A.O. Scott

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.

The test of realism in a movie like this — the thing that would separate it from a conventional, made-for-television disease melodrama — is whether you can imagine lives for the secondary characters when they aren’t on screen. Still Alice lacks that kind of thickness.

Despicable Me cannot be faulted for lack of trying. If anything, it tries much too hard, stuffing great gobs of second-rate action, secondhand humor and warmed-over sentiment into every nook and cranny of its relentlessly busy 3-D frames.

Bully forces you to confront not the cruelty of specific children - who have their own problems, and their good sides as well - but rather the extent to which that cruelty is embedded in our schools and therefore in our society as a whole.

[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.

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.

I found Mr. Zobel’s film touching and amusing, but it also left me a bit queasy.

I can’t say I had a good time, but I did end up somewhere I didn’t expect to be: looking forward to the next chapter.

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

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.

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.

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

An enjoyable and charming if overactive fantasy.

As well done as it is, Wonderland feels predictable. There is no sad turn in these characters' lives that you cannot see coming about an hour before.

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

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.

No one in Jerichow is entirely deserving of sympathy, which gives the film a detached, clinical feeling underlined by the director’s habit of observing emotions rather than evoking them.

It’s an exciting sports movie, an inspiring tale of prejudice overcome and, above all, a fascinating study of political leadership.

The nexus of racism, patriarchal power and sexual exploitation gives Catch the Fair One a pulse of righteous anger, and Reis’s charisma — her willingness to show fear as well as resolve — makes Kaylee a magnetic protagonist.

Mr. Oliveira relishes the formality of conversation, and there is great pleasure to be found in listening to the actors and watching the small adjustments of posture and gesture that accompany their words.

There's more to everyone here than we're initially led to think. The Good Girl is like a neurotically charged post-millennial take on the trailer-park comedies that Jonathan Demme once claimed for himself.

Something not seen in movie theaters for a long time: an intelligent, modern screwball comedy, a minor classic on the order of competent, fast-talking curve balls about deception and greed like Mitchell Leisen's "Easy Living" and Billy Wilder's "Major and the Minor."

Like Walt Whitman, another hard-to-classify embodiment of the spirit of New York, he is contradictory and multitudinous. The hour and a half Mr. Barsky provides might be enough time for a lesser figure. Mr. Koch...needs more.

Without a real-world correlative for the actions it depicts, Bertrand Bonello’s new film would merely be tedious and pretentious rather than repellent.

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

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.

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.

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.

Even though Anders and the people around him can be sorted into recognizable types (a fault, mostly of Mr. Thompson’s book), they are also amusing and awful in ways that can feel disconcertingly real.

This movie...is a lovely example of the strong realist tendency in Japanese animation. Its visual magic lies in painterly compositions of foliage, clouds, architecture and water, and its emotional impact comes from the way everyday life is washed in the colors of memory.

Shorter than a bad blind date and as sour as a vinegar Popsicle, Young Adult shrouds its brilliant, brave and breathtakingly cynical heart in the superficial blandness of commercial comedy.

Brad’s Status at its best is genuinely thought-provoking.

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

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 nearly everything else in this feverish, frustrating movie, the political themes are handled with maximal melodrama and minimal clarity.

Bronson invites you to admire its protagonist as a pure, muscular embodiment of anarchy. And perhaps you will, but you may also be glad that he’s still behind bars.

There are waves of brilliantly orchestrated anxiety and confusion but also long stretches of drab, hackneyed exposition that flatten the atmosphere. We might be watching "Cold Case" or "Criminal Minds," but with better sound design and more expressive visual techniques.

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.

There are aspects of “Horton,”... that are fresh and enjoyable, and bits that will gratify even a dogmatic and orthodox Seussian.

At the very least, it’s impossible to watch The Disappearance of My Mother without a measure of ambivalence. Gratitude for the chance to make Barzini’s acquaintance, and for Barrese’s sensitivity in making the introduction, is accompanied by ethical queasiness.

It is appropriately blunt, powerful and relentless, a study of male bodies in sweaty motion and masculine emotions in teary turmoil.

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.

Be warned: it's a downer, and a knockout.

The film is careful to avoid explicit political statement, but its reticence makes its critique of the Iranian regime all the more devastating.

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.

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.

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.

It’s too cool for melodrama and too pretty for politics, and the drama of May’s experience occupies a middle ground between pity and indignation.

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.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day is the latest example of a wonderful children’s book turned into a mediocre movie.

Mr. Washington's dry-ice grandeur -- the predator's reflexes contrasting with a pensive mouth -- deserves regard, and his powerhouse virtuosity will almost guarantee him an Oscar nomination.

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

The blend of pornography and humor, obnoxiousness and elegance, sweetness and cruelty reminds you that this is, above all, an Abel Ferrara movie. And the splendor of Pasolini lies in its essentially collaborative nature.

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.

Drinking Buddies, Joe Swanberg’s nimble, knowing and altogether excellent new film, refuses to dance to the usual tune.

Yes, The Theory of Everything has a different emphasis. But like so many cinematic lives of the famous, it loses track of the source of its subject’s fame.

It's this compulsion to solder melancholy to weightlessness that constantly trips up the movie; Mr. Kelly doesn't have the assurance to pull off such a difficult feat.

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.

Fast-moving, tightly packed, at times unnervingly entertaining.

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

Prisoners is the kind of movie that can quiet a room full of casual thrill-seekers. It absorbs and controls your attention with such assurance that you hold your breath for fear of distracting the people on screen, exhaling in relief or amazement at each new revelation

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

New York becomes a complex character in this vital and sharply intelligent film.

Occasionally becomes pretentious and shrill -- sometimes Mr. Wright isn't aware that his material is so good that he doesn't need to comment on his characters.

There are plot twists, and then there is what Ms. Ferran does here, which is to transform — impetuously, improbably and altogether marvelously — this somber, realistic tale into something else entirely.

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.

Almost magically, The Walk transforms itself into a beguiling caper movie, full of comic energy and nimble ingenuity.

There are some amusing moments, to be sure, and some touching ones as well, but the film is less interested in ideas or emotions than in illusions. It produces an aura of suspense without a sense of real risk, and offers devotees of fashion an appealing, shallow fantasy of inside knowledge.

It almost works, but as persuasive as the performers can be, Tom and Joan seem less real the more time you spend with them.

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

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

Moss strips away every shred of her charm to reveal her charisma in its rawest state, implicating Perry and the audience in a voyeurism that can feel almost holy.

This is a dumb movie pretending to be smart, even as it wants you to believe the opposite. Still, dumb can be fun.

Mr. Carpignano has a shrewd sense not only of the character’s psychology, but also of the audience’s expectations, and our tendency to confuse realism with magical thinking.

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

Whatever minor entertainment there is to be gleaned from Mahowny -- set in the early 1980's, mostly in Toronto -- comes in bits and pieces.

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

Ms. Danhier manages to conjure a glorious and grungy bygone past without fetishizing it as a golden age. A bunch of people got together and did some stuff, and this is what it looked like.

Though the story sometimes wanders into hazy, corny sentiment, its protagonist (called Felix Bush, which was apparently a nickname or alias of Breazeale's) is vivid, enigmatic and unpredictable.

The cumulative effect is that of watching misspent lives disintegrate before your eyes. Ms. Miller's canny accomplishment is a triumph, giving the material weight and heart. This is one of the finest pictures of the year.

Seems to just drift to a close rather than pronounce an end. This can be a result of wrestling with a daunting subject and not being up to its demands.

Ms. Wood's performance bounces with mood swings from anxiety to exhilaration in a movie with moments so realistically painted that your eyes will sting from the fumes.

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

So while The Science of Sleep may not, in the end, be terribly deep, it is undoubtedly -- and deeply -- refreshing.

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.

Nothing in this stressful, intricately plotted fable of modern life is as simple as we or the characters might wish.

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.

Its scenes, quiet and undramatic, are nonetheless suffused with an almost lyrical intensity, and its sympathy is as limitless as its curiosity.

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.

The picture is about victims -- but it's also a great, sick rush with a kicker on the level of "The Vanishing."

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.

You won't come out unaffected, because the depths of intimacy that the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu plumbs here are so rarely touched by filmmakers that 21 Grams is tantamount to the discovery of a new country.

Merchants of Doubt, Robert Kenner’s informative and infuriating new documentary, ought to remind us that the denial of climate change is hardly a joke.

Its scrupulous, humane sympathy gives this small, sorrowful film a glow of insight and a pulse of genuine, openhearted curiosity.

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.

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

Every time you think Late Night is settling into familiar tropes — about workplace politics, mean bosses, long marriages, fish out of water, bootstraps and how to pull them — it shifts a few degrees and finds a fresh perspective.

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

The movie, an uneasy amalgam of horror and allegory, full of creepy, gory effects and literary and mythological allusions, amounts to a sustained and specific indictment of the titular gender.

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

The documentary’s account of the song’s fate, indebted to Alan Light’s book “The Holy or the Broken,” is a fascinating study in the mechanics and metaphysics of pop-culture memory.

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.

Hedges's intelligent and touching farce, Pieces of April, makes an important contribution to a small and insignificant subgenre: Thanksgiving Day failure. It does so by raising the bar.

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

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

For all its brooding atmosphere and visual poeticism, the film offers a perspective on the lives of its characters that feels narrow and superficial.

It is possible to admire the craft and sensitivity of Louder Than Bombs without quite believing it. The characters are so carefully drawn that they can feel smaller than life, and the dramatic space they inhabit has a curiously abstract feeling.

No Country for Old Men is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists -- those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design -- it’s pure heaven.

Plays like a nutty psychological mystery.

This is historical filmmaking without the balm of right-thinking ideology, either liberal or conservative. Gangs of New York is nearly a great movie. I suspect that, over time, it will make up the distance.

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

What the point here might be is a bit more elusive. It may be simply to allow Ms. Huppert, one of the most adventurous actresses in movies, the opportunity to try something new. And that might be enough.

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.

Mr. Herzog’s film is a pulpy, glorious mess. Its maniacal unpredictability is such a blast that it reminds you just how tidy and dull most crime thrillers are these days.

As a portrait of anxious, status-conscious Brooklyn parents living in a chiaroscuro of self-righteousness and guilt, Carnage misses its mark badly.

As a purely emotional experience it succeeds without feeling too manipulative or maudlin. I mean, it is manipulative and maudlin, but in a way that seems fair and transparent. Still, it isn’t quite satisfying.

Beeswax, at first glance a modest, ragged slice of contemporary life, turns out to be a remarkably subtle, even elegant movie.

Satire and outrage are easier approaches than the tact and empathy Ms. Akhavan deploys. The Miseducation of Cameron Post, confident in its beliefs and curious about what makes its characters tick, is more interested in listening than in preaching.

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

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.

Hannah Arendt conveys the glamour, charisma and difficulty of a certain kind of German thought.... The movie turns ideas into the best kind of entertainment.

Superior entertainment, the most elegantly pleasurable movie of its kind to come around in a very long time.

The filmmakers honor both the pastoral and the infernal dimensions of Mr. King’s distinctive literary vision.

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

It is all perfectly dreadful and at times appallingly funny. Mr. Solondz winds thin tendrils of narrative around the dinner-table conversations, and allows everyone a chance to be earnestly foolish, unguardedly selfish and also, almost by accident, cruelly honest.

The film is a cat-and-mouse game in which each player thinks he’s the cat, making it both thrilling and disconcerting to watch. It is also a nature documentary about behavior at the very top of the imperial food chain and a detective story about the search for a mystery that is hidden in plain sight.

There’s not much here you haven’t seen before, and very little that can’t be described as crude, obvious and borderline offensive, even as it tries to be uplifting and affirmative. And yet! There is also something about this movie that prevented me from collapsing into a permanent cringe as I watched it. Or rather, two things: the lead performances.

Like "Dogtooth," Alps works by systematically unsettling our sense of what is normal and habitual in human interactions.

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

The light, amusing bits cannot overcome the grinding, hectic emptiness, the bloated cynicism that is less a shortcoming of this particular film than a feature of the genre.

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

Quite a bit darker than "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," both in look and in mood. It is also in some ways more satisfying.

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet is a sly, elegant meditation on the relationship between reality and artifice. But it is a thought-experiment driven above all by emotion.

More than a simple tribute or a fond remembrance, it is a remarkable and full-throated elegy, a work of art that is full of life.

There is plenty of substance in Absolute Wilson, as it provides a concise and absorbing portrait of a powerful creative personality.

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.

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

Even though the techniques are immersive — plunging you into a disorienting reality that mirrors the drug-fueled frenzy you are witnessing — the effect is also curiously distancing.

A sharp, small-scale comedy of male misbehavior that turns out to be one of this dreary spring’s pleasant cinematic surprises.

Forlorn melodrama, which is low on drama and high on mellow.

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

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 high-school comedy bits of “Far From Home,” while not especially original, have a sweet, affable charm.

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

Filled with voyeuristic shots as the camera peers through picket fences and windows and around corners; the film looks as if it were shot with a surveillance camera from a 7-Eleven

This is not a biopic, it’s a Coen brothers movie, which is to say a brilliant magpie’s nest of surrealism, period detail and pop-culture scholarship. To put it another way, it’s a folk tale.

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.

Ms. Fanning, who is younger than her character, shows a nearly Streepian mixture of poise, intensity and technical precision. It is frightening how good she is and hard to imagine anything she could not do.

Though it is a tragic love story, it is also a perfect and irresistible fantasy.

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.

It wants to be fun and, to a perhaps surprising extent, it is. Largely forsaking the sweet multiculturalism of the original for white-dude bromance, and completely abandoning earnest teenagers-in-crisis melodrama in favor of crude, aggressive comedy, this 21 Jump Street is an example of how formula-driven entertainment can succeed.

The thicket of relationships that the director, Hiner Saleem, has created and weaves his cast and camera through is so invitingly hotblooded and crowded with hilariously melodramatic incident that the snowbanks are not nearly as forbidding as they initially seem.

Things worked out between Joe and Valerie, and for their real-life models, who are now the subjects of a terrifically entertaining movie. But that does not mean that justice was done, or that truth prevailed.

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.

Brett Morgen’s semi-animated, semi-documentary attempt to make the ’60s cool for a new generation of kids, does the opposite. It is a narrow, glib dollop of canned history, an affirmation of received thinking rather than a challenge to it.

Its speedy, funny, happy-sad spirit is so infectious that the movie makes you feel at home in its world even if the landscape is, at first glance, unfamiliar.

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

Part of the pleasure of this film, directed by Ritesh Batra (“The Lunchbox”), lies in the rediscovery of what wonderful actors they can be, and how good they are together.

The Exploding Girl can also make you feel bad about wishing that she were just a little more interesting.

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

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

It is so dishonest that the title Changing Lanes can just as well refer to the cheaply contrived turns in the film.

Samuel makes the most of his formidable cast. If anything, he may be overgenerous. The narrative sometimes flags so that everyone can get in a few volleys of the salty, pungent dialogue on the way to the next round of gunplay or fisticuffs.

Reign Over Me uses the rhythms and moods of comedy to explore, and also to contain, overpowering feelings of loss, anger and hurt. And like that earlier movie ("The Upside of Anger"), this one is maddeningly uneven.

Less a parable of literary ethics than a showcase of literary personality, and it is in the end more touching than troubling.

The nerd in me wants a bit more rigor, a bit more plausibility underneath the exuberant fakery. Maybe in the next episode.

Persepolis, austere as it may look, is full of warmth and surprise, alive with humor and a fierce independence of spirit.

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.

Equity pulls off a difficult balancing act with an elegance that should not be underestimated. It turns its unflappable gaze on a maddeningly complex reality and transforms it into a swift, clear and exciting story.

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

Looks like a big-budget version of a Miller's Genuine Draft commercial.

In Smash His Camera Mr. Galella emerges as a kindred soul for the curious documentarian and as a large, complicated personality in his own right, not entirely likable but admirable for his persistence and the quickness of his index finger.

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.

The film itself is as much a feat of engineering as a work of art, an efficient machine for delivering intricate data and blunt emotions.

Neither Mr. Gibson’s fans nor his detractors are likely to accuse him of excessive subtlety, and the effectiveness of Apocalypto is inseparable from its crudity. But the blunt characterizations and the emphatic emotional cues are also evidence of the director’s skill.

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

The Kindergarten Teacher — the film as well as the character — yearns for different values, for intensity, beauty and meaning. Its sobering lesson is that the search for those things is most likely to end in madness, confusion and violence.

Though $9.99 manages to be quirky and enigmatic, it is in the end too self-conscious, too satisfied in its eccentricity, to achieve the full mysteriousness toward which it seems to aspire. It is odd, curious, intermittently intriguing but ultimately more interesting for its artifice than for its art.

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

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.

The genius of Early Man is that it cannot possibly be spoiled. The animation is foolproof in its combination of ingenuity and obviousness, and the script obliterates the difference between a laugher and a groaner.

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.

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. Cooper’s direction is skillful, if overly reliant on borrowed Scorseseisms (especially when it comes to music), and the cast is first-rate, but the film is a muddle of secondhand attitudes and half-baked ideas. It feels more like a costume party than a costume drama.

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

So unabashed in its cheesiness that it could be spread on crackers; it may spike your cholesterol levels

Much too long. It starts to feel like a flabby, dramatic version of the first "Austin Powers" movie, another exercise in living anachronism as a storytelling device. By the time the picture's final note about German reunification is struck, "Lenin!" has raised a wall of indifference for the audience.

Mr. Patwardhan has located so much information and found so many willing interview subjects that his War and Peace has a riveting intelligence all its own and earns its epic title.

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.

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

Maybe I’m repeating myself: The Hateful Eight is a Quentin Tarantino movie. But Mr. Tarantino is also repeating himself, spinning his wheels here in a way he has rarely done before. None of his other films venture so far into tedium or manage to get in their own way so frequently.

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.

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.

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

Does a yeoman's job of recycling the day-old dough that passes for its story.

The film, written and directed by Bart Layton, can’t quite decide what it wants to be: a slick, speedy caper; a goofball comedy; or a commentary on the state of the American soul. It’s none of those — a tame and toothless creature that is neither fish nor fowl.

“Popstar” takes aim at everything that is artificial and plastic in contemporary pop in a spirit of love rather than spite. It’s a celebration of the curious authenticity — the innocence, the sweetness, the guiltless pleasure — of music whose badness is sometimes hard to separate from its genius.

Take This Waltz, Sarah Polley's honest, sure-footed, emotionally generous second feature. Ms. Williams, one of the bravest and smartest actresses working in movies today, portrays a young woman who is indecisive and confused, but never passive.

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.

The twists in the story are meant to raise the emotional stakes, but they have the opposite effect, undermining the credibility of the premise. The harder the movie leans into its own cleverness, the more it exposes itself as a diverting but ultimately unconvincing exercise.

Where you end up may not be where you thought this was going. The final act, including the post-credits sting (to infinity and beyond, as it were) brings a chill, a darkness and a hush that represent something new in this universe.

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.

The Way, Way Back has the charm of timelessness but also more than a touch of triteness. Its situations and feelings seem drawn more from available, sentimental ideas about adolescence than from the perceptions of any particular adolescent.

The plot undermines the film’s power. At the end you may be impressed at the skill on display, but you may also wish that you were more fully moved by the spectacle of a soul laid bare and transformed.

A crudely made, half-clever little frightener that has become something of a pop-culture sensation and most certainly the movie marketing story of the year.

The overall vibe — a look that is both opulent and generic; a tone that mixes brisk professionalism with maundering self-pity; an aggressive, exhausting fusion of grandiosity and fun — is more superhero saga than espionage caper.

It never quite rises to the full potential of its theme or fully inhabits its intricately imagined space. It’s cool but not haunting — a brainteaser rather than a mindblower.

Just Mercy is saved from being an earnest, inert courtroom drama when it spends time on death row, where it is opened up and given depth by two strong, subtle performances, from Foxx and Rob Morgan.

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.

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.

Overlong, predictable in its plotting and utterly banal in its blending of comic whimsy and melodramatic pathos.

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.

Feels as though it is not about much, but it is so well acted that the lassitude becomes a part of the atmosphere.

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.

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.

Mr. Aronofsky’s earnest, uneven, intermittently powerful film, is both a psychological case study and a parable of hubris and humility. At its best, its shares some its namesake’s ferocious conviction, and not a little of his madness.

You might, nonetheless, want to see this movie, even -- or maybe especially -- if you have seen “Billy Elliot” or “Bend It Like Beckham.” Familiarity is not always a bad thing, and if the script, by Shauna Cross, piles sports movie and coming-of-age touchstones into a veritable cairn of clichés, the cast shows enough agility and conviction to make them seem almost fresh.

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.

A shockingly hilarious, stiletto-sharp satire directed by Chris Morris and written by a squad of British wits.

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.

The ultimate caper, a work of brazen ebullience.

Something TERRIBLE is afoot. Sadly, that something turns out to be the movie itself.

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.

Its low-key affect and decidedly human scale endow Once with an easy, lovable charm that a flashier production could never have achieved. The formula is simple: two people, a few instruments, 88 minutes and not a single false note.

Does not entirely play by the established conventions of its genre. Its willingness to explore states of feeling and modes of behavior that tamer romantic comedies never go near is decidedly a virtue, though this same sense of daring and candor also exposes its limitations.

I’m curious, and inclined — as I was in 2009 — to give this grand, muddled project the benefit of the doubt. Cameron’s ambitions are as sincere as they are self-contradictory. He wants to conquer the world in the name of the underdog, to celebrate nature by means of the most extravagant artifice, and to make everything new feel old again.

For a film full of murder, jealousy and fatalism, Snow Angels feels curiously small and anecdotal, and its impact diminishes as it nears its terrible conclusion.

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.

Kevin Costner is suitably flinty in 13 Days, a competent, by-the-numbers recreation of the events surrounding the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

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

A soulless compilation of thrills.

What keeps Bolt fresh is an unaffected exuberance, a genuine sense of fun, that is expressed above all through obsessive attention to craft.

The film, at its phoned-in worst and also at its riotous best, has a terminal feeling. It suggests that a comic subgenre based on the immaturity, sexual panic and self-mocking tendencies of men who should be old enough to know better has reached its expiration date.

Its fascination with Brandon becomes a kind of credulity, a willingness to accept uncritically the mystifications of a proven liar.

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

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

More of a hoot than any picture dealing with the bloody, protracted fight between the Soviet Army and the Afghan mujahedeen has any right to be.

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.

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.

Mr. Peretz and the screenwriters (Evgenia Peretz, the director’s sister, is credited along with Tamara Jenkins and Jim Taylor) find an amiable farcical groove, and the actors embrace the ridiculousness of the circumstances without overdoing it.

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.

Once the talking stops and the action begins, her professionalism is very much in evidence and exciting to watch. And yet, somehow, it cannot quite relieve the tedium of a movie that is too cool even to pretend that there is anything worth fighting about.

The film’s spirit is refreshingly playful and sweet.

Annette masters its own paradoxes. It’s a highly cerebral, formally complex film about unbridled emotion.

Whether or not events actually unfolded this way, the story the film tells is an interesting and complicated character study, with something to say about the corrosive effects of power and privilege on both the innocent and the guilty.

Wanders rather than moves chillingly toward its climax.

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

Somehow, the film is missing both adrenaline and gravity, notwithstanding some frantic early moments and a late swerve toward tragedy. It makes its points carefully and unimpeachably but does not bring much in the way of insight or risk.

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.

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

Magee and Clermont-Tonnerre’s adaptation emphasizes the romance of Lawrence’s book over the radicalism of his vision. This Lady Chatterley’s Lover is faithful to the novel, while also revealing how safe, how domesticated, it has become.

The raggedness of The Sapphires can’t be separated from its exuberant charm. Like the Sapphires themselves, the film is determined to muscle its way into your heart, which would have to be a lump of gristle to resist it.

Feels like an early rehearsal for a play where all the movement is being coordinated but the underlying emotional notes have yet to be set.

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.

The performances are charming and convincing, and Mr. Joelsas does a good job of conveying Mauro’s loneliness and confusion as well as his playfulness. The Year My Parents Went on Vacation may not be terribly fresh or original, but its warm, sweet, nostalgic tone is hard to dislike.

Its earnest insouciance recalls the “Superman” movies of the ’70s and ’80s more than the mock-Wagnerian spectacles of our own day, and like those predigital Man of Steel adventures, it gestures knowingly but reverently back to the jaunty, truth-and-justice spirit of an even older Hollywood tradition.

There will no doubt be better movies released in 2015, but Furious 7 is an early favorite to win the prize for most picture.

Ms. Macdonald is quite simply a revelation, capturing the reflexive self-confidence and defensive diffidence of the millennial generation with sneaky sincerity and offhand wit.

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.

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

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.

This is ultimately a tale of affirmation, self-acceptance and second chances, and its lessons, while not unwelcome, are a bit too forced and neatly packaged to make it fully satisfying.

Even if it did not have other charms, this peculiar, uneven campus comedy would be worth seeing for the delightful felicity of its dialogue.

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.

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.

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

The Girl With All the Gifts doesn’t really venture into new territory, but it does a decent job of reminding us why zombies are so scary, and so interesting.

A good piece of work more often than not, and this is one of the few times an actor turned director has chosen to subvert the feel-good genre for his maiden voyage.

While the film is lively and engaging, it also, in the end, feels a little thin, largely because it is unsure of how earnestly to treat its own lessons about fate, ambition and brotherly love.

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.

Continental Drift, like its predecessors, is much too friendly to dislike, and its vision of interspecies multiculturalism is generous and appealing.

The opening shot of Somewhere, Sofia Coppola's exquisite, melancholy and formally audacious fourth feature, prepares you for what is to follow in a characteristically oblique and subtle manner.

Enormously likable, partly because it is aware of its own grasp of the absurd.

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

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.

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 film lacks either the immersive intensity that would galvanize emotions or a context that would provide enlightenment. Its brief tour of an unpleasant corner of reality feels less revelatory than voyeuristic.

Mr. Loach’s touch is a bit lighter here. “Sweet Sixteen” is a coming-of-age story shot through the lens of social tragedy, while “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” is an epic of historical disaster. Looking for Eric is, by comparison, gentle and sweet and often very funny.

Raises expectations that it has no real inclination to fulfill. The movie's best bits would stand alone nicely on YouTube, or on Funnyordie.com, the comic video boutique of which Mr. McKay is an owner and where he sometimes dabbles in short-form hilarity.

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.

An inviting piece of film. Mr. Rubbo's cast of characters have the charisma of true devotees and stoked egos that match their intentions.

While she (Lopes-Curval) portrays the brittleness of their lives with lovely splashes of generosity, the lack of condescension doesn't change the fact that there's not much drama to be found in those very limitations; her characters don't do much beyond getting on one another's nerves.

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

Has a winningly pulpy, jaunty, earnest spirit.

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.

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.

You will come for the kind of humor promised in the title and the well-earned R rating, but stay for the nuanced meditations on theology and faith.

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

Leigh’s narrative is touched by the literary spirit of the later 19th century. Peterloo has the sweep of Tolstoy and the bustle of Dickens.

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.

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

Mr. Solondz brilliantly - triumphantly - turns this impression on its head, transforming what might have been an exercise in easy satirical cruelty into a tremendously moving argument for the necessity of compassion.

Creed II is a terrific movie, a boxing picture full of inspired sweetness and shrewd science that honors the cherished traditions of the genre while feeling like something new and exciting in the world.