Ella Taylor

For once in an American movie, the uplift feels earned.

Thrilling documentary.

An excellent documentary by MacArthur fellow Stanley Nelson (The Murder of Emmett Till), offers no grand theories for the Jonestown phenomenon.

The movie is anything but combative. Pariah is a tender, sporadically goofy, yet candid examination of emergent identity, a film whose lack of attitude sets it apart from much of the hard-bitten, thug-life storytelling that's dominated African-American cinema for decades.

Eerily compelling.

The movie's strength lies in its portrayal of a many-sided genius, as manipulative as he was charming and persuasive, monomaniacal to a fault, generous and sweet yet utterly clueless about the emotional havoc he wrought in the name of science.

Gabrielle, a quietly insidious tale of domestic warfare that makes the protagonists of Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage" look like pussycats, will exasperate and satisfy in roughly equal measure.

Glazer shoots with the dreamy impressionism much favored in his principal line of work, all floaty slo-mos and in-your-face close-ups punctuated by a hard-driving rock score.

McElwee fans will welcome back the wonderful Charleen, his former teacher and lifelong friend, older and mellower but as beguiling and free-spirited as ever.

Directed by Agnès Jaoui, who made the equally delightful "The Taste of Others," this comedy of manners with a serious purpose centers on a group of loosely connected neurotics, all working in the rarefied worlds of amateur chorales.

This overcrowded, overheated scenario, with many scenes repeated from the first two films, keeps us so busy tracking all the overlapping storylines, we have no time to imagine what they might mean.

A haunting tale of the physical survival and emotional confusion of children who were simultaneously required to build a new life and hold fast to the memory of an old one, in the hope of resuming it after the war.

Junge's testimony about the last days in Hitler's bunker will fascinate the layperson, but it adds little to what is already known by historians.

Affliction is a work of realist art rich in quotidian detail, a Grimm fairy tale about a community under siege, and a lament for a good man gone bad for nothing.

Burshtein refuses to engage with the culture wars that flare fiercely between secular and religious types in Israel; in fact she's trying to avoid types of any kind, which may be why secular audiences and critics have embraced her rapturous depiction of a community living its life, more separate from than at odds with the society beyond.

Intentionally or not, Searching for Sugar Man catches all that - the fleeting moments of triumph and the years of endurance, the accumulation of family and the unquenched dreams - and doesn't presume to sew it all up for us.

British actor Damian Lewis, in an astonishingly elastic yet disciplined performance, invests Keane with a richly ambiguous, heartbreaking inner life that's only at peace when he manages to form a tenuous human connection.

A capable, soulful thriller with a love story as steamy as is possible when its lead characters are Orthodox Jews.

Like almost everything in this clever, brutal and strangely soulful movie, the time and place are accomplished by suggestion.

If the sum of Enough Said is less than its parts — and really, the midlife challenges here are pretty small potatoes — the movie does have some lovely grace notes that add up to an astute observation of the symbiosis of single mothers and their daughters.

Has a marvelous, pent-up passion.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the jollity that reigns in this household, one wants to ask the Mia Farrow question: Why does this woman keep surrounding herself with others who are completely reliant on her?

In its breathlessly claustrophobic way the movie is vital and passionate, and lit with a lyric beauty that washes over love scenes and violent acts alike.

A fetchingly improbable match of material and directors.

It's the dialogue -- wisecracking and wistful in equal measure -- that plays out the tyrannical illogic of romantic attraction, and so endears us to this ensemble of bruised souls that when, as in life, not everyone gets what they have come to deserve, it feels, as in life, like an injustice.

Gröning makes us fully feel the rhythms of their lives, but for the same reasons that most of us couldn't or wouldn't last in such a stripped-down environment, the movie, at just shy of three hours, starts to feel oppressive after two.

As written, Jasmine is a hopeless neurotic, trapped in a perpetual panic. As played, she has a wicked hint of Scarlett O'Hara.

Like all her (Holofcener) movies, Please Give is multitonal, as tenderly sympathetic as it is tough toward all its tortured, even unlikable characters.