Glenn Kenny

Do’s tale is resolutely earthbound. He uses animation as an interrogation into the practice of fictional depiction derived from actual atrocities.

A lively, engaging and moving documentary.

The Cordillera of Dreams is a beautiful film about nightmares that have yet to end.

This picture is well acted (one of the cast members, Manuel García-Rulfo, has a growing profile in Hollywood; he was seen last year in “Widows” and “Sicario: Day of the Soldado”) and maintains narrative interest without ever grabbing the viewer by the lapels.

Those who aren't inclined to lambaste will surely have some stimulating conversations after the film is over.

This is not a perfect picture, but it’s a soulful one that offers a lot of pleasure and even a kind of wisdom.

The narrative never really builds a good head of steam. That could just be because as a Westerner with extremely limited knowledge of Estonian culture and mythology, the barrage of tropes from there is relatively overwhelming for me. Even so, November never stops being a visual trip. And that may well be enough.

Such is the nature of this movie. It’s like a series of charcoal sketches with marginalia; there are unexpected mini-flashbacks, and even a visualization of a poem. Hong’s free style isn’t showy; there’s a stillness holding the film together at all times.

Schroeder’s approach is calm, almost detached, in keeping with his other work (although the choice of de Medeiros to speak for Buddhism, and with a nonspecific Asian-seeming accent at that, struck me as an avoidable misstep); this makes the bleakness of what he recounts (which is buttressed by an insinuatingly menacing score by Jorge Arriagada) that much more resonant.

All of it staged and shot with conscientiousness and ingenuity rarely seen in films from any country anymore. It is indeed a phantasmagoria, and perhaps an overload.

What’s most bewitching throughout “Scruggs” is its sense of detail. Its meshing of formal discipline and screwed-down content sometimes give it the sense of a work that has been carefully and elaborately embroidered rather than photographed.

If you love the music Berns made, you’ll love this movie; if you don’t, I feel for you, but “Bang!” might nevertheless entertain with its dish.

Hong’s new film, “In Our Day,” is not atypical—it’s a plain-looking, often wry, and lightly nourishing character study with a diptych structure that adds enigmatic intrigue to the proceedings.

Iron Man is the first Marvel Comics superhero movie I would willingly sit through a second time. This is the result not just of what the movie does, but what the movie doesn't do.

This is, among other things, something of a fatty movie. It goes out of its way to hit “beats” that it presumes will be satisfying to a mainstream audience.

Saint Laurent was essential to 20th-century culture, and Celebration shows the inevitable fading of glory as well as the enduring features of his life’s work.

The movie interweaves the contemporary sessions with a very selective — and, while not wholly sanitized, certainly discreet — account of her tumultuous past. Overall it’s a better-than-competent piece of fan service and a not unpersuasive bid for an auxiliary youth audience.

This is the touch of a cinematic master. Claire Denis is the writer and director of this film.

Return to Dust abounds in small poetic touches from the director and his lead characters.

The film belongs to Ms. Muñoz. She’s the kind of performer (like Setsuko Hara, the Japanese actress to whom the film is dedicated) you can’t take your eyes off, even when she doesn’t seem to be up to much of anything.

The screenwriter, Carlos Treviño, crafts frank dialogue and the director, Kyle Henry, films the scenes with an eye for the intimate, dividend-paying gesture. The superb actors, given opportunities to go for broke, make each one count, and make the movie worth watching.

At its best, it throbs with immediacy, just as Strummer did.

It makes for a daringly different kind of thriller -- cerebral, meticulous, haunting.

The movie is a worthy time capsule and a must for Cohen devotees. Its occasional meanderings into artiness, which take the form of interpolation of outside footage (war atrocities and home movies, mainly) are emblematic of the time it was made and mercifully brief.

This cool, unhurried movie is firmly anchored by a spectacularly modulated performance by Caillee Speeney.

Over all, this movie is less “you are there” than “you had to be there.”

Balsam is marvelous throughout, precisely measured in portraying a state often teetering on abjection. Balsam’s Lila can turn from luminescent to hangdog in a flash. The character’s inner worlds register with exceptional vividness.

The movie is at its most fascinating in its depiction of Lennon as a pragmatic activist.

The moral rot and callous corruption depicted in Angels Wear White has a particularly bracing effect in part because, cultural specifics aside, the inhumanity on display is hardly alien.

Schamus’ commitment to a style, and to the material, yields potent results.

While this film is often funny, its ultimate bit of wisdom, from the New Testament, is dark and undeniable: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

As exciting and involving as it is brainy.

The details of how the father cleaned up, became a caregiver to his terminally ill second wife and tried to help his son are terribly moving.

A gruelingly tense, deftly plotted, and slyly intelligent piece of work. And also it's really really disgusting.

There’s subtlety, and then there’s deliberate evasion. In pursuing the former, “Chile ‘76” only achieves the latter.

Ly shows command of staging and shooting throughout, simulating documentary form while maintaining a tight grip on narrative coherence.

It's also that he's really, honest-to-God, got one of those movie faces that doesn't even come along once every generation. It's astonishing.

As sad as Garcia’s end is, Long Strange Trip remains an exhilarating and inspiring movie. For a not inconsiderable period, Garcia, Weir, Hart, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and various fellow travelers saw the possibilities that their talents and the times offered them, and made hay of them.

Ms. Bohdanowicz’s self-interrogation is clearly important to her art, but I think she worries too much, at least where this subject is concerned. Her hostess, a model of charm, good humor and senior wisdom, is a movie unto herself.

Starting Out never builds to the explosive climax it seems to be heading for, which I suppose is a good thing for its overall integrity, but maybe not so good for its motion-picture value.

This affectionate, heartbreaking documentary about his life, directed by Garret Price, presents Yelchin as a soldier of cinema, and a lot more.

It’s frustrating to see such a sophisticated cinematic apparatus used in the service of such muddled half-ideas.

This is not my favorite kind of documentary filmmaking. Eugene “Gene” Cernan, the subject of this film, who’s also the older fellow watching the bucking bronco, is a man deserving of a tribute such as this movie aspires to give him. The filmmakers, attempting to jazz up their material, get in the way a lot.

Clash turns into a full-fledged horror movie, albeit one without the fake comfort of a supernatural or science-fiction pretext. It’s just man’s inhumanity to man, in full sway.

While some institutions are legitimate, Shuffle, a shocking and confounding new documentary directed by Benjamin Flaherty, lays out in painstaking detail the collusion between moneymaking rehab treatment centers, double-dealing insurance entities and predatory social-media “scouts” who make sure cash flows into corporate pockets while the sick and suffering never get well.

With The Card Counter, Schrader has a sub-theme he can toss off like a light cloak, and when he does, the movie swerves into a semi-surreal realm not entirely like that of the climax of First Reformed. But then it swerves back into a variation on Bresson that constitutes one of the most brilliant shots of his career.

It’s in the climbing sequences that the movie’s animation is at its most imaginative, creating effects both exhilarating and harrowing.

Writer/director Adam Egypt Mortimer is clearly a movie-mad soul, and if he can get a little further out from under his influences he may concoct something a more consistently geekily transportive.

Once the picture gets into Hollywood's bloodstream, it could well prove to be as influential as John Woo's 1989 crime thriller, "The Killer."

This is one of the most satisfying films, genre or otherwise, of the year.

A Love Song is a companionable movie to sit through. It’s well-photographed, unobtrusively edited, full of wondrous sights, and acted by a couple of masters of warm underplaying.

This is a sexy, fun film filled with a lot of zingers, but it also feels a little less personal than many of Assayas’ movies, perhaps in part because it’s not stuffed to the gills with songs he loves.

The ebullient history — which also cites on-site food tents as a mind-blowing component of the fest’s appeal — becomes tearful when Hurricane Katrina decimates New Orleans in 2005.

This intense documentary shows a driven creator walking the walk, so to speak, in the most perverse fashion possible. The story is both repellent and strangely inspiring.

The interactions between these real-life characters are here recalled with fondness and rue by the surviving participants. Taublieb’s approach is straightforward, but also a little pedestrian.

In its alternating of Parvana’s day-to-day struggle with the tale she tells herself, the movie doesn’t promote bromides about stories and storytelling transcending reality. Rather, it demonstrates that the way imagination refracts reality can provide not only solace but also real-world strategy.

Whatever your movie plans, you miss Tracks at your aesthetic pleasure peril. It’s a truly outstanding cinema experience.

Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein is a breathtaking coup, an exhilarating riposte to the conventional wisdom about dream projects. The writer-director makes something almost new, and definitely rich and strange, out of a story we all thought we knew well.

Scarlett Johansson looks lovely and hasn't much to do besides that, McGregor only starts having fun when he's playing the "original" of his clone.

The movie is replete with ingeniously constructed mini-narratives, including a turf war. The mesmerizing score by Kira Fontana, interspersed with well-chosen Turkish pop, is a real asset.

Limbo is entirely engrossing as it brings its discomfiting points home.

I'm glad that 2046 is different from "Mood" even while being strangely of a piece with it. Like "Mood," it’s a movie of utter wonder and ravishment. But the key here is different.

It is grounded, and made most exemplary, by Cynthia Nixon’s performance. Every actor in this movie is wonderful. But Nixon’s precision in portraying every particular mood of Emily — for each individual scene calls for absolute specificity — is simply spectacular.

The director Julien Temple — who has excellent documentaries on the Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer and other galvanic musicians under his belt — is very good at this sort of thing.

“Copperfield” is a grand, long novel, and in reducing it to 120 minute scale, Iannucci has hewn it to something almost anecdotal.

So breathtaking is the action.

The film itself falls short on two crucial levels: it’s neither sufficiently profound nor intoxicating enough to justify or transcend its self-seriousness. As good-looking as the movie and its stars are, Ardor, whose title refers to a literal state of burning, never manages to catch fire.

Genius, this movie believes, is real, whether it’s failed or successful.

This is filmmaking that's as rousing as it is strange.

Herzog not only tells an incredible story but implies a dark metaphysic of the natural world that makes this film unsettlingly larger than its human subject.

For this viewer, the formal element and the narrative never quite cohered, and I wound up admiring the movie for its ambition while unsatisfied with its achievement.

Even though Wetlands is absolutely, brutally unrelenting in its depictions of bodily functions and searching adolescent sexuality, it’s also an inventively sharp, briskly edited, spectacularly-acted post-adolescent coming-of-age story.

It’s a film of scenes rather than of one unified narrative, but each scene is a showcase for the magnificent talents of Ms. Balibar, a multifaceted performer of spectacular magnetism and intelligence.

When the writer opts to just let things be, the movie is at its most content.

If today Presley really needs a sales pitch, this movie is a good one.

Ms. Dorfman emerges as an artist of deep compassion, empathy, humor and wisdom.

Resnais employs all the tools of studio-bound moviemaking, silent-era to post-modern, in a way that is not only is consistently dazzling in a purely visual sense, but contains an empathy that lifts the picture to tragic heights even at those points at which it seems practically weightless.

One thing not open to question is that the real heroes of this movie are Johnston's family, particularly his aging parents, who for all their heartbreak are palpably full of love and forbearance for their disturbed and, yes, talented boy.

A modestly scaled character comedy-drama that winds up exerting an almost shockingly strong emotional force by the end.

It’s an impeccable, creepy and genuinely transporting movie.

As much as I enjoyed much of it, I hope Grindhouse doesn't start any trends. Exploitation cinema is combustible stuff that only highly trained professionals should be permitted to play with.

The scenes of Dracula befuddled by a mobile phone were familiar; those in which the vampire’s garlic “intolerance” preludes a flatulence joke predictable. Returning a third time as director, Genndy Tartakovsky lends his usual graphic savvy, providing a not-quite-saving grace.

It’s very fresh and often very funny stuff, communicated in a direct, unforced style.

It took me a while to realize she actually IS Shania Twain, because I initially thought “What does Shania Twain need this kind of low-rent enterprise for?” Maybe she really wanted to meet Travolta.

It’s refreshing to see an account of a famous food guy who doesn’t wallow in his own character defects.

The movie, shot mostly in crisp, sometimes smoky black and white, is far better, a quirky but purposeful grafting of Mack Sennett to the French New Wave. Yet it’s the soundtrack that has the staying power.

At this point in time, Springsteen is the world’s greatest living entertainer, full stop. “Road Diary,” a new documentary directed by Thom Zimny, offers dynamic proof for this argument.

To get at the heart of what’s wrong with The Face of an Angel all you need to do is consider the professional stones it takes to adapt the Amanda Knox case into yet another movie about the existential/amorous crises of a white male filmmaker. (And then have the nerve to dedicate the results to the memory of the murder-victim in the real-life case!)

This entertaining narrative documentary is very firmly in the ferment/fervency/fulfillment camp.

As the movie wears on, one suspects that the writer Luke Del Tredici and the director Jonathan Watson aren’t crafting an indictment of toxic masculinity, but an invitation to take some sadistic enjoyment in it, without consequences.

Miike’s seemingly offhand inventiveness is evident in almost every shot and cut.

The movie’s senses of cinema are never present for self-consciously clever, self-referential reasons. Rather, they’re deeply intertwined with considerations of age and mortality.

Dweck divides his efforts between elegiac tone poem and shaggy-dog ensemble piece.

More than a few moments here are new, and real grabbers.

There’s a lot of crunch and dazzle here. While the overall tone is pitched to a teen demographic, the creative energy and the execution on display is consistently engaging.

The verbal analysis here isn’t always profound — one interviewee trots out the banal phrase “the conversation we should be having” — but the narrative as presented in archival footage (Kaepernick did not sit for an interview for this film) is exemplary.

Even if you are unmoved by Mr. Szegedi’s personal story (I found him somewhat sympathetic), what Keep Quiet tells us about its larger themes is upsettingly pertinent.

The cultural transformation and re-transformation of Miami Beach (specifically its southern tip, South Beach) is a story that’s fascinating, poignant, garish and, in some ways, befuddling.