Eric Hynes

Fellag does for the film what his Lazhar does for the pupils: He's soothing and entrancingly enigmatic enough to keep us fixed to our seats.

Time and changing tides have been kind to Graceland (and to the local musicians who've since become internationally renowned), but an on-camera meeting between the songwriter and ANC leader Oliver Tambo finds their conflict between creative freedom and revolutionary solidarity fascinatingly unresolved.

A train station finale is textbook tearjerker territory, but it still teems with exquisite sorrow.

This boppy biopic pushes a wealth of outrageous incidents while never making anything resembling a point.

Amid its celebrations of black power, ambitious Afros and fly female trombonists, the film serves as a rousing testament to the singular blessings of music education, since there's nothing inherent or automatic about kids learning how to groove.

Poised between childhood and adolescence, arrogance and insecurity, the kids still make for compelling subjects.

The film clandestinely captures marauders in action while embedding itself in the imperiled home of aging farmer Michael Campbell. He's not the movie's ad hoc martyr, but something more compelling: a simple man whose fight for personal justice has matured into patriotism.

Undertow's three impassioned lead performances and Fuentes-León's honest engagement with thorny matters of identity, sexuality and community still make it an easy movie to get swept up by.

The film ultimately plays less like an experiment than a demonstration of a tinkerer’s ingenuity. Tim’s finished Vermeer may resemble the real thing, but Tim’s Vermeer never tackles the true mystery of why the latter is actually incomparable.

This vision of contemporary Italy as a warped fairyland filled with corpulent slobs and seedy C-grade celebrities recalls the tough-love spectacle of Fellini’s "La Dolce Vita," but Reality frustratingly devolves into a far more tedious mass-media morality tale.

Essential, if artless, baseball exposé.

Point Blank fires nothing but blanks in the end, dealing in increasingly ludicrous plot twists and one fizzle of a finale.

Farmiga persuades as a kooky monster of a matriarch, while Javier is an ideal vessel for Duchovny's laconic line readings (he's grown into an even more deadpan Bill Murray). Goats may cover an all-too-familiar terrain, but at least it grazes it well.

When it comes to human emotions, however, the filmmaker is all thumbs, crassly fumbling for audience response via clichéd uses of dropped-out sound and the occasional twinkling piano.

Characters seem less entrapped by their desires than by plot necessities — a fact that’s not redeemed by Ozon’s winking self-awareness.

Director Madeleine Sackler favors an agenda of advocacy over complexity, making The Lottery an effective, if unapologetically one-sided, piece of agitprop.

The backbeat anarchy is fun while it lasts, but without a persuasive purpose, it's all just noise in the end.

This impassioned documentary could have the same real-world impact as Errol Morris's "The Thin Blue Line," and help to free a wrongly convicted man. The filmmaking could be better, but it's hard to argue with that kind of potential.

Though overly dependent on a roundelay of talking heads, the film escalates into an ace legal thriller, spinning a web of shame that snags everything from the Austrian government to America's most beloved not-for-profits.

When Gonzo divulges his classmates' darkest secrets, we're meant to disapprove of his transformation from swaggering New Journalist to WikiLeaks extremist. In the real world, we've still haven't decided which ethical version we prefer.

Boy needn't be pop-culturally fluent to be relatable; believable human characterizations would have sufficed.

Unlike satires that coast on winking self-satisfaction, Anusha Rizvi's debut is both a heartfelt and a genuinely funny skewering of India's convoluted caste-consciousness.

There's some magic in the grab-bag method, but with all the furious wand-waving, the story itself never gets to cast much of a spell.

It's no recipe for hilarity or pitter-pattering hearts, but like our hero's sweets, this pleasant, delicate confection goes down easy enough.

Bergès-Frisbey and Duvauchelle make for a deliciously ripe pair - their cheekbones defy both gravity and sound facial architecture - but Auteuil is less interested in young lust than old world values.

Though its blanketed voiceover narration can be too on-the-nose—it’s a metaphor, we get it—the film packs a psychic punch, thanks to Gedeck’s spectrally wearied face.

The film is overcrowded with story lines and short on thrust, but fortunately, its protagonists carry the day with their candor and precocious poise.

Loach coaxes an endearingly poised performance out of nonprofessional Brannigan, and largely sells these scuffling characters as neither hopeless nor heroic—just terribly human.