Joe Morgenstern

The last thing we need is entertainment that evokes the horror and then trivializes it with cheesy heroics. Never has a movie taken on a subject of greater immediacy, or handled it more ineptly.

I laughed myself silly through most of A Mighty Wind, and was pleasantly surprised when it took a turn toward genuine feeling near the end.

What’s remarkable about Arrival is its contemplative core—and, of course, Ms. Adams’s star performance, which is no less impassioned for being self-effacing.

It's a comedy of crisp, mordant wit and quietly radiating warmth, as well as a coming-of-age story with a lovely twist -- you can't always spot the best candidates for maturity.

Here's one vote for the most affecting, anguishing, revealing and prophetic scene of the movie year-and yes, it's all of those things at once in a powerful film that alternates between moments of earlier happiness and later pain.

The payoff is sneakily profound — sneakily because this small-scale drama grabs you when you least expect it, often with the help of the dog.

Just as Aubrey's authority springs from skill and knowledge, so does the film's power. They don't make movies like this any more because few people know how to make them.

This wonderfully strange and exquisite little feature was created, especially for young children, to celebrate the book through another kind of illumination that's been falling into disuse--hand-drawn animation.

The film feels freshly minted because the man who made it has such a lively mind and fearless style. At a time when all too many movies are selling bleakness and dysfunction, it also feels like a revenant from Hollywood’s golden age, when an entertainment’s highest function was to entertain.

This joyless thriller runs the gamut from unconscionable through unwatchable to unendurable.

The film is exuberant and heartfelt, and the hero’s journey takes him through spectacular territory; the picturesque land of the living pales by comparison to what Miguel discovers in the Land of the Dead.

This wise and funny film, in Japanese with English subtitles, works small miracles in depicting the pivotal moment when kids turn from the wishfulness of childhood into shaping the world for themselves.

Nobody doesn't like Tina Fey, and anyone aware of her starring role in Admission will be wishing her well. But wishing won't make this dramedy any less dreary than it is.

Bridge of Spies isn’t conventionally exciting, and isn’t intended to be. Instead, it’s satisfying — thoroughly and pleasurably so.

Anyone who doesn’t have a grand time watching Shaun the Sheep Movie is suffering from a fractured funny bone that needs to be reset.

Long and winding though it may be, Road to Perdition gets to places that are well worth the trip.

It's a portrait, by turns chilling, thrilling, mysterious and terrifying, of a woman who refuses to be terrorized.

A droll and affecting debut feature by Tom McCarthy.

Foxcatcher is a radical departure from Mr. Miller’s previous feature, the smart and entertaining “Moneyball.” It isn’t meant as conventional entertainment, but it’s fascinating to watch from start to finish.

The film's special mixture of sadness, comedy and hope sneaks up on you and stays in your memory.

Jane Campion has performed her own feat of romantic imagination.

At the center of this swirl of events, poignant recollections and utter pandemonium, Ms. Portman’s Jackie is a mesmerizing presence.

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.

For all its energy, fine performances and dramatic confrontations, Friday Night Lights substitutes intensity for insight, dodging the book's harsher findings like a dazzling broken-field runner.

This French-language horror film is shockingly well made for a debut feature: Julia Ducournau, who wrote and directed it, really knows her stuff and is clearly bound for mainstream success, if that’s where her appetites take her.

A good subject has been ill-served by Ms. Greenwald's cliched script and clumsy direction.

A P.T. Anderson film is, by definition, an event, even if this one doesn’t measure up to such absurdist landmarks as Howard Hawks’s “The Big Sleep,” the Coen brothers’ “The Big Lebowski” and Robert Altman’s peerless “The Long Goodbye.”

Three Identical Strangers is clear about the awful fate that befell its innocent subjects. They grew up as lab rats and didn’t know it.