Joe Morgenstern

A remarkably fine and genuinely frightening movie about a teenage vampire.

Taxi to the Dark Side adds something new to our awareness -- interviews with soldiers who served as interrogators in Afghanistan, and in Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison, and who, in some cases that ended in courts martial, served prison terms themselves.

The best news about this clangorous clunker is that it may well have vanquished the Mummy franchise.

In many ways the film reflects its hero’s brilliance. It’s a scintillating construction, though one that sometimes feels like a product launch in its own right.

The director, Kevin Macdonald, searches for clarity amid the contradictions of Marley's life and reaches no conclusions, but that's a tribute to his subject's complexity in a film of fascinating too-muchness.

An absolutely thrilling recreation, in documentary style, of a now-legendary story.

Le Havre stands on its own fragile but considerable merits.

The narrative jumps back and forth between the two time frames, rather than telling Karamakate’s story in linear fashion, and these juxtapositions deepen the film’s resonance.

A drama crossed with a polemic that’s enriched by a black-history lesson, the film is sprawling, enthralling and essential viewing.

Mostly, though, The Last Black Man in San Francisco — which is what Jimmie sometimes feels like in the gentrifying city of his birth — glides from moment to meaningful moment with cumulative power and singular grace.

A splendid war movie. The combat sequences are harrowing -- all the more so for the director's spare, sharp-eyed style -- and the performances are phenomenally fine.

This one follows its own goofy rules, fills the screen with astonishing images, tells a touching tale of outcast dogs and a faithful boy, and does so with ultralively deadpan wit. My only regret after seeing it at a screening was that I couldn’t stay and see it again.

Since you can't read my lips, read my words: See this movie.

A film that asks its audience to invest serious thought, and in return, bestows serious pleasure.

An impressive and self-impressed documentary by Jennifer Peedom, has some of the best speck shots you could imagine—not spec as in speculation, though the film offers plenty of that on the subject of why human beings choose to climb tall peaks, but speck as in the size of a human seen against a stupendous alpine landscape.

This is a debut feature, though you'd never know it from the filmmaker's commandingly confident style, or from the heartbreaking beauty -- heartbreaking, then heartmending -- of Melissa Leo's performance as a poor single mother who's living her whole life on thin ice.

What's on screen, though, is a peculiar clutter of gentle sentiment, awkward dialogue, shaky contrivance — especially the resolution of Joey's feelings — and monotonous performances from a supporting cast that includes Marisa Tomei and Darren Burrows.

I also know The Assassin to be so ravishingly lovely that tracking the plot is far less important than luxuriating in the images.

Deeply affecting.

Ms. Howard is nothing less than mesmerizing. She seems to be giving a master class in unswerving focus and absolute simplicity. It’s a superb piece of acting about acting, and a harbinger of great things to come in this young actor’s future.

The film succeeds on its own terms — an exciting entertainment that makes us feel good about the outcome, and about the reach of American power, rather than its limits. Yet the narrative container is far from full. There isn't enough incident or complexity to sustain the entire length of this elaborately produced star vehicle.

It’s a beautiful film, a piece of absurdism that goes straight to the heart.

This astute, subversively funny film fills a broad canvas. Mainly, though, it’s about long division, the all-too-human state of being permanently and unwittingly split down the middle.

Loving it is not the issue, of course—the level of amputating, eviscerating, decapitating violence transcends good nasty fun. The challenge is taking it in, watching it without averting your eyes—I can’t say mine stayed fixed on the screen—and seeing it for what it is, a tumultuous, graphically gorgeous entertainment for our time as well as an ineffably somber meditation on our species’ seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of savagery.

Fascinating — though overlong and sometimes slow.

The silents, as this film suggests, achieved aesthetic marvels before sound came along to set things back for a while.

Mike Leigh's latest film preserves the mystery of why another marriage has flourished over decades. That's not the stated subject of Another Year, but it's at the center of this enjoyable though insistently schematic comedy.

At Berkeley is more than the sum of its minutes. Narration-free and artfully discursive, it's a one-of-a-kind mosaic portrait of a great institution struggling, under dire stress, to retain its essential character at a time of declining support for public education.