Joe Morgenstern

Liam Neeson has never had a richer character to play on screen -- including his landmark role in "Schindler's List" -- and has never displayed such formidable energy and virtuosity.

Appeal lies on the bright, shiny surface of its ostensibly simple plot, and in its rat-a-tat-tat language, which often sounds like Mamet-visits-Spyne.

The most daring part of this wonderful film, which was written and directed by Jeff Nichols, is its calmness. Momentous events move at a human pace while Richard and Mildred Loving — a matchless pair of performances by Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga — try with varying success to comprehend what’s happening to them.

This is filmmaking as an act of devotion, and exploration — not just of the nature of faith but of faith’s obverse, abject doubt. The production is physically beautiful, and evokes the beauties of classic Japanese films, but the substance makes few concessions to conventional notions of entertainment.

Philippe Claudel gives his heroine unusual depth, which Kristin Scott Thomas reveals with unusual passion.

This superb film, by Kent Jones, adds three more layers to the book’s alluvial wisdom: stunning clips from Hitchcock features, audio clips from the original conversations and fascinating comments by contemporary directors.

Anders Danielsen Lie, gives a performance that's as distinctive as any in recent memory -- casually witty, remarkably graceful and yet terrifying in its explosiveness.

The latest in a series of stiletto-sharp social comedies by the French filmmakers Jean-Pierre Bacri and Agnès Jaoui.

The essence of this grindingly violent movie can be summed up by what Parker says of his handgun to a terrified clerk at a check-cashing service: "It's small, but it hurts."

Few actors working today could make emotional sense of such a protean character, but Ryan Gosling does so with calm authority. He's a formidable presence in a film that grabs your gaze and won't let go except for moments when you can't help but look away.

I have minor misgivings about the use of a few Disney-esque sound effects, as well as some conventionally garish voicings in the score by Danny Elfman, Hollywood's current master of the macabre. But none of that diminishes the educational value of Deep Sea 3-D, which was directed by Howard Hall, or the sometimes ethereal, sometimes fearsome beauty of its cast of trillions.

While the film handles itself well in the ring, it's brilliant in the arena of a blue-collar family that brutalizes its younger son and best hope for worldly success in the name of sustaining him.

The made movie — i.e. Mr. Pavich's documentary — makes for a great seminar on creativity. Its star is Mr. Jodorowsky, outrageously handsome and dynamic at the age of 84.

This is a harrowing film to watch. In spite of the vibrant jungle greens and the searing sun, it’s as bleak a vision of modern warfare as has ever been put on screen.

Now the movie can be seen for what it was all along, remarkable by any standards.

The Visitor tells of renewal through love. Its song is tinged with sadness, but stirring all the same.

A bright little screwball comedy that speaks for the vitality of new movies.

The gadgetry is absolutely dazzling, the action is mostly exhilarating, the comedy is scintillating and the whole enormous enterprise, spawned by Marvel comics, throbs with dramatic energy because the man inside the shiny red robotic rig is a daring choice for an action hero, and an inspired one.

News management is the main issue. Control Room shows how coverage is tailored to fit the audience, both by al-Jazeera and its Western counterparts.

You don't have to be a fan of Mr. Jarmusch's special brand of indie spookiness to enjoy his new film. All that's required is patience with its languorous pace, plus a willingness to swing between amusement and delight, with periodic pauses at ennui.

There's no transcending a prosaic plot and several flat performances.

At its best, Ava DuVernay’s biographical film honors Dr. King’s legacy by dramatizing the racist brutality that spurred him and his colleagues to action. The director and her screenwriter, Paul Webb, are less successful — sometimes much less so — at breathing life into the private moments that define King as an inspirational figure with human flaws, and a political as well as spiritual force.

Ms. Garner transcends the inherent limits of her role to convey ineffable tenderness and wordless ferocity in a movie that’s bigger than it seems.

The film forges ahead, in vivid 3-D, with such energy, expertise and thunderous conviction that you readily accept its basic premise — the pell-mell emergence of great intelligence, plus moral awareness, in primitive bodies — and find yourself exactly where the filmmakers want you to be, swinging giddily between sympathy for the apes and the humans in what threatens to become all-out war.

Computer travel may not be the real thing, but IMAX makes this an astonishing trip all the same.

All but one of the actresses in Caramel are nonprofessionals -- not unprofessional, just untrained in the craft -- and they are, to a woman, enchanting. So is this Lebanese comedy.

A stunning drama that's distinguished by a magnificent performance; the most powerful scenes are those that play, as recollection or confession, on Lena Endre's lovely face.

The movie is maddening too, just as it intends to be, but you do watch, and care, and learn. What seems at first to be a gallery of narcissistic rogues turns into something else, a study in equal-opportunity romantic folly.

Mr. Lee's film is stronger as a visual experience - especially in 3-D - than an emotional one, but it has a final plot twist that may also change what you thought you knew about the ancient art of storytelling.

This is more than a respectful remake; Let Me In is quietly stylish and thoroughly chilling in its own right.

It’s all too seldom that a feature film combines brilliant acting with a spellbinding flow of language.

The Witness is remarkable for its emotional impact, and its clarity. The picture that emerges isn’t perfectly clear; the whole truth will never be known, Bill Genovese says. What he has made known, though, is valuable.

No beauty contest has ever been more bizarre than the one in Gerardo Naranjo's shockingly powerful thriller.

Puzzle is less puzzling than exasperating. What’s good is exceptional — a meeting of minds, and then more, between two jigsaw-puzzle prodigies — while the rest is perfunctory or lifeless.

An absolutely phenomenal film by the Korean director Bong Joon-ho.

This is a movie about the joys of friendship, among many other things, and the possibility of change—for the better, not only for the worse, and not only through blood-alcohol adjustment.

The whole film is unlikely, a joyous story of youth, innocence, sweet earnestness, charming ineptitude and a shaky but productive belief on the hero’s part that he can do anything he pleases.

This isn't entertainment in any conventional sense, but it's a mesmerizing film all the same.

The whole dumb movie is a baloney cake, but the enticing icing on it is Reese Witherspoon, who manages to have a few moments of spontaneous fun in this half-baked store-bought comedy.

Readily accessible, slyly subversive and perfectly delightful film.

The film feels self-obsessed, an intriguing drama that slowly devolves into a bleak meditation on the absence of dramatics.

This Transformers is a pile of glittering junk.

Aronofsky blurs the line between reality and fantasy, turning the film into a gothic horror show that is fascinating and disappointing in equal measure. What's resplendently real, though, is the beauty of Ms. Portman's performance. She makes the whole lurid tale worthwhile.

The oddity of the crime lay in the value of the art — relatively low, except to the artist, a young Czech woman who was neither famous nor rich. The beauty of the film lies in the bond she forges with one of the thieves after they’re found by police and sentenced to 75 days in prison. Questions of identity haunt both the victim and the perp — not their names or addresses, but who they are in the farthest reaches of their psyches, and who they may become.

A special film, and occasionally an exasperating one, but not, in the end, an inaccessible one. It’s a work of emotional impressionism with moments of rueful grace and startling images that evoke yearning.

Indignation is very much the sort of venture Mr. Schamus has often championed as a producer — ambitious and provocative, a must-see for anyone who cares about independent film.

It's a horror flick, and a creepily good one, that also functions as an allegory of the war that still haunts Spain seven decades later.

I can't say enough about the way Enough Said keeps its scintillating sense of humor as it grows deeper and more affecting.

There's no better fun for movie lovers than a small, unheralded film that turns out to be terrific -- unless it's a small, unheralded sequel that trumps the original.

The film becomes an enthralling, edifying, terrifying, sometimes funny and improbably stirring portrait of a multiethnic, polycultural cauldron where fury against injustice and neglect hovers near the boiling point.

This one is nowhere near as original -- it's a flawed remake of a fine first feature from Norway -- but "Insomnia" still stands on its own as a thriller with brains and scenic beauty.

The more I think back on Kajillionaire, which goes to digital platforms in mid-October, the more I remember lovely things in it — moments of mystery and grace that go against the absurdist grain.

By turns chilling, mysterious and inspiring; sometimes it's all of those at once.

Fatih Akin is a filmmaker to be reckoned with. His characters grow and change in a stunning film that pulses with life.

So much movie can be made with so little plot, given sufficient humanity and dramatic tension. That's the case with Andrew Haigh's eloquent chamber piece.

A thriller with a quietly sensational performance by Tilda Swinton.

A wonderfully generous spirit. It's a film about cultural yearning and fearless love.

Genuinely and irresistibly inspirational.

In a tale that touches on such a diversity of subjects—loneliness, mortality, adoption, family ties, the realm of the senses, artificial intelligence—it’s the ineffable things that count.

Cate Blanchett tops anything she's done in the past with her portrait of a fallen woman who's a hoot, a horror, a heartbreaker and a wonder. The mystery of the movie as a whole is that it depicts a bleak world of pervasive rapacity, deceit and self-delusion, yet keeps us rapt with delight.

Taut, smart, intense and genuinely scary, Trey Edward Shults’s It Comes at Night fulfills the promise, and then some, of the filmmaker’s 2015 debut feature, “Krisha.”

Hugely inventive -- and smashingly beautiful.

This gorgeous film, always tender and sometimes dark, is a deeply resonant comic drama that's concerned with nothing less than life, death, love, sex, guilt and the urban logic of mortality.

Why, then, should we be eager to see a story of such incomplete inspiration? Because it's thrilling, and stirring. And because it is truth.

I can tell you that Ms. Laurent’s direction is astute and economical, that both of the film’s young stars give fine performances, and that Breathe is a very good title for a film that ever so gradually takes your breath away.

A film of fitting energy and complexity, it’s a stirring account of an astonishing life.

5 Broken Cameras is short on facts and, like the demonstrations themselves, provocative by nature. Still, it casts a baleful light on anguishing, seemingly incessant scenes of tear gas hurled, bullets fired, villagers fleeing for their lives and, on one shocking occasion, a life lost as the camera rolls. This is how the conflict looks from the other side of the barrier.

Magnificent.

Difficult too, and certainly problematic, but it's sometimes quite wonderful. Do see it if you're curious about one-of-a-kind films, and if you care about the ever-evolving career of one of our most gifted filmmakers.

This film is extraordinary on several counts: its knowledge of an arcane trade (Mr. Cohen ran his family's diamond business after his father died); its fondness for telling good life stories; and, above all, its superb starring performance.

In a literal sense this delightful film, in Norwegian with English subtitles, is about retirement and the prospect of loss. But Mr. Hamer, a poet of the droll and askew, sends the aptly named Odd--it's also a common Norwegian name--on a cockeyed journey from regret through comic confusion to a lovely eagerness for new adventures.

In Between is full of life, a triptych of sexual and cultural combat that takes us to places that I, for one, knew nothing about.

I found Hustle & Flow hard to get into at first, if only for its dialogue. But DJay's turf turns out to be everyone's turf -- a jagged landscape of hopes, disappointments, folly and fulfillment.

The Counterfeiters is inevitably serious, even austere, and full of chilling, ironic details.

A thrilling -- and harrowing, and beautiful -- celebration of the unpredictability of life.

It's spectacular, to be sure, but also remarkable for its all-encompassing gloom. No movie has ever administered more punishment, to its hero or its audience, in the name of mainstream entertainment.

The book’s subtitle was “A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon,” and the film gets that part wrong. It’s deadly dull and conspicuously short on obsessiveness.

Succeeds at its daunting task: summing up an epic struggle with bedazzling action; with a style that progresses, apart from a few lapses, from the elegiac through the episodic to the symphonic; and with more humor, zest and feeling — the real, heartfelt stuff — than you’d dare to expect from what is, after all, an immense industrial undertaking.

Sizzlingly smart and agreeably sententious, Mr. Garland’s film transcends some all-too-human imperfections with gorgeous images, astute writing and memorably strong performances.

His film is not for the weak of stomach or heart, but it's a stunner all the same.

The Tribe is one of the most disturbing films I’ve ever seen. It may also be among the most memorable — not only for its pitch-black view of human nature, but for the devilishly instructive way in which it turns the tables on us. As we watch in anxious confusion, it’s as if we are profoundly deaf, trying to understand what’s going on and striving to break out of isolation.

(Morton's) character here is emotionally mute -- though Morvern speaks, she can't or won't reveal what's in her heart -- and her performance is brilliant from start to finish.

For those who’ve lived with the series for more than a decade, this fateful pause may heighten the suspense. For a Muggle like me, the storm does gather slowly.

Like the movie as a whole, she (Judy) is funny, sweet, sophisticated and adventurous.

The film is poetic in its turn, as well as deliciously funny, and pretty much perfect except for a slightly didactic coda. But that’s a minor flaw in a major achievement. To err, even slightly, is you know what.

Either way, though, Mr. Assayas, whose previous work has ranged from the tossed-off beguilements of “Irma Vep” to the docudramatic brilliance of “Carlos,” has created a small but special diversion that fairly vibrates with stylish performances and flies in the face of marketing fashion — a talkie with an abundance of good talk.

Even if snorkeling wasn't a major sport in 16th-century Sicily, where the action was originally set, the joyous spirit of the play has been preserved in this modest, homegrown production.

Foreign films can be as enchanting as ever, and perspective-expanding too. The latest proof is Up and Down, a wonderfully funny, giddily intricate Czech comedy.

A fine Argentinean film with English subtitles.

The best part of Tracks — aside from the spectacular images, the succinct dialogue, the elegant filmmaking and the mysterious beauty of Mia Wasikowska's performance — is what's left unsaid.

The most urgent question posed by The Social Dilemma is whether democracy can survive the social networks’ blurring of fact and fiction. “Imagine a world where no one believes what’s true,” Mr. Harris says. It’s possible, of course, that the film itself is a conspiracy cooked up by chronic malcontents, but it has the ringtone of truth.

Comes on like an overproduced coma, and leaves you comatose by the end. In between are 127 minutes of intermittent chaos that feel like a lifetime.

It’s a coming-of-age story about the coming of unlikely, unbidden hope.

It’s surely the most spellbinding documentary ever made about the mediation process.

An enchanting documentary by Ceyda Torun, operates on three levels, and we’re not speaking metaphorically here.

The plot has an intriguing twist, and the production, in addition to Mr. McKellen’s commanding presence, has fine work by Laura Linney as Holmes’s housekeeper, Mrs. Munro, and by Milo Parker as Roger, Mrs. Munro’s son. The boy is vividly intelligent, ferociously angry and a force to be reckoned with.

If truth be told, the film is less than the sum of its parts; the main problem is the fragmented narrative structure, a legacy of the literary source. Still, it's a joy to see men and women with dense life stories played by powerful actors with long and distinguished careers.

The essence of the film is slapsticky, chopsocky action, rendered with great verve and accompanied by bromides having to do with the need to believe.

This, too, is a mood piece, sometimes surreal and dominated by Chow's lovelorn sadness. But it's hard to find an emotional or narrative handle to hang on to, since the filmmaker keeps reaching for dramatic energy that keeps eluding him.

Truth be told, though, the film, which Mr. Iannucci directed from a screenplay he wrote with Simon Blackwell, is blissed out on its own cleverness and ultimately exhausting.

This delightful and useful documentary by Mariem Pérez Riera catches its subject at a piquant point in her career

Clemency is a meditation on capital punishment from a singular perspective. Call it Dead Warden Walking.

A handsome, absorbing debut feature by the fiction and television writer Henry Bromell.

Watching the actors and gorgeous trappings is an adventure in cognitive dissonance. I didn't believe a single minute in almost three hours, but enjoyed being there all the same.

As a thriller, The Town has what it takes and then some.

Immensely likable, and allows Mr. Smith to fulfill his manifest destiny -- as an urbane comedian who is also, shades of Cary Grant, a romantic hero.

You’ll want to see Zero Days — just not when you’re counting on a good night’s sleep a few hours later. Alex Gibney’s documentary about cyberwarfare is many things, none of them lulling: a thriller, a detective procedural, a startling chronicle of science fiction transformed into fact, and an urgent plea for public discussion of a new way of waging war that could wreak havoc on a scale akin to that of nuclear weapons.

Finding Dory can be touching, sweet and tender, but it’s compulsively, preposterously and steadfastly funny.

If Human Flow has a chance of breaking through the noise and clutter of the media surround, it’s not because the demands Mr. Ai’s documentary makes on our attention are modest; just the opposite. This movie, a testament to the power of seeing, provides a long and uncommonly vivid look at a human crisis that’s changing the face of our planet.

The essence of this inventive though erratic animated feature is joyous music and eye-popping motion.

One of the film's best moments of deliciousness comes with the revelation that Yoshikazu, rather than his father, made the sushi that won the Michelin inspectors over; so much for working humbly in the old man's shadow.

What's on screen is a gorgeous grab bag of notions: ardent love, a salute to Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain," a bit of "Camille" and a lot — I mean a lot — of nuts-and-bolts stuff about nuts and bolts.

The Dark Horse brings Cliff Curtis back home, and he gives a performance that’s transcendent in more ways than one.

You may know Mr. Edgerton as the actor who played the cocksure SEAL squadron commander in “Zero Dark Thirty,” and Tom Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby.” Who knew, though, that his debut feature would be so stylishly crafted, intricately psychological and genuinely thrilling?

The other remarkable aspect of Mr. Schipper’s film centers on the title character, who is played by an extraordinary Spanish actress named Laia Costa. She’s full of energy, and effortless grace.

This comic chronicle of a Peruvian bear’s adventures in London turns out to be a total charmer, made with panache, élan and generous dollops of marmalade.

It's a terrible life, and a terrible movie.

Several startling depictions of the artist at work make you forget, if only temporarily, the serious shortcomings of the script.

Directed with such a confident, delicate touch. Nothing is insisted on, yet whole lives are discovered and revealed in vignettes that seem as spontaneous as a laugh or a gasp.

Reconstruction means to be confusing, and is. It also means to intrigue us, and does.

Beautiful images can be a distraction in a serious documentary, but that's hardly the case here. They draw us in so we can better understand the hurtling changes that endanger the future of Cambodia and, by extension, much of the developing world.

You never lose interest for a moment, and the images are often striking: Javier Julia did the stylish cinematography. Yet there’s little lift from the carryings-on, not much buoyancy in the misanthropy.

A must-view film for our media-besotted age.

The ghost story gets to be silly, and wants to have it both ways, as ghost stories often do, on the question of whether various signs from beyond the grave are real or imagined.... Yet Ms. Stewart’s portrayal has the ring of truth and the urgency of terror.

Straightforward in form but surprisingly intricate.

Transcends its star's controversial career and, in the bargain, stands head, shoulders and heart above every other Hollywood movie that we've seen so far this year.

The level of artistry here is out of all proportion to the smallish scale of this Australian coming-of-age drama, which was directed by Shannon Murphy from a screenplay by Rita Kalnejais. Everything seems freshly discovered. Lives connect spontaneously, explosively. Love bursts forth inappropriately, yet unquenchably. Moments come along, not just a few but many, that stop your heart, leave you grinning with delight or watching breathlessly.

The new production, computer-animated except for a living, breathing boy at the center of the action, isn’t pretty or sweet but utterly stunning, as well as very funny; all those vaudeville antecedents haven’t been forgotten.

Youth may be wasted on the young in this muddled movie. But age is equally wasted on the aging.

Jockey has its limits as full-fledged drama; it’s more of a meditation on mortality, as well as a love letter from a filmmaker son to his own father. At the same time, though, it’s a testament to the power of being recognized, truly seen and remembered.

This classic tale of a little guy taking on giants benefits from being essentially true, and from accomplished filmmaking, but most of all from the beautiful vitality of Mr. McConaughey's performance.

As horror upon horror unfolds in Prophet’s Prey, Amy Berg’s shocking documentary about the mad polygamist Warren Jeffs and his followers, one may marvel, in horror, at the elaborate forms that deviancy can take.

Looks like Weimar decadence and feels like down-home friendship.

Ms. Dorfman, bless her open heart, has been captivated by the surfaces of the people she shoots, of how they seem. “I am totally not interested in capturing their souls.”

One of the best of the genre. If it doesn't serve oysters, per se, this submarine wonder offers marvels in abundance.

Mr. Fukanaga's purpose is to evoke the immigrants' experience, which he does with such eloquence and power as to inspire awe.

Growth is the film's subtext, and finally its subject. Never has a line of dialogue been more freighted with symbolism, or more grounded in literal reality, than when Barbu says, ever so quietly, "Mother, please unlock me."

This is a feel-real film, a sharp-witted, tough-minded biopic about Tonya Harding, the 1991 U.S. figure skating champion and two-time Olympian who skated rinks around most of her rivals but never became America’s sweetheart.

Proves to be a remarkably lean and incisive film about the fateful power of sexuality.

Value has been added as well -- the most thrilling car chase ever committed to film, a sequence that also shows, by cutting to the psychosexual chase, why fans embraced the tawdry genre in the first place.

What works best is what's readily accessible, the startling power of performers who understand the drama all too well.

On screen it looks crazed, but the comic energy is huge, if indiscriminate, and Mr. Sandler's performance -- think Topol doing Charles Boyer -- can be as delicate as it is gleefully vulgar or grotesque.

In the end Relic really is about decay, both physical and spiritual, and filial devotion. But devotion to what is the question. The answer makes this movie distinctive, and well worth seeing.

Enjoyable enough for what it is, a clever idea developed by fits and starts.

The Wave, Scandinavia’s first-ever disaster film, is the polar opposite of a disaster. It’s a triumph of modest means, a tribute to the power of storytelling on a human scale.

It's a film of modest means and great ambition, a darkly comic drama concerned with nothing less than the place of faith, and an embattled Church, in modern life.

Clark Terry the teacher sometimes talks like a trumpet, even though he's dealing with a pianist—"daddle-leedle-daddle-loodle" is how he wants Justin to play one phrase. Clark Terry the man personifies generosity, and it's lovely to behold.

This is filmmaking of a high order, even though the production's scale is modest and the climax is not without its facile contrivances.

The strength of her film transcends the soldier’s power to seduce. We’re beguiled, as an audience, by seeing this male animal as he is seen, and for better and worse experienced, by a diverse and dynamic group of females. And by seeing, in the end, how The Beguiled gives new and memorable meaning to the notion of a finishing school.

Ms. De Clermont-Tonnerre’s direction is a revelation — not just a good first try, but a first-rate achievement by any measure. She clearly watched such relevant classics as “The Black Stallion” and “The Misfits,” yet found a laconic style that is all her own.

Deliver Us From Evil has its flaws. Certain passages are diffuse, others are argumentative, and there's a discomfiting staginess to the climax... Yet the film's concern for the victims, and their families, is one of its strengths.

Mr. Coogan, lavishly talented as a comic, and a comic actor, is fairly monotonous in the mostly serious role he wrote for himself. That leaves Ms. Dench to carry the picture, which she does, up to a point, with her usual delicacy and grace.

I admired the leisure and intensity of this morality tale.

Dramatically relentless and emotionally shattering, it brings news from a turbulent past that casts a baleful light on America’s troubled present.

The R-rating does represent truth in advertising, and it has conferred a kind of liberation on what strikes me, a violence-averse moviegoer at heart, as the best superhero film to come out of the comic-book world, and I’m not forgetting Tim Burton’s “Batman” or Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight.”

With a calmness that bespeaks confidence, this small, spellbinding second feature by Hilary Brougher brings together two women, trapped in separate states of denial and distress, who manage to end each other's entrapment.

A powerful drama, albeit a flawed one with a clumsy, didactic script.

This is a woman's work in the best sense -- empathetic, inferentially erotic and delicately intuitive, as well as fiercely intelligent.

Every now and then, though, a movie comes up with a scene of surpassing stupidity, and then builds from that defining moment to a climax of perfect ineptitude. Life or Something Like It is such an achievement.

Nair's movie, far from being paste, is a string of small, exquisite gems.

Michael Bay's absurdist comedy is all pain, no gain and an utter monstrosity. It may be the most unpleasant movie I've ever seen, and I'm not forgetting "Freaks," which Pain & Gain resembles, come to think of it.

Gleeful and smart, funny and serious, this sequel surpasses the endearing original with gorgeous animation — a dragon Eden, a dragon scourge, an infinitude of dragons — and one stirring human encounter after another.

Jacques Audiard’s superb drama, which won the top prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, rises to the challenge with the power of art and not a scintilla of sentimentality.

Mr. Herzog’s film may not be a model of organization, but I loved every meandering minute.

Mr. Almodóvar's love of movies informs every frame of this beautiful film.

Ms. Miller proves to be an original, setting her comic characters in motion like mini-planets that spin in eccentric but overlapping orbits.

There's no shortage of felicitous lines or interesting performances, yet the movie, like the amusement park of its title, feels constructed from familiar parts.

How long has it been since a movie left you literally speechless?

Thanks to this new film, though, any questions about her potential have been dispelled. Alicia Vikander has fully and memorably arrived, a luminous presence with a gift for tenderness, an instinct for understatement and formidable reserves of passion—she not only rises to the challenge of Vera’s climactic speech, but elevates the pacifist rhetoric into furious poetry.

The greatest fascination is watching these three people when they're planted firmly inside the frame, talking at cross-purposes while trying to perceive one another in the reflected light of their needs and risky assumptions.

Boils with humor, surprise and dramatic energy.

Too bad it isn't more engaging — and dramatic — than it is, but this new film, in French with English subtitles, is still worth seeing for what it says of the turbulent state of France in the early 1970s, when Mr. Assayas was a high-school student in Paris, and of the zigzag pursuit—of painting, beautiful girls and independence from a demanding father—that finally culminated in his becoming the filmmaker he was meant to be.

In Dolemite Is My Name, Eddie Murphy takes a good idea and runs with it, soars with it, and turns it into a great, if wildly erratic, twofer tribute — to a singular legend of black entertainment culture, and to the transformative power of raunchy, outrageous humor.

If Lords of Dogtown accomplishes nothing else, it shows how hard writing a fiction film can be, and what a vast artistic distance can stand between a bad fiction film and the first-rate documentary that inspired it.

A likable lightweight, though it's heavy enough on cosmic combat and dazzling effects.

The pace is deliberate, verging on slow — Australian filmmakers aren't keen on short takes or quick cuts — but the content is constantly surprising.

The production, which grew out of the filmmaker’s friendship with the two men, Iván and Gerardo, is so heartfelt, and the material so intrinsically powerful, that I Carry You With Me slowly catches up with itself, and lights a fire fueled by food and love. That’s a winning combination in this story, just as it is in real life.

Magic suffuses this film -- performances that approach perfection, or achieve it, moments of exceptional grace as a troubled family plays out a contemporary version of a classic immigration saga, healing itself in the process.

Tender, funny and smart, Machuca is that rare discovery, an incisive political parable that also succeeds as a drama of sharply drawn individuals.

Mr. Rex gives a 100% phenomenal performance, starting with a bright veneer of charm that conceals only barely, then not at all, an unmoored soul.

The strengths of the first "3:10 To Yuma" were enhanced by its proportionality -- an intimate story told in 92 minutes. The story is no bigger in the new version, which goes on for 117 minutes. And it's certainly not better.

Almost everything about Cary Fukunaga's version of the Charlotte Brontë romance is understated yet transfixing, mainly-although far from exclusively-because of Mia Wasikowska's presence in the title role.

Do watch it on a big screen to take in all the beauty. A couple of flawless live-action performances share the screen with lovely animation, and with whatever digital magic spawned the monster — who looks like a tree, has molten sap, biteless bark, Liam Neeson’s voice and a face that reminded me of Boris Karloff.

It keeps you fascinated, even enthralled; elicits astonishment, even wonderment, and makes you grateful for the chance to meet someone remarkable.

One of the smartest, funniest and most surprising movies I’ve seen in years.

While Mr. Bahrani’s film shares certain themes with Danny Boyle’s international hit, it’s a great entertainment in its own right, a zestful epic blessed with rapier wit, casually dazzling dialogue, gorgeous cinematography (by Paolo Carnera ) and, at the center of it all, a sensational star turn by an actor, singer and songwriter named Adarsh Gourav.

The film itself operates on shifting sands. Shot documentary-style, by Robert Elswit, and accompanied by a pounding soundtrack, Syriana makes high-octane melodrama look like revealed truth.

She's (Jennifer Hudson) the best part of the show by far, but the writer-director Bill Condon, who wrote the screenplay for "Chicago" four years ago, has done the original "Dreamgirls" proud without solving its dramatic problems.

An improbably bountiful subject -- kids on skateboards turning themselves into virtuoso artist-athletes -- has been brought to life in a wonderful, unpretentious documentary.

One unwelcome surprise is how shopworn the story's components prove to be. Still, they're enhanced if not redeemed by Mr. Washington's stirring portrait of a skillful, prideful pilot hitting bottom.

A relatively small, tough-minded drama about pitiless people doing unprincipled things, proves to be one of the most interesting, elegantly crafted and — paradoxically, given the dark subject matter — elating films to come along in recent memory.

It isn't saying too much, though, to call Mia Hansen-Løve's French-language drama beautiful, profound and, given the gathering tensions of its story, phenomenally full of life.

Mr. Sorkin’s film is sometimes eloquent, and sustained for the most part by his flair for hyperverbal entertainment. Yet it also diminishes its aura of authenticity with dubious inventions, and muddles its impact by taking on more history than it can handle.

Wonderfully fresh and affecting fable from India.

For the most part, though, Ms. Moncrieff has given us a portrait of a young woman with a luminous soul.

Rapturously beautiful, startlingly audacious and often very funny, the film employs many of the techniques that were used so pleasingly in "Amélie."

Living in Emergency is anything but bleeding-heart propaganda.

Even when the masks are dropped, though, it’s all but impossible to tell the good guys from the bad. Both sides are corrupt, both sides do terrible harm. Although the film has its shortcomings and simplifications, it’s a bleakly persuasive view of a decades-long combat that respects no boundaries, and seems to hold no prospect of surcease.

Period pieces can be marvelous or musty, depending on the period, as well as the piece. Soul Power is marvelous.

The film deserves to be seen, and admired, for its own revelations, and for its unlikely, yet deeply affecting, transformation into a story of abiding love that, in its own turn, involves a deception. At the age of 86, Mr. Randi is a small, gnomish figure who walks with a cane. What seems entirely undiminished, though, is the power of his mind, driven more than ever by the dictates of his heart.

Who knew this German-born Turkish filmmaker could perpetrate a delirious farce-in German and Greek with good English subtitles-that doesn't flag for a single one of its 99 minutes?

It’s a fascinating documentary about ragtag political activists making fundamentally serious mockery at a high level of media savvy. It’s about jujitsu as performance art — turning an opponent’s outrage to one’s advantage; about deadpan as dramatic technique, and about the damnedest strategy you could imagine, summoning up Satan as a champion of religious freedom.

The tutoring sessions progress from whimsical to intriguing to captivating, even though Cristi and his confederates don’t really do very much with their secret code. Good stories thrive on details. The specifics here are abundant, and so charmingly preposterous — or maybe not, who knows? — that they command your rapt attention.

A beautifully strange and stirring sci-fi adventure.

What’s most significant, though, is the merciless nature of the cyberbullying, and the terrifying ease with which it’s inflicted. Tickled opens a smudged window on a dark alley of contemporary life.

A drama of uncommon moral complexity, unexpected humor, convincing transformations (for good and bad) and, best of all, vibrant, unpredictable energy. In a movie landscape littered with dead souls, here's a live one.

The entire film is a seduction, one that draws us into a vanished world where Count Leo Tolstoy and his wife of 48 years, Countess Sofya, come to joyous, tempestuous life in a matched pair of magnificent performances by Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren.

As such, it's chilling and enjoyable in unequal measure. Entertainment predominates, but entertainment with smarts, and a well-honed edge.

The Hand of God creates a reality that is by turns hilarious, heartbreaking and remarkable for its buoyancy and grace. It’s a film from the hand of a master.

Hotel Rwanda isn't impersonal, even though it only hints at the story's full horror. It's stunning.

Sergio, a Netflix docudrama directed by Greg Barker from a banal screenplay by Craig Borten, catches flashes of his brilliance from time to time but scatters and dims them through a mosaic structure that’s ultimately no structure at all.

Caught up in the coils of Princess Diana’s hot lasso, I am bound to tell the truth: Wonder Woman is wonderful, and the Woman herself, as played by Gal Gadot, is the dazzling embodiment of female empowerment. She is also learned, charmingly funny and, for a goddess, touchingly human.

An exhaustive and exhausting dissection of a relationship that was never all that promising in the first place.

The distinction of this lovely, if slightly tentative, debut feature is its willingness to set forth mysteries of the human heart without solving them; everyone's fate stays unsealed.

Pablo Larraín’s film, written by Steven Knight, calls itself a “fable from a true tragedy.” It might also be called a fever dream, a surreal nightmare, a reductio ad tedium or just an inherently limiting concept that slowly but inexorably squeezes the life out of itself.

This portrait of a failing marriage is one of the summer's great discoveries, and a marvel of mercurial intimacy.

I came out of this would-be epic feeling physically exhausted, psychically mauled and none the better for wear.

It’s another Soderbergh film whose allure is sure to endure.

A survey of the week wouldn't be complete without a left-handed salute--not to be confused with a backhanded compliment--to the gleeful rubbish of Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!

Yet the heart of the film lies in what it manages to say, without boldface or italics, about how hard it is for Donna, like so many of her anxious cohort, to make genuine connections, to break free of narcissistic constraints and become a stand-up grown-up.

A glorious feature-length documentary -- This film will leave an indentment, and a deep one, on anyone who loves great, joyous music and cares about the people who make it.

I regretted it most when the temporal hopscotching took me away from Ms. Winslet's portrait of the writer as a young sensualist, madly smitten by words and life.

The most intriguing question it raises is whether our feelings about Vermeer may be changed by the likelihood of him having used optics of one sort or another. The answer is yes, unavoidably, but not necessarily for the worse.

Blink your eyes and you've lost track of them, but one of the interesting things about the experience is that you don't want to lose track; though the film moves as slowly as its hikers, it demands, and deserves, to be watched closely. (The cinematographer was Inti Briones.)

It’s serious at bottom. It means to teach and inspire, as well as entertain, and takes on more subjects of consequence than you can shake a racket at—among them race, parenting, marital dynamics, the weight of personal history and the mad commercialization of sports. Yet it’s marvelous fun from start to finish.

For all its verbal combat, and marital strife that’s echoed and amplified by a younger academic couple in the manner of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” the story works best when the dialogue tides subside. In those fleeting moments Ms. Moss is able to convey, eloquently and almost wordlessly, a tormented soul.

What We Do in the Shadows has nonmedicinal virtues that many large-scale movies lack: unflagging energy, entertaining inventiveness, sustained ridiculousness and even, dare I say it, a spasm of eloquence in Deacon’s twisted tribute to the frailties of the human race.

Represents a big growth spurt in Mr. Cronenberg's career. Its measured pace, along with a style that is sometimes austere (though sometimes anything but) repays close attention with excellent acting and a wealth of absorbing information.

Nicole Kidman places the bereaved heroine of Rabbit Hole in a nether land between life and not-quite-life. Her beautiful performance transcends the specifics of the script, which David Lindsay-Abaire adapted from his play of the same name.

It is by turns harrowing, affecting, unexpectedly funny, truly scary and fantastical. (The cinematographer was Juan Jose Saravia.) The fantasy grows overlush from time to time, but Ms. López has created an original work of art in genre disguise.

In the end, though, the success of American Gangster doesn't flow from the originality of its ideas, or its bid for epic status, as much as from its craftsmanship and confident professionalism. It's a great big gangster film, and a good one.

Absurdist, but also condescending and self-infatuated; The Royal Tenenbaums is at least three times too clever for its own good.

How could a movie with such likable actors be so deeply dislikable?

Jeff Nichols's third feature traffics unerringly in truth, delicious surprise, unadorned beauty and unforced wisdom.

Mr. Gyllenhaal’s startling portrayal is far from the only distinction in this impeccably crafted feature film. Mr. Gilroy’s directorial debut connects its hero’s tacit madness to the larger craziness of a broadcast medium that teaches vast numbers of viewers to live with a false sense of insecurity.

The film is a fable, to be sure, and one that unfolds at a leisurely pace, not a tough-minded psychological drama. But it’s sharp-witted as well as soulful, reasonably suspenseful.

The trip is entertaining and even instructive — not about the facts of the case, which go from murky to opaque, but about the slip-slidingly elusive nature of truth.

Catching Fire is exceptional entertainment, a spectacle with a good mind and a pounding heart.

Wonderfully funny and subversively affecting.

The film is neither kind nor cruel, but wise, great-spirited and wonderfully enjoyable. It’s an addled dream of beauty unlike any other.

This screen adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s autobiographical best-seller is burdened, out of fidelity to the book, with life lessons and unneeded explanations that it dispenses, like CliffsNotes, at every opportunity.

Modest in scale but formidable in its impact.

None of this is uninteresting, and much of it is fascinating as the film gets up close and personal with the earth’s seething innards.

This isn’t a great film, but it’s a work of great subtlety with artfully smudged boundaries — “Rashomon” in modern dress and watercolors.

The film isn’t just about their search for love and the vagaries of modern dating, but the craziness of life as it’s lived by passionate, gifted people with insufficient channels for their passion and shabby containers for their gifts.

Shrewdly reconceived, powerfully acted and hugely entertaining.

The wonder of the film is how good it makes us feel. Greenberg scintillates with intelligence, razor's-edge humor and austere empathy for its struggling lovers.

A stylish thriller with real complexity, people with interesting faces, a sensational actress cast as an ambisexual Goth hacker heroine--the news about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is nothing but good.

That's not to say that this first visit to a live-action Narnia on screen isn't enjoyable, or promising for the future of what will surely be a successful franchise. But there's not a lot of humor along the way, and the epic struggle between good and evil plays out in battles more impressive than thrilling.

Austere and magnificent film.

One of the great strengths of Farewell Amor is its intimacy, the sense it conveys of three people close together yet emotionally distant in Walter’s small, narrow Brooklyn apartment.

Ms. Gerwig’s performance is a comic diamond, and not in the rough. Her timing is flawless, her delivery is droll. The character she has created — from a remarkably smart and supple script, plus her own unerring instincts — may have spiritual connections with Cate Blanchett’s delusional Jasmine or Diane Keaton’s blissed-out Annie Hall (Brooke solemnly and absurdly consults a spirit medium).

I've made a good case for seeing Rango, and why not; an eye feast is still a feast in this lean multiplex season. Be advised, though, of the film's peculiar deficits. The narrative isn't really dramatic, despite several send-up face-offs. It's more like a succession of picturesque notions that might have flowed from DreamWorks or Pixar while their story departments were out to lunch.

Border may not be everyone’s idea of a fun night out, but it takes you to places you won’t forget, and that’s nothing to sniff at.

JW is played brilliantly by Joel Kinnaman, who is familiar to American audiences of "The Killing" on AMC.

What The Art of the Steal documents most dramatically is the irresistible pull of irreplaceable art.

A singularly strange and affecting comedy.

The film is picture-book pretty and fairly conventional, except for the 3-D, which is emerging as a convention in its own right. Still, the prettiness comes with brains, and the whole production, like those newly eye-catching models of American-made cars, bespeaks resurgent confidence.

Goes from good to great in 90 minutes, and then it's over, except that it's really not, because this small masterwork grows even deeper and more affecting as it takes up permanent residence in your memory.

Every moment strengthens the essence of the drama—the bond of love between two people who came out of their mother’s womb within seconds of one another.

Andrew Garfield's phenomenal performance makes room for the many and various pieces of Jack's personality, whether or not they're securely fastened together.

In addition to being borderline unendurable, Funny Games is inexplicable, and I don't mean in any philosophical sense.

Any movie with these two comics is a trip and a half. How about France for the next one? A perfect way to revisit Michael Caine.

The movie's metaphorical dimensions rarely interfere with the concrete, quirky pleasures of its story. The Flower of My Secret is Mr. Almodovar's most entertaining work since his phenomenal "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." [15 Mar 1996]

Lovely & Amazing goes to the heart -- and face, and skin -- of a subject that's sure to ring true with women, and may even educate men.

There's plenty of scary pleasure to be had from this clever, compact thriller.

Never lacks for extravagance — the film looks as striking as it sounds — and some of the tales certainly seem outlandish. Yet they’re part of a truly remarkable origin story that the film and its subjects explore with uncommon thoughtfulness and depth of feeling.

The real head-scratcher is how such an endearingly modest, gentle film can say so much with such eloquence about a professional partnership that amounts to a love affair; about the mysterious business of being funny; and about the toll taken by the passage of time. (Messrs. Reilly and Coogan are both wonderful; so are Shirley Henderson and Nina Arianda as, respectively, Ollie’s wife, Lucille, and Stan’s wife, Ida.)

Undine isn’t a conventional romance, or a readily accessible one, but open yourself to this special film and you’re liable to be hooked.

Don’t write it off. You know about good things and small packages; this is a dark and startling thing in a brightly wrapped package, and the brightness is all the more misleading because the action takes place during Iceland’s radiant summer.

It’s a strange piece of work, full of paradox — sharply analytical about the ways of love, yet sometimes plodding to the point of self-parody; intentionally distanced, yet offputtingly so, despite an exquisite performance by one of the stars, Clotilde Courau.

Any meaningful perspective on the greedfest of the period is obscured by the gleefulness of the depiction.

Major League Baseball has passed new rules for the Dominican system, according to the film's closing credits, rules that will limit signing bonuses. Yet the harvest will continue, and it's not a pretty sight.

Where Dark Horse shines brightest is in its portraits of individuals, and of a town raised up from the depths of economic despair by the promise of one of its own making good.

The film is a dramatic and visual feast, one that portrays its adversaries as passionate humans who move us and make us laugh while they’re having at each other in search of common theological ground.

The larger problem, transcending all realms, is that this action-adventure sequel from Marvel soon turns so dumb and 3-D-murky that it hurts.

The celebrated percussionist Evelyn Glennie is the subject of a wonderful documentary called Touch the Sound, although calling her a percussionist is like calling Brancusi a demolitionist.

In what I think may be the filmmaker’s plan, all that stuff — that maddeningly cacophonous Stuff — is what we’re meant to cut through and get past in order to become as alert and alive as the star of Mr. Godard’s movie. In this interpretation, it’s the pooch who points the way toward perceiving beauty by learning to live in the vibrant, fragrant present.

So what does the film, playing in theaters, want to make millions of moviegoers feel? Delight in graphic design? Sure, but the filmmaker’s familiar motifs, playful and inventive as they may be, operate in an emotional void.

Lost in La Mancha, a documentary about a movie that never got made, is more involving -- and heartbreaking -- than many movies that do get made.

Where the movie is at its best is in the comically laconic, straight-to-the-camera remarks offered by Carthage's residents. (They're played by a mix of local actors and real townspeople doing partially scripted versions of themselves.)

Through it all -- the free-form conversations, the brilliant set pieces, the preposterous gross-outs, the flawless performances -- Kristen Wiig's forlorn maid of honor, Annie, seeks her own destiny with a wrenchingly cockeyed passion.

This is a significant addition to the Verhoeven canon, meaning it’s elegantly crafted, formidably well performed and as fascinating as it is lurid.

The Invisible Woman gives us a plausible image of the great man in the fullness of his celebrity, and an affecting portrait of the woman who lived much of her life in his shadow.

Tully turns out to be a twofer. There’s the movie you see, which is whipsmart, intimate, affecting and fearlessly funny about the mixed blessings of motherhood. And there’s the movie you replay in your mind to sort out its several mysteries. That one is richer, deeper and strangely beautiful.

He’s (Oldman) superb in this one, a study in eccentric but magnetic leadership, and in masterly acting.

Ms. Hurwitz’s film, which was written by Michael Levine, is modest in scale yet far-ranging.

The film succeeds powerfully, even though it's short on practical solutions, makes some questionable statements of fact and, given Gore's current ambiguous position in public life, requires a tighter focus on the message than on the messenger.

There are remakes and there are remakes. I don't want to belabor the flaws and sexual excesses of the original; its great strength was its explosive energy. Still, this one investigates the unfulfilled potential of the first one so thoroughly, and develops it so audaciously, that it qualifies as a brilliant reinvention.

There's an old-Hollywood feel to the movie's solid showmanship and unabashed sophistication. These days it's feature-length 'toons, sporting the newest-fangled technology, that take kids and adults alike back to the movies' good old days.

In the new film beauty is sought, and seldom found, in glitzy surfaces. Enchantment is chased, and never captured, in extravagant set pieces that owe less to fairy-tale tradition than to Cirque du Soleil grandiosity.

I’ll See You In My Dreams, has its shortcomings as drama, but she’s (Danner) the heroine, Carol Petersen, and she takes advantage of every resonant moment the role offers her.

If you’re looking for something to lift you up and take you away from the tumult and anguish of the moment, seek out Our Little Sister, a lovely new film, in Japanese with English subtitles, that’s going into national distribution this week.

The star of Susanna Nicchiarelli’s freely fictionalized biopic, Trine Dyrholm, finds fierce beauty in the woman Nico has become. I’ve never seen a performance quite like it — unsparingly harsh, but also graceful, droll and tender, a portrait of soul-weariness laced with a yearning for salvation.