Dana Stevens

Watching The Five Obstructions is at once like witnessing two chess masters playing dominoes and like spying on a series of therapy sessions. Mr. von Trier clearly sees himself as a maniacal psychoanalyst.

Strikes a difficult and necessary moral balance, refusing to succumb to hopelessness but also refusing to rule it out.

Rarely has the basic nature of visual perception seemed so frightening.

Your attention is rewarded by a film of surprising depth and a few deep surprises.

Like most great musicals, though, this one slides, with breathtaking ease, from silliness to pathos and freely mixes exquisiteness and absurdity.

Whatever your opinions about the war, the conduct of the journalists who covered it and the role of Al Jazeera in that coverage, you are likely to emerge from Control Room touched, exhilarated and a little off-balance, with your certainties scrambled and your assumptions shaken.

Holy Motors, a movie that's beyond weird, and beyond beautiful.

If her films so far have ranged from very good to great, The Land of Steady Habits exists somewhere at the low end of that continuum. But that still makes it a very good movie, full of sharp dialogue and lacerating insight about the haute-suburban milieu that the script both skewers and struggles to understand.

It’s well worth seeing, both for its merciless anatomization of the country’s post-Ceausescu social order and for Gheorghiu’s stupendous central performance as a mother so monstrous she makes Medea look like a pushover.

Nobody else working in movies today can make her (Keaton) own misery such a source of delight or make the spectacle of utter embarrassment look like a higher form of dignity.

Though it’s not concerned with global politics and warfare, Seconds is a blistering assessment of the cultural politics of the mid-1960s, equally bleak in its view of the establishment and the counterculture.

The heart of Life Itself, and the part of the film that’s most instructive even for those familiar with Ebert’s story, is the long middle section dealing with his stormy, never-resolved relationship with Gene Siskel.

Christine Jeffs's film is an emotionally rich biography of the poet Sylvia Plath, who is played with radiant conviction by Gwyneth Paltrow.

As sublimely warming an experience as the autumn sun that shines benevolently on the vineyard owned by the film's central character.

If you're willing to let go of your Hollywood-bred expectations for a movie of this type-spectacular action set pieces, constant pulse-pounding music, a killing every 15 minutes-The American is a great pleasure to watch, an astringent antidote to the loud, frantic action movies that have been clogging our veins all summer.

It is an enormous improvement over the brainless, patronizing teenage romances that have slouched into (and quickly out of) theaters in recent years. But it could, if the filmmakers had trusted themselves and the actors a bit more, have lived up to its title.

Mr. Jaa, blessed with astonishing muscle definition and a stoical, sensitive face, clearly has the potential to be an international action movie star, and Ong-Bak feels like the start of a scrappy, potent franchise.

Whereas the original was a work of speculative science fiction - a chin-stroking fable about evolution in the nuclear age - this revisiting of the Planet of the Apes myth is an animal-rights manifesto disguised as a prison-break movie.

A graceful and sympathetic look at how the lives of teenagers intersect with a work of literature.

The very existence of Four Lions is an act of audacity; the fact that it's also smart, humane, and frequently hilarious is nothing short of a miracle.

Like many musicals, The Blind Swordsman works better in individual scenes than as a whole. Mr. Kitano is not the most disciplined storyteller, and the plot meanders along tangents and stumbles into flashbacks, losing momentum for long stretches in the middle.

At first House of Sand may seem like a stark tale of survival, but a surprisingly lush and colorful romance blossoms in its bleak and gorgeous desert setting.

What emerges from the chaos may be uneven and at times ridiculous, but it's never boring.

Mild, harmless and occasionally affecting, possessing the fizz of diet soda and the sweet snap of slightly stale bubble gum.

The director’s sometimes absurd bravado — along with Forest Whitaker’s grave, wise performance in the title role — is what gives this outsized and sometimes lumbering film its irrefutable emotional power.

An intellectually engaging movie. But Mr. Jia's careful objectivity and regard for material detail are not matched by narrative rigor.

Like an uncommonly artful and well-acted after-school special. I don't mean this as a put-down: its combination of realism and fretful moral inquiry is best suited to the tastes and sensibilities of young teenagers who devour young-adult fiction.

Acting is not really the point of this movie, which seems to arise above all from Mr. Spielberg's desire to reaffirm that he is, along with everything else, a master of pure action filmmaking.

Certainly Shrek 2 offers rambunctious fun, but there is also something dishonest about its blending of mockery and sentimentality. It lacks both the courage to be truly ugly and the heart to be genuinely beautiful.

Mr. Boe keeps a safe distance from his characters' inner lives, he does succeed in conjuring an atmosphere of elegant melancholy and metaphysical anxiety.

Though a dramatic (even melodramatic) narrative eventually takes shape, what you remember is the succession of moods and observations through which it emerges.

Small-scale and loose. It feels oddly long for a Woody Allen picture, but its relaxed, casual air gives the humor room to breathe, and a gratifyingly high proportion of the piled-up one-liners actually raise a laugh.

In any case, what is on screen is a delightful respite from awards-season seriousness - a feather film, you might say, that actually tickles.

Crude, unpolished, yet curiously dreamy.

Walks the delicate boundary between politically inflected realism and costumed sentimentality.

Of all the twists in Catfish-the most surprising of all is what an honest and thoughtful film it turns out, against all odds, to be.

Even when Prince-Bythewood (Love and Basketball) tries to pack too much around the edges (including critiques of record-industry sexism and the mechanisms of black political fundraising), the romance at the movie’s center remains credible and vibrant.

The violent scenes veer vertiginously between slapstick, soft-core pornography and raw documentary, leaving you repelled and confused, as well as fascinated.

A charming, silly family Christmas movie more likely to spread real joy than migraine, indigestion and sugar shock. The movie succeeds because it at once restrains its sticky, gooey good cheer and wildly overdoes it.

Justin Lin, who's now directed three movies in the Fast series, knows how to choreograph and edit an action sequence so that it's more than an onslaught of chopped-up images and grating noise.

The movie is, above all, a showcase for its stars, who seem gratifyingly comfortable in their own skin and delighted to be in each other's company again, in another deeply silly, effortlessly entertaining movie.

A stylish, ingeniously constructed bit of hokum, a sparkling trinket of a movie that's as implausible as it is irresistible.

It's Depp as Barnabas that holds the movie together. The story may be less than coherent and some of the minor characters washouts, but when he's on-screen, there's energy and humor and that foppish sex appeal that (as in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie) reminds you why you once liked Johnny Depp.

So unlike most Hollywood coming-of-age stories as to seem downright revolutionary.

The film's warm, sweet sentiments are genial and unchallenging, and its jokes are low-key and gentle.

It is hard not to admire the independence and ambition of The Beautiful Country, even if the film does fall short of its epic intentions.

Land of Plenty, is like a clumsy, well-meaning intervention in a family quarrel. Mr. Wenders may not have the power to heal the rifts his movie acknowledges - and his account of them may not always be persuasive - but there is nonetheless something touching about his heartfelt concern.

As powerful as Foxcatcher can be scene to scene, there’s something maddeningly indistinct about it at times, as if the details that would make it all make sense remain somehow inaccessible to us.

While not a great movie, is a very good movie about greatness, in which celebrating the achievement of one major artist becomes the occasion for the emergence of another.

Café Lumière stands in relation to "Tokyo Story" as a faint, diminished echo. It is nonetheless a fascinating curiosity, a chance to witness one major filmmaker paying tribute to another in the form of a rigorously minor film.

He (Ford) slips into the role as if it were a pair of well-worn loafers, the left inherited from Peter Falk, the right from Clint Eastwood, and then proceeds, with wry nonchalance, to tap-dance, shuffle and pirouette through his loosest, wittiest performance in years.

The inhospitability of the land emphasizes the spare precision of the narratives and helps to give them an atavistic power, as if they were tales that had been handed down since the beginning of time.

As a lifelong aficionado of sprawling, dopey disaster movies with plenty of character back story—your Poseidon Adventures, your Twisters, your Titanics—and as maybe the world’s biggest fan of Emmerich’s 2012 (2009), I was naturally inclined to enjoy Moonfall, and I did, though maybe with not quite as much glee as I vibed with the fevered conspiracy theories and lovingly preserved world treasures of 2012.

Though the film immerses us in the details of Senna's life and the world of Formula One for 104 thrilling minutes, we leave still wondering both who Senna was and how Formula One racing works.

To his great credit, Villeneuve has followed through on the task he set for himself in Dune’s moody, enigmatic, and expansive first chapter: He now returns to the world he so painstakingly established, ready to orchestrate the grand-scale conflicts that are about to tear it apart.

Ultimately too thin for its length and too dependent on easy assumptions about its characters. But it does demonstrate that Ms. Collette is more than able to carry a movie, and it leaves you hoping she will soon have another chance to do it.

Btter-than-average screen Shakespeare: intelligent without being showily clever, and motivated more by genuine fascination with the play's language and ideas than by a desire to cannibalize its author's cultural prestige.

A modest, restrained picture, as small and satisfying as one of Woody Allen's better recent efforts.

At times Good Morning, Night feels as claustrophobic as the apartment itself, and you may feel that the director is handling his volatile material with a bit too much delicacy. But the movie's atmosphere is a curious mixture of obliqueness and intensity.

Cinematically, Doubt is something of a dud. But if it remains a play, it's an ingeniously structured one, with smart, thought-provoking words spoken by fabulous actors, and how often do most of us get to see one of those, whether in three dimensions or two?

A tour de force of grime, fluorescence and destinationless velocity, is more concerned with atmosphere than meaning.

I found The Skeleton Twins merely entertaining, but I’d love to see these two actors team up again, Tracy-and-Hepburn style, and make a string of movies together — maybe some that would venture further into the post–rom-com territory this one begins to explore.

If all this does not quite add up to a coherent movie, it does produce a bouncy, boisterous and charming one, which becomes downright thrilling when it shows the bands in action.

For most of Wild, we’re alone with Cheryl’s stark aloneness with herself. That’s a fine place to be.

Much more effectively terrifying than the usual overplotted, underwritten Hollywood thriller.

The two central performances help the lesson go down easily, and Mr. Duperyon's unassuming, slightly ragged realism gives the movie a sweet, lived-in charm. Mr. Sharif, grizzled and white-haired at 71, has lost none of the charisma that made him an international movie star in the 1960's, and Mr. Boulanger, in his first feature film, shows impressive self-assurance.

Fassbender spending nearly an entire movie obscured by a giant fake head is such a had-me-at-hello idea that it’s disappointing that Frank never plumbs the fascinating questions it raises about performance, group dynamics, and mental health.