A.O. Scott

Mr. Jarecki finds a way to show that denial and hope often grow from the same vine. Lives are built around the way they're harvested -- and this talented director has a feel for the soil.

What is so remarkable about Mr. Langella is that he seems to hold Leonard’s intellectual cosmos inside him, to make it implicit in the man’s every gesture and pause.

Tsai not only gives the audience a chance to breathe but also lets us luxuriate in the mood of deadpan melancholy his movie evokes so beautifully.

This is a fundamentally — and I would say marvelously — old-fashioned entertainment, a sports drama that is also an appealing, socially alert story of perseverance and the up-by-the-bootstraps pursuit of excellence.

You don’t have to know anything about Joy Division to grasp the mysterious sorrow at its heart.

A history lesson doesn’t have to be a lecture, and at its best, Mangrove, with its clear and painful implications for the present, conveys the sense of a world in motion, as the possibility of something new comes into being.

The level of accomplishment in the filmmaking is overwhelming.

Graduation is long and intense, a rigorously naturalistic film that at times feels as claustrophobic and suspenseful as a horror movie. Like Mr. Mungiu’s other work, it is a thriller of sorts, built around an excruciating ethical problem. He is unstinting in his sympathy and unsparing in his judgment.

One of the pleasures of Ajami, a tough and in many ways unsparing movie, is its deep immersion in the beats and melodies of everyday life in Jaffa and beyond.

Beyond the Lights may be a fantasy — movies about love, like songs about love, tend to fall into that category — but it is an uncommonly smart and honest fantasy.

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

By the end you know the characters in it so well that you can't believe you've seen the movie only once, yet on a second viewing it seems completely new. And that may be because the world they inhabit is immediately recognizable -- until we get to heaven, it's where we live -- and like no place you've been before.

Marvelously quick-witted and gloriously goofy hand-drawn feature shows there's still more than 21 grams of life left in the form.

While this is a first-person documentary, with the director providing voice-over narration, it expresses a poignant humility and a patient willingness to listen.

At under 90 minutes, Around a Small Mountain is, by Mr. Rivette’s standards, a small vignette. It could have been —--and perhaps was -- part of something longer and more complex, but it stands as perfectly on its own as Pic St.-Loup, marvelous to contemplate and changing slightly every time you see it.

Coraline lingers in an atmosphere that is creepy, wonderfully strange and full of feeling.

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.

It’s a dazzling display of filmmaking craft that also feels raw, unsettled and alive.

The movie itself, which was lost until a few years ago, is relaxed, reflective and sweet, a romance shadowed by the complexities of history, race and politics that manages to be both modest and ambitious.

The Woman Who Ran is a cinematic sketch, and also the work of a master.

The rounded-off corners of the almost-square frames evoke early movies and antique photographs, and there is wit and mischief in the way Mr. Alonso plays with the relationship between what we see, what we don’t see and what we expect to see.

This is a comedy, with plenty of acutely funny lines, a handful of sharp sight gags and a few minutes of pure, perfect madcap. But a grim, unmistakable shadow falls across its wintry landscape.

A sharply written, fast-talking, almost dementedly articulate satire on modern statecraft.

The close-ups and camera movements in this version enhance the charisma of the performers, adding a dimension of intimacy that compensates for the lost electricity of the live theatrical experience.

May not make the splash it should; films about moviemaking rarely do. And that would be a shame, because the contrasts the director sets in motion and keeps playing against each other make an entertaining wrestling match.

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.

Hostiles itself wants to be both a throwback and an advance, not so much a new kind of western as every possible kind — vintage, revisionist, elegiac, feminist. What makes the movie interesting is the sincerity and intelligence with which it pursues that ambition, heroically unaware that the mission is doomed from the start.

The film collects a cast of performers who know how to be funny. The success of this movie, following a formula upheld by just about any recent hit comedy you can name, lies as much with supporting players and plot-derailing set pieces as with the central story and characters.