that doesn’t lose itself in decorative period detail, a beautifully photographed chronicle of rural existence that refrains from picturesque sentimentality and grinding misery, the usual modes for this kind of film.

The on-camera absence of its subject and its overall indifference to matters of biography make Sol LeWitt a welcome departure from most documentaries about artists, as well as a fitting and serious tribute to his art.

May not be perfect, but it honors its source and captures the key elements -- the humor and good sense, as well as the sheer narrative exuberance -- that have made White’s book a classic.

A goofy and remarkable film.

Ms. Zhao’s commitment to her craft — she knows how to take care and when to take risks — matches Brady’s. She has an eye for landscape and an acute sensitivity to the nuances of storytelling, a bold, exacting vision that makes The Rider exceptional among recent American regional-realist films.

Viewers jaded by daily doses of digital dazzlement might not fully register the reality of the wonders they are witnessing. But that doesn’t, in the end, make The Eagle Huntress any less wonderful.

Mr. Kurosawa, a prolific and skilled genre master, spins this parable with a light, nimble touch, punctuating heavy passages of exposition with punchy, modest action sequences and snatches of incongruously bouncy music.

It's a mirror and a portrait, and a movie as necessary and nourishing as your next meal.

The film is a short, nimble consideration of the collision between the wildness of nature and the orderly bustle of modern urban life. It is also an essay on ornithology, Japanese culture and the challenges of pest control.

Mr. Shyamalan may be the only mainstream director hankering for success with a need to understate; he is like Shaq without the tattoos. The result is a mastery of craft that may leave some hungry for more.

Nearly every melodramatic impulse has been suppressed in favor of a calm precision that serves both to intensify and delay the emotional impact of the film’s climactic disclosures.

Ms. Granik’s tact and curiosity are remarkable. So is her subject’s openness.

Less an archival clip job than a late-night jam session, it is informal and inviting.

On the most fundamental level, Neither Heaven Nor Earth is an impressive stunt, a horror movie masquerading as a film about the horrors of war. But its gravity and intelligence...make it something more.

The magical, metaphorical strain in The Future is what makes it powerful, unsettling and strange, as well as charming. The everyday fears and frustrations that shadow us on our awkward trip through the life cycle often feel enormous, even cosmic, and Ms. July has the audacity to find images and situations that give form to those metaphysical inklings.

Mr. Garrel’s method goes beyond realism to achieve a kind of psychological intimacy that is rare and, in its low-key, meandering way, tremendously exciting.

What is beyond dispute is the sheer exuberant virtuosity Ms. Seigner and Mr. Amalric bring to the material.

Its themes are a bit nostalgic and some of its technology looks dated, but there is nothing else in theaters now that feels quite as new.

The picture has a daring attention-span deficit and an epic silliness that can be awesomely entertaining.

Even if you think you know what’s coming, Selma hums with suspense and surprise. Packed with incident and overflowing with fascinating characters, it is a triumph of efficient, emphatic cinematic storytelling. And much more than that, of course.

In A Hijacking, his assured, intense second feature, the Danish director Tobias Lindholm turns tedium and frustration into agonizing suspense.

You understand the different ways the members of this extended family are trapped, in physical space and in psychological patterns they don’t fully understand. But you also realize that, like house cats that venture to the door to sniff at the air outside, they don’t necessarily want to be free.

A giggly cocktail, though it's more foam than drink.

Like any good work of criticism, De Palma will be catnip for passionate fans while also serving as a primer and a goad for the skeptical and the curious. Mr. De Palma is remarkable company — witty, insightful and neither unduly modest nor overbearingly vain.

Mr. Block has put his parents’ life, and his own, into this film with such warmth and candor that it may take more than one viewing to recognize it as a work of art.

Apollo 10½ is more a modest memoir than a whiz-bang space epic. Its view of the past is doggedly rose-colored, with social and emotional rough edges smoothed away by the passage of time and the filmmaker’s genial temperament.

The most fascinating — and the most moving — thing about this sprawling, sincere and boisterous movie is its tone.

The result is captivating, but not exactly moving: Nasser-Ali's grand passion is posited rather than communicated, in spite of Mr. Amalric's exquisitely soulful performance.

The Beltway sniper case was solved a long time ago. But in some respects, Mr. Moors’s haunting film suggests, it is still a mystery.

The filmmakers know how potent the material is, and they don't hammer away at the obvious.

The brilliance of Stuff and Dough is that it wraps this powerful, disturbing drama in an anecdote from ordinary life. As is often the case in recent Romanian movies, the acting is so accomplished as to be invisible.

After watching the fascinating and compelling new documentary Lost in La Mancha, you may forever wonder how it is that movies are made at all.

Modest in scope, but it feels complete, fully inhabited, in a way that more overtly ambitious movies rarely do.

If fun does not really fit into Roy Andersson’s frame of reference, there is ample pleasure to be gleaned from his formal discipline and his downbeat wit.

May feel redundant, but it is stylish and intelligent.

If Coco doesn’t quite reach the highest level of Pixar masterpieces, it plays a time-tested tune with captivating originality and flair, and with roving, playful pop-culture erudition.

In the end Babel, like that tower in the book of Genesis, is a grand wreck, an incomplete monument to its own limitless ambition. But it is there, on the landscape, a startling and imposing reality. It's a folly, and also, perversely, a wonder.

Has the advantage of being an unusually good superhero picture. Or at least -- since it certainly has its problems -- a superhero movie that's good in unusual ways.

Mr. Villeneuve tells Nawal's story in a way that is both subtle and emphatic, and Ms. Azabal, portraying Nawal from hopeful youth to despairing middle age, gives a performance that is all the more powerful for the restrained, unshakeable sense of dignity she brings to it.

Into the Abyss superficially resembles the kind of titillating, moralizing true-crime shockumentary that is a staple of off-hours cable television. But the grim ordinariness of the narrative makes its Dostoyevskian dimensions all the more arresting.

It is for the most part a jumpy, suspenseful caper, full of narrow escapes, improbable reversals and complicated intrigue. But it has a sinister, shadowy undertow, an intimation of dread that lingers after Irving's game is up.

Ballet 422 elegantly conveys the complex collaborations behind even a relatively modest production, and the toil and discipline that somehow deliver, for the patrons on opening night, a seamless spectacle of grace.

Mr. Leconte gives this meeting of opposites in Claude Klotz's script a lovely, sportive élan, instead of making it register as lumpy, obvious polemics.

The adoring and adorable documentary on the philosopher Jacques Derrida.

The story pops and swerves; the images are by turns comical, banal and ravishing; and the result is a briskly shaken cocktail made of equal parts provocation and comfort. You come away with a buzz that is invigorating and pleasantly familiar.

Splendidly rich and wise.

Best and most touching when it shows how willing punk is to eat its young.

The extent of the need around the world is so enormous and overwhelming that the efforts of the doctors in this sobering film seem both vitally necessary and woefully inadequate.

Sembène is a far more adroit and elegant storyteller than many may be accustomed to seeing.

Its classicism feels unforced and fresh. Its romance neither winks nor panders. It looks good, moves gracefully and leaves a clean and invigorating aftertaste. I almost didn’t recognize the flavor: I think the name for it is joy.

With impressive agility, Wadjda finds room to maneuver between harsh realism and a more hopeful kind of storytelling.

It suggests John le Carré by way of David Lynch — a feverish and haunting but also wry and meditative rumination on power, secrecy and the color of clouds over water at sunset.

[Ms. Coppola’s] Beguiled is less a hothouse flower than a bonsai garden, a work of cool, exquisite artifice that evokes wildness on a small, controlled scale.

At times, Mr. Harris’s voice-over narration veers into academic abstraction or lyrical emotionalism in ways that undercut the eloquence of the images, but over all he is a wise and passionate guide to an inexhaustibly fascinating subject.

This one is something different — a deep cut for the die-hards, a hangout movie with nothing much to prove and just enough to say, with a pleasing score (by Mark Mancina) and some lovely desert scenery (shot by Ben Davis). If the old man’s driving, my advice is to get in and enjoy the ride.

While The Boxtrolls does follow kiddie-action genre conventions in its big, noisy climax — a hectic brawl of explosions, collisions and oversize machines — it also finds an impressive number of quiet, eccentric and haunting moments along the way.

The resultant mix of dreaminess, violence and politics is a bit unwieldy, but it sticks to your ribs. You'll savor pieces of Duck, You Sucker in your head much later: the mark of a work by a true voluptuary, the overspill in whose craft comes as much from enthusiasm as arrogance.

Contemplating both tales in succession can induce a far from unpleasant sense of vertigo, a feeling of standing at the edge of an abyss of wide-open philosophical questions and deep psychological mysteries.

If in hindsight An Education might make you a little queasy, it is hard to resist, like David himself.

I’m not usually someone to hope for sequels, but I guess if you live long enough …

It is a quiet, relentless exploration of the latent (and not so latent) terrors that bedevil contemporary American life, a horror movie that will trouble your sleep not with visions of monsters but with a more familiar dread.

This film, Mr. Baumbach’s movie, mostly brings a light touch and a forgiving gloss to its own self-consciousness. It is not afraid to be implicated in the confusion — in the self-involvement, the anxiety, the pettiness — it depicts. But there are also areas where it feels soft and compromised, where the subtlety and clarity of Mr. Baumbach’s vision seem to desert him.

Mr. Nichols’s screenplay is perhaps a little too heavily plotted, especially toward the end, when everything comes together neatly and noisily, but he more than compensates with graceful rhythm, an unfussy eye for natural beauty and a sure sense of character and place.

What makes Le Amiche so bracing -- so sad and, sometimes, so funny -- is that its heroines are fallible, flawed, vain and powerful, each in her own way. They often make one another miserable, but their company is always a pleasure.

Mr. Tsai's films are held together internally, and connected one to another, by an elusive, insistent logic that is easier to recognize than to describe. But once you do start to recognize it, each new movie offers passage to an exotic place that feels, uncannily, like home.

It was clearly made with slender financial means and abundant enthusiasm, and it functions simultaneously as a critique of the self-serious idiocy of authority and a celebration of the anarchic power of imagination.

There is terrible pain here, and the main interest of the film is in how the characters respond to it and what their response says about China’s understanding of its recent history.

The picture itself is about, yes, cycles, and as tiresome as that sounds, 10 minutes into the film you'll be white-knuckled and unable to look away.

Ben Is Back is really Holly’s story, and notwithstanding the all-around excellence of the cast, it’s very much Roberts’s movie. This isn’t a matter of ego or showboating. On the contrary, what is so moving and effective about Roberts’s work here is her shrewd subversion of her long-established persona.

The busy, silly script allows Ms. McCarthy to be her own best sidekick, in effect an entire sketch-comedy troupe unto herself.

Mr. Gere is fascinating to observe in this role, partly because he refuses to solicit sympathy, or even attention. Time Out of Mind is an intimate portrait of a man caught between the desire to be left alone and a need for human connection.

Soderbergh rallies a seismic jolt of enthusiasm, and the movie is an elating blaze of flair and pride.

What’s perhaps most impressive about The Northman is that it hurtles through 136 minutes of musclebound, shaggy-maned mayhem without a whisper of camp or a wink of irony. Nobody is doing this for fun. Even if, in the end — thank goodness — that’s mostly what it amounts to.

Revenge leaves a lurid, punchy afterimage, an impression somewhere between righteous delight and quivering revulsion. It’s both a challenge and a calling card, in which Ms. Fargeat at once exposes what’s wrong with her chosen genre and demonstrates her mastery of it.

Mr. Ross consulted some of the leading experts in the era...and has done a good job of balancing the factual record with the demands of dramatic storytelling. The result is a riveting visual history lesson, whose occasional didacticism is integral to its power.

From one scene to the next, you may know more or less what is coming, but it is never less than delightful to watch these actors at work.

Gives a remarkably thorough and detailed account of the difficult conditions facing American soldiers in Iraq.

Mixing pop savvy with startling formal ambition, Mr. Mann transforms what is essentially a long, fairly predictable cop-show episode into a dazzling (and sometimes daft) Wagnerian spectacle.

The ease and professionalism that distinguished this prolific director's later work is very much in evidence, as is an insouciant attitude, at once resigned and dismissive, toward mortality.

He (Lenny) is completely appalling, and also completely himself, a kind of mad, disturbing integrity that is both matched and mitigated by the honesty of this lovely, hair-raising film.

Mr. Green is too fond of these guys, and too respectful of the little bit of freedom they possess, to ensnare them in the machinery of a plot.

Even as The Taste of Money swerves toward a frantic climax and a sentimental denouement, it remains intriguing. It feeds an insatiable curiosity about how the other half - or, in current parlance, the 1 percent - lives, and what it shows us is gorgeous, grotesque and disconcertingly human.

It’s a jaunt down memory lane and also a moving and generous elegy.

Max et les Ferrailleurs, adapted from a novel by Claude Néron, has the matter-of-fact look and careful pace of a precinct-house procedural.

In the hands of a more literal-minded filmmaker The Tracey Fragments might well have been dreary and unbearable, a chronicle of florid self-pity justified by arbitrary cruelty. Instead it is fierce, enigmatic and affecting.

Takes all the Christmas season's bad vibes and converts them into an achingly funny and corrupt dark comedy.

It’s like a comprehensive exhibition catalog or a thorough critical essay — an indispensable aid to understanding and appreciating a fascinating artist.

It is a rousing and powerful drama, respectful of both the historical record and the cravings of modern audiences.

Getting an audience so caught up is no small feat; it is a tribute to the directors' storytelling.

Mr. Lin makes the anxious grasping of these kids for some kind of emotional turf -- their own need to shatter the stereotypes that bind them -- the heart of Better Luck Tomorrow, a scenario that keeps the movie's blood racing.

Karl Marx City, Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s unsettling new documentary, is a smart, highly personal addition to the growing syllabus of distressingly relevant cautionary political tales.

Shrek the Third seems at once more energetic and more relaxed, less desperate to prove its cleverness and therefore to some extent smarter.

By the end of “Be Natural,” you won’t only have a clear idea of who this remarkable woman was; you may well have acquired a new taste in old movies.

The film fumbles some of its big gestures and over-italicizes a few statements. What lingers, though, are strains of anger, ardor, sorrow and sweetness, and the quiet astonishment of witnessing the birth of a legend. This movie feels like something new, and also as if it’s been around forever, waiting for its moment.

Mr. del Toro lets loose with an all-American, vaudevillian rambunctiousness that makes the movie daffy, loose and lovable.

Mr. Tsai typically uses narrative as a tool for exploring the moods and meanings that link his characters with one another and with the city that awakens, contains and frustrates their desires. They seem very much stuck in their world, but because that world is the creation of a wildly original artist coming into his own, it also feels alive with possibility.

While Passione praises the spirit of its subjects, it also attends to the discipline and tenacity that makes them worth noticing.

Vivid and visually stunning.

Effervescent and satisfying, a crowd pleaser that does not condescend.

Ms. Ramsay, with ruthless ingenuity, creates a deeper dread and a more acute feeling of anticipation by allowing us to think we know what is coming and then shocking us with the extent of our ignorance.

What makes Mr. Crialese's telling unusual, apart from the gorgeousness of his wide-screen compositions, is that his emphasis is on departure and transition, rather than arrival.

Mr. Leconte seems at last to have anchored his cinematic gifts to a story worth caring about.

A charming and slyly poignant documentary.

Somehow the story of a young man's coming of age never gets old, at least when it is told with the kind of sweetness and intelligence Adventureland displays.

Mr. Shindo's world is sad and inspiring in familiar ways, but what makes it so memorable is that it is also gorgeous and strange.

A monumental treat as well as a crafty assemblage of mythologies.

The result is a movie that offers uplift without phoniness, history without undue didacticism and a fair number of funny, dirty jokes.

This movie may tire you out with its hammering, swaggering excess, but it is never less than wide-awake.

Shot in black and white (with Hong serving, for the first time, as cinematographer) and clocking in at a little more than an hour, Introduction is both lucid and elusive.

David Fincher’s Mank is a worthy, eminently watchable entry in the annals of Hollywood self-obsession. That it is unreliable as history should go without saying.

Head Games gains credibility and power from compassion for athletes and respect for their accomplishments. But it also tries to open the eyes of sports lovers to dangers that have too often been minimized and too seldom fully understood.

Ms. Binoche, effortlessly charismatic and ruthlessly unvain, has no investment in the character’s likability. She and Ms. Denis could not care less what you think of her. Let the Sunshine In commits itself to taking Isabelle on her own terms. The challenge, for her and for the audience, is to figure out what those terms are.

Mr. Abrahamson’s main achievement, enabled by the sensitive and resourceful cast, is to find a tone that is funny without flippancy, sincere without turning to mush.

It is a rigorously honest movie about the difficulties of being honest, a film that tries to be truthful about the slipperiness of truth.

A sneaky and smart film noir.

Ms. Hamilton tells a modest, complex story with admirable clarity and nuance. That her film is so quiet, so evidently invested in contemplation rather than confrontation, gives it power as well as insight.

Bobby Fischer Against the World does not traffic in easy explanations or medical diagnoses, but it leaves the strong impression of a continuity between the oddness Fischer displayed in early interviews and the mania so jarringly evident toward the end.

The sheer heterogeneity of human experience is one of his (Morris) enduring preoccupations, and he has found, once again, an impossible and perfect embodiment of just how curious our species can be.

This minimalist film is slightly hobbled by its minimal plot; it's the crucial difference between a movie with moments of greatness and a great movie.

On one level, the film (or nonfilm; it was shot on digital video and partly with smartphone cameras) is a mischievous, Pirandellian entertainment. It is also an allegory, dark but not despairing, of the creative spirit under political pressure, and of the ways the imagination can be both a refuge and a place of confinement.

For rock geeks of any age or taste, the lore in this documentary will be catnip.

It is comfortable with itself and confident in its ability to amuse and beguile young viewers.

The shadows are what linger from this flawed, fascinating movie.

The kind of old-fashioned, grown-up weepie in which the hearts of men and women are cracked, and the shards flutter through the story. Its directness is the movie equivalent of hot, fresh popcorn.

There’s no doubt that this is, in several senses, a personal film. But that doesn’t mean that the character is simply the author’s mouthpiece; one of the things that gives this movie its raw, unbalanced energy is the indeterminacy of the distance between them.

Canners is a testament to its director’s indefatigable humanism, and to the human beings who feed it. The movie follows the money, a nickel at a time, and discovers something far more valuable.

Jar City is chilly and cerebral but also morbidly and powerfully alive to grossness and physicality.

A revelation comes near the end that is both tremendously moving and a bit disappointing, in the way that the solutions to great mysteries frequently are. This turn does not diminish the accomplishment of Ms. Scott Thomas's deep, subtle and altogether stunning performance, but it does alter the scale of the movie, turning it into a more manageable, less existentially unsettling drama.

The believability comes from the casting: he has found a group of actors and nonprofessionals who interact spectacularly well.

A tour de force of archival research and dogged interviewing, and the portrait it presents is remarkably complete.

The narrative motion is tricky; first it canters, then shifts into a heady, quick gallop. What's most fascinating about Adanggaman are the scenes that feel like anecdotal rest stops but that are actually building into a nuanced and engrossing whole.

Amigo is a well-carpentered narrative, fast-moving and emphatic, stepping nimbly from gravity to good humor.

The proto-punk warriors known as the MC5 left a dent that outlasts their mostly negligible record sales, and the director's curiosity is piqued by the group's sociological impact.

What lifts Terri above its peers is not the plight of its protagonist or the film's sympathy for him, but rather the care and craft that the director, Azazel Jacobs, has brought to fairly conventional material.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is one of the darkest movies by Joel and Ethan Coen, and also among the silliest. It swerves from goofy to ghastly so deftly and so often that you can’t always tell which is which.

Don’t be fooled by Mr. Broadbent’s genial sarcasm, Ms. Duncan’s warm smile or the literary felicities of Mr. Kureishi’s script. This is not a movie about the gentle aging of lovable codgers.

Since the movie is about desire -- not so much for sex as for the vitality and surprise that sex can provide -- it is also about power. Few writers can match Mr. Kureishi's knowing wit on this subject, or his skill at dissecting the shifting dynamics of longing and domination.

It is an engrossing portrait all the same, a generous introduction to someone worth knowing, who knows an awful lot.

The point of it is not, in the end, to explain him or solve the mystery of his life, but rather to spend time in his company and understand why he is someone to be missed.

Mr. Rithy Panh makes telling use of a survivor whose ability to communicate lends itself to the subject. The tragedy is that Mr. Vann Nath's powers are used to illuminate these horrors.

Suzy's marriage, Nick's divorce, Paul's work history: none of it is my or anyone else's business. But these things -- these people -- have become, through Mr. Apted's films, a vital part of modern life, which seems to grow richer every seven years, when the new "Up" movie comes out.

The end may be a bit of a letdown, but much of Garage Days is choice cuts indeed.

Ms. Ushpiz is determined to rescue her subject from the banality of biography. The details of Arendt’s childhood, education, romantic life and professional activity are not ignored, but they nearly always illuminate her ideas.

What Mr. Mitchell gets splendidly right in this quiet, observant film, is the unsteady mixture of sophistication and naïveté that is central to the modern American teenage way of being in the world.

Jacobs, the great 20th-century philosopher-evangelist of urban life, would surely recognize this retired restaurant cook, a resident of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans and the subject of Jonathan Demme's marvelous new documentary, as an indispensable "public character."

Maddin's real point -- and, for admirers of this brilliant and idiosyncratic artist, the true source of the movie’s interest -- is that Winnipeg explains him.

A film in which nothing is what it seems, this is the kind of genre touch that Mr. González Iñárritu expands into something far more haunting.

Witty but not campy, grand without being unduly somber, it is a crazy, almost-coherent riot of intrigue, color and kineticism anchored by the charisma of its cast.

With Shanghai Knights, he (Chan) has come through with one of his best. This time, it's personable.

Narc is convincing, an entertaining, grimy view of the traps of machismo tucked inside a cop thriller.

A startlingly beautiful documentary by Bong-Nam Park that is also devastatingly sad.

Ms. Kim is simultaneously an ordinary woman and a melodramatic heroine, her performance made more layered and intriguing by the intimation that she may be playing herself.

In the end there is nothing especially campy about “The Duke of Burgundy,” which neither mocks its heroines nor the breathless, naughty screen tradition to which they belong. It’s a love story, and also a perversely sincere (and sincerely perverse) labor of love.

The achievement of this film is to forestall and complicate easy judgment. You emerge shaken and bothered, which may sound like a reason not to see the movie. It is actually the opposite.

Though finally overwhelmed by a preening lassitude, Hotel is never less than fascinating.

Happy Valley, even as it revisits past events, has a chilling timeliness.

The Illinois Parables is not, strictly speaking, an educational film, but it conveys a unique and precious kind of knowledge.

Gimme the Loot has a lot to say about the contradictions of a place that is defined by both abundant opportunity and ferocious inequality. But the film makes its points in a lighthearted, street-smart vernacular, treating its protagonists not as embodiments of a social condition but rather as self-aware individuals who are, like teenagers everywhere, both smart and dumb.

Wickedly absorbing.

After Tiller is impressive because it honestly presents the views of supporters of legal abortion, and is thus a valuable contribution to a public argument that is unlikely to end anytime soon.

The film's shapeliness and depth are not immediately apparent; for much of its running time, it feels diffuse and anecdotal, but in retrospect you appreciate the subtlety and heft of the story, as well as the tricky profundity of Mr. Ceylan's approach.

Mr. Bielinsky, in what would sadly be his last film, demonstrates a mastery of the form that is downright scary.

We are not exactly in the present and not precisely in the past, but in a dreamy cinematic space where distinctions of genre and tone are pleasantly (and sometimes shockingly) blurred.

The cleverest and most troubling aspect of the film is its empathy.

If recent American history is ever going to be discussed with the necessary clarity and ethical rigor, this film will be essential.

This is the kind of story, as Oliver himself would admit, that we have already seen dozens of times. But Mr. Ayoade's keen visual wit and clever, knowing touches keep it surprising and nimble, especially in the quick, lurching early scenes, which are startlingly funny.

This is a film about the struggle for sexual freedom and women’s rights, and also about the power of region, class and custom in the lives of its characters.

While the gist of Offside is the same (as "The Circle"), its tone is more insouciant, as it celebrates the guile and toughness of its heroines while casting a sympathetic glance at the ethical quandaries facing their jailers.

Composed entirely of footage shot at the time in various parts of the Soviet Union, the film is a haunting amalgam of official pomp and everyday experience, the double image of a totalitarian government and the people in whose name it ruled.

The result is an experience that, even as it feels a bit familiar, is nonetheless engrossing and satisfying.

There is something to be said for a clear and unblinking recitation of facts, and thankfully Mr. Gibney does a lot of that.

Even at a distance from each other (Washington/Travolta), they conduct a tag-team master class in old-style movie star technique, barreling through every cliché and nugget of corn the script has to offer with verve and conviction. Even when you don't really believe them, they're always a lot of fun to watch.

Ace in the Hole is an acquired taste -- and an unforgettable one.

Babylon is about architecture as a balm, and this is a particularly good time for such a film.

Though the film’s structure may be tragic, its spirit is anything but.

Enchanting and diverting documentary.

Onscreen, On Chesil Beach loses some intensity at the end, as the supple suggestiveness of Mr. McEwan’s prose is replaced by the stagy literalness of film. Perhaps this couldn’t be avoided.

The reason it deserves to be seen in a theater with special glasses on, rather than slapped on the DVD player when the children are acting up -- lies in those airborne sequences.

This means that the violations chronicled in The Invisible War are compounded by a deep and terrible betrayal, which ripples outward from the various branches of the service into the society as a whole. This is not a movie that can be ignored.

Ms. Biller’s movie, like its heroine, presents a fascinating, perfectly composed, brightly colored surface. What’s underneath is marvelously dark, like love itself.

Mr. Larraín invites us to believe that history is on the side of the poets and the humanists, and that art will make fools of politicians and policemen. But he is also aware, as Pablo Neruda was, that history sometimes has other plans.

His painstakingly coordinated scenes and exquisitely timed takes are the filmmaking equivalent of wringing every single use from a paper towel and then folding it before disposal.

The point of this thoughtful, moving film is that the motives and actions that define human ethics are never simple and that the Communist regime was especially adept at exploiting this complexity for its own ends.

This is one of the best-photographed pictures of the year, but not ostentatiously so; the look is organic to the less-than-glamorous badlands of Sunnyside, Queens.

There's as much at stake in the hilarious, moody and cantankerous film adaptation of "Splendor" as there was in this summer's other movies of comic-book antiheroes like "The Hulk" and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen."

By the end, Mr. To has proven himself to be a genre hack of uncommon intelligence and soul: a first-rate entertainer who can thrill you into thinking.

The Darjeeling Limited amounts finally to a high-end, high-toned tourist adventure. I don’t mean this dismissively; it would be hypocritical of me to deny the delights of luxury travel to faraway lands. And Mr. Anderson’s eye for local color — the red-orange-yellow end of the spectrum in particular — is meticulous and admiring.

Mr. Barras’s film, with its bigheaded, asymmetrical modeling-clay figures and off-kilter picture-book backdrops, explores a harsh situation with gentle whimsy.

Queen and Country doesn’t quite have the bittersweet intensity of its precursor. The terrible magic of the war is missing, and so is the heightened, wide-eyed perceptiveness of the child protagonist.

Mr. del Toro provokes your screams and shudders, but he also earns your tears.

Part feminist fable, part romantic fairy tale, it is by turns tart and sweet, charming and tough, rather like its heroine and like Keri Russell, the plucky, pretty, nimble actress who plays her.

Julie & Julia proceeds with such ease and charm that its audacity -- is easy to miss.

Intensely appealing.

Fittingly enough, given that his great subject has always been himself, it is Mr. Roth who dominates the screen...He is, for 90 minutes, marvelous company — expansive, funny, generous and candid.

This is not a lurid true-crime tale of jealousy and drug addiction, but a delicate human drama about love, ambition and the glories of music.

It is a curious hybrid of documentary and experimental theater. It is also one of the most terrifying movies I have ever seen.

Leviathan, a product of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, offers not information but immersion: 90 minutes of wind, water, grinding machinery and piscine agony.

hough the picture is wrenching, at times devastating, it leaves you with that buoyant feeling of having encountered a raw, authentic work of art.

Those dreading 50th-anniversary greatest-hits medleys will find solace, enlightenment and surprise in João Moreira Salles’s In the Intense Now, a bittersweet, ruminative documentary essay composed of footage from the era accompanied by thoughtful, disarmingly personal voice-over narration.

You could say that what the film is about lies just beyond the reach of images or words. It’s a necessarily cerebral meditation on the nature of physicality.

The mischievous paradox of Matías Piñeiro’s Viola is that it is at once devilishly complicated and perfectly simple.

With the director of photography (Annika Summerson) and the sound designer (Paul Davies), Tariq stitches domestic drama, satire and magical realism into a tissue of moods and meanings, held together by the shattering credibility of Ahmed’s performance.

[Mr. Miller's] film shows the influence of other recent work in the American neo-neo-realist vein, notably Ramin Bahrani’s “Goodbye, Solo” and Lance Hammer’s “Ballast,” and like them relies on understatement and indirection to arrive at a powerful and resonant meaning.

The point of Rocketman isn’t self-aggrandizement. It’s fan service of an especially and characteristically generous kind.

Mr. Yaguchi's film is so brazenly cheerful and charmingly engineered that even the sourballs in the cast are sucked in.

More moving than shocking, it proceeds slowly and gracefully, and the few scenes of bloodshed are emotionally intense rather than showily sensational.

In spite of a meandering story and some fuzzy passages, there is a touch of magic in Museo, a sense of wonder and curiosity that imparts palpable excitement.

A stylized and sentimental fairy tale about the way the world might be, grounded in a frank recognition of the way it is.

The unapologetic, sometimes heavy-handed literariness of The Wild Pear Tree is leavened by hints of grim comedy and sharp, if subtle, social criticism.

Mr. Yamada is confident that by taking his time and relishing the leathery arrogance that is the perquisite of a director in his 70's, his audience will follow his whims.

It’s about the sometimes risky discovery of pleasure, and it’s a pleasure to discover.

Above all, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a triumph of technique.

An incisive drama about a waking nightmare.

The movie is an affecting group portrait and also a complex and subtle piece of literary criticism.

Maineland takes up a large and complicated set of topics — the global economy, the shifting relations between East and West, the commodification of American education — and addresses them with understated delicacy.

A terrifically deft picture about the thick line that separates movie glamour from the real world, and the thin line between common sense and paranoia.

The buzz of The World’s End is more like an antic sugar high than a reeling, drunken stupor. There are no headaches, dry mouth or crushing shame at the end — no “Hangover,” in other words. I’ll drink to that.

The premise of Every Little Step is no less inspired for seeming so simple and obvious, and it pays tribute to the durability and continued relevance of “A Chorus Line,” which first opened in New York in 1975, before many of the performers in the movie were born.

The Homesman is both a captivating western and a meticulous, devastating feminist critique of the genre.

So assured in its manipulative prowess that only afterward do you realize how fully you've been worked over.

The overall mood of Hairspray is so joyful, so full of unforced enthusiasm, that only the most ferocious cynic could resist it.

The film has an appealing honesty and an enjoyably low-key comic style.

Witty, intelligent, sometimes cryptic.

Moves slowly and grimly toward the moment that for the audience is the most engrossing though filled with dread: when things begin to unravel and the participants are no longer aware of the cameras. That is when your shoulders tense and you lean toward the screen.

Funny and brisk, with enough good lines to make the comedy more satisfying than the somewhat routine but still unsettling jolts to the spine.

The film is a compulsively detailed swirl of moods and impressions, intent on capturing the contradictions of the man and his times. Observations of Saint Laurent at work and in love give way to panoramic, intricate surveys of the world of commerce and culture in which he suffered and flourished.

Elegant and exquisitely tailored.

Sexy, sweet and laced with a sadness at once specific to its place and time and accessible to anyone with a breakable heart, Chico & Rita is an animated valentine to Cuba and its music.

Director Sandi Simcha DuBowski latches on to a provocative subject and invests it with a compelling tenderness.

Colossal has such an easygoing, offhand vibe, and takes such pleasure in its characters’ foibles, that it camouflages its deep subject, which is rage.

By turns touching, amusing and genuinely disturbing, it defies expectations and easy categorization, forgoing obvious laughs and cheap emotional payoffs in favor of something much odder and more interesting.

Has an offbeat, absurdist charm that turns a potentially creepy conceit into an odd, touching adventure.

In the best B-movie tradition, the filmmakers embed their ideas in an ingenious, propulsive and suspenseful genre entertainment, one that respects your intelligence even as it makes your eyes pop (and, once in a while, your stomach turn).

The film, Mr. Aster’s debut feature, is engaging, unsettling and unpredictable, generating a mood of anxious fascination punctuated by frequent shocks and occasional nervous giggles. But I also found it a bit disappointing.

Though Mr. Favreau probably had to co-star in Made to make his exposé of the loser's mushy pink underbelly of "Swingers" register, he might have come up with a better picture if he had stayed behind the camera. But he's willing to take chances, and he'll learn from this movie.

The most obvious thing to say about Far From the Madding Crowd is also the most bizarre, given the source material. It’s buoyant, pleasant and easygoing. That’s a recommendation of sorts, and also an expression of disappointment.

There are no big surprises, but the jumps and jolts are well timed and the overall mood is at once grisly and good-natured -- more diverting than disturbing.

Mr. Gout combines a slick, kinetic style with a somber ethical sense. His movie is flashy and entertaining, but also earnestly concerned with the collapse of trust and integrity at every level of society.

The cumulative effect is exhilarating and also a bit frustrating, since so many dances are included and woven together the audience does not have the chance to experience any single work in its entirety. But the power and intelligence of Bausch's approach, which at times seems more cerebral than sensual, is communicated.

If it tells, in Mr. Ludin’s words, "a typical German story," the movie also offers an unusually matter-of-fact picture of the private and public effects of ordinary evil.

There is also much in The Art of Getting By that is worth praising, and if you can grade on a curve - setting the standard at "The Wackness" rather than "The Squid and the Whale" - you may find yourself touched, tickled and occasionally surprised.

Intent on showing that Arbor and Swifty live in a world of radically limited possibilities, barely sustained by their families and failed by the state, Ms. Barnard locks them into a narrative prison. Their fates seem predetermined less by their circumstances than by the iron will and limited imagination of their creator.

Often very smart about being silly.

Mostly it's exhilarating.

Stranger by the Lake is seductive and fascinating, but it is also a bit trapped in its own conceit, and in its carefully maintained emotional detachment.

This film, commissioned by Mr. Russell and directed by Les Blank, is among other things a strange and gorgeous artifact of its moment. Happily indifferent to the conventions of its genre, it’s neither the record of a concert nor a talking-head-driven biography.

Certainly touching, even heart-rending at times, and it mostly steers clear of the didacticism and sentimentality its subject matter often invites. But it never takes the full measure of its modest heroine, and makes her world a bit too small.

It’s a work of art that troubles the conscience, in part because it suggests, both by default and by design, that no art is innocent, and that its preservation, like its destruction, depends on the operation of power.

World War Z often feels smaller and quieter than it is, because your attention is drawn to details and moments rather than to showstopping spectacles or self-important themes.

Has a lovely, unadorned, though distended sentimentality.

To accuse it of being manipulative is like accusing it of being in color. The genre is melodrama. The assault on the tear ducts and heartstrings is part of the contract, and the movie more than holds up its end of the bargain.

Mr. Greene’s impressionistic style and rough, off-center compositions create an atmosphere of intimacy, as if the viewer were being invited to read Ms. Burre’s diary or her mind.

As the latest tribute -- Jim Brown’s loving documentary, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song -- makes clear, he’s still busy, still angry, still hopeful, still singing.

Hilali and Benghabrit were real people. Mr. Ferroukhi, who wrote the script with Alain-Michel Blanc, deftly interweaves their stories with the adventures of the fictional Younes, and so contributes a worthy and interesting chapter to the tradition of World War II dramas of conscience.

if Madeline’s Madeline is sometimes unconvincing and frequently unnerving, it is never uninteresting. In its final moments it ascends into heady, almost visionary territory, like a balloon caught in a sudden updraft, and becomes a singular and strange experience.

Mr. Brugger's portrait of shameless, routine collusion between exploitative foreigners and dysfunctional dictatorships is depressing and undeniable. Unless, that is, The Ambassador is even more of a hoax than it seems to be. This strikes me as plausible, since somebody having this much fun in such proximity to horror may not be completely trustworthy.

It is worth sticking with it until the end, since the third part is the most powerful.

The two lead performances — Lika Babluani as Eka and Mariam Bokeria as Natia — are direct and unaffected, but also enigmatic in the way that nonprofessional screen acting can be in the hands of a sensitive director.

The movie may be a little too tame in the end, but at its best it is just wild enough.

The fact that the speakers' faces are never seen produces a feeling of estrangement that is crucial to the film's effectiveness. You become acutely aware of gaps and discontinuities: between slogans and realities, between political ideals and stubborn social problems, between then and now.

But true to its title, The Hangover goes down smoothly enough and then kicks you in the head later on, when you start to examine the sources of your laughter.

Settling scores, wrapping up loose ends and taking a victory lap — the main objects of the game this ostensibly last time around — generate some comic sparks as well as a few honest tears.

Perhaps it's the difference in culture, but the thoughtfulness in Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine shows that its creator isn't letting himself or his audience off the hook.

The spell Mr. Yonebayashi casts is effective, but also ephemeral. It’s minor magic.

While Stranger Than Fiction traffics in a bit of darkly funny existential anxiety, it also finds room for romantic fantasy and sentimental uplift.