Glenn Kenny

While her filmmaking style can sometimes come across as staid, [Ms. Asante's] sense of pace is always acute. The best reason to see A United Kingdom, however, is the performance by Mr. Oyelowo.

This movie, which was written by Mr. Diggs and Mr. Casal, has an energetic-to-the-point-of-boisterous style. Its lively frequency is embedded in the writing, bolstered by Carlos López Estrada’s direction, and kept buoyant by the performers. This particular aspect of the film makes it exciting to watch, but can also be confounding.

Fowler’s film is made up of familiar documentary components: archival footage, reminiscences by friends and readings of the subject’s letters. But these are ordered in a way that is less concerned with telling a story, or explaining Bartlett’s life, than with evoking his qualities of erudition, curiosity, enthusiasm, care and sometimes anger.

The movie tells an incomplete version of the band’s story...but provides a comprehensive and sometimes harrowing portrayal of the grind a working bar band in the 1970s had to endure to get by.

Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation, directed by Barak Goodman, uses the perspective of nearly 50 years’ hindsight to demonstrate anew how the festival was both a mess and a miracle, and implicitly argues that it was a good deal more miracle than mess.

I was so invested with Jong-gu and his family that as the suspense, violence and worse ratcheted up, I was not merely scared, but heartbroken. An overly literal bit of business at the end slightly undermines the film. As a whole, though, The Wailing is the hard stuff. Handle with care.

The characters and the actors playing them are appealing, and the fight scenes have a lot of moxie, not to mention a lot of steel-slinging.

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

Andresen’s determination to rise above misfortune, and his hopes for himself, make this movie less than a total tragedy. But it’s an often shudder-inducing cautionary tale.

Free Fire is an action movie finely tuned to even the most potentially vicious audiences’ tolerances. It is filled with mayhem, but avoids grisly violence — at least until the finale pulls out some gory, and not inapt, punch lines. Luxuriating in disreputability in all the right ways, the film also contains no shortage of profane verbal wit.

The gray skies under which Glavonic shoots, the unhurried takes in which he chronicles the drive, they put us with Vlada in an unmitigated way, the better to compel viewers to ask themselves what they would do in his position.

The Salt of Tears is quite a bit more than a cad’s progress. There are fleeting shadows of Flaubert in this tale, which Garrel crafted in collaboration with two venerable screenwriters, Jean-Claude Carrière and Arlette Langmann.

Fripp, an endlessly thoughtful and meticulously articulate guitarist, is the group’s most tireless and paradoxical explainer in the film.

When the tension finally does break, the movie goes a little nuts, in venerable Johnnie To tradition. The elaborate, largely slow-motion multifloor action climax is as audacious as anything he has staged and filmed.

Through it all Ting is an anchor, a presence of compassion and good sense. Anyone confused about transgender people will certainly benefit from a viewing of this picture.

This quiet movie, shot in black-and-white and color, is an unhurried, beautiful, and pained work that through simple means resonates on various levels.

As an oblique examination and critique of political and art history and their various interactions over the 20th century, Manifesto is both witty and provocative. It is not, however, a motion picture for people seeking a plot.

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.

[Mr. Léaud's] riveting, and a little alarming. As for Mr. Serra, while he often enjoys playing the foppish provocateur in his interviews, his film is sober, meticulous and entirely convincing in its depiction of period and mortality.

While second-guessing the marketing strategies of movie conglomerates is happily not the concern of this reviewer, it does seem a shame that this exhilarating, bizarre, good-hearted, blatantly obvious sci-fi-fantasy-slapstick eco-fable isn’t getting wider fanfare.

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 mostly impressive array of experts (including, in the movie’s one unfortunate off note, Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign as national security adviser) adds to the merciless clarity of this tragic picture.

Tommaso has a different feel than your average variant on Fellini’s “8 ½.” Maybe it’s a sense of shame, something the older film’s Guido hadn’t much of. Whatever it is, it makes Tommaso crackle with ideas and empathy, as Ferrara’s best work always does.

It also brings some devilish ingenuity to its variations on “Memento” and other “who am I?” thrillers. And it adds to that something more rare: a genuine emotional potency.

An informative and overdue documentary.

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.

The betrayal of Native Americans by larger forces looms over this powerful movie without ever being explicitly discussed.

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.