Joe Morgenstern

In the realm of documentary films, as in the news media, polemicists are ascendant, but Frederick Wiseman isn’t one of them. For the past half-century, since his first film, “Titicut Follies,” he’s been an observationist. Not an observer, which carries a passive connotation, but a filmmaker who’s made a distinguished career of observing in a particular way — closely, calmly, shrewdly and systematically, with an eye to the institutions and social structures that shape and reveal people’s lives.

Remaking a cherished movie is not, to borrow a fancy phrase from the dialogue, malum in se - wrong in itself - but there are always losses along with the changes and gains.

Rarely have age and shining youth been juxtaposed more affectingly, but that’s only one of many moments of grace in a movie that mines its resonant mythology while moving its story ever forward.

A movie of minimalist moments (Molly's tiniest gestures speak volumes) and lovely, almost holy tableaux.

More to the point of this marvelous film, who knew there were kids as heroic, in their various ways, as these valiant super-spellers?

Words of wisdom keep popping up in My Dog Tulip with gratifying regularity. They're more likely to gratify dog lovers than anyone else, but that's a large group to which I belong.

The whole production speaks well for the power of film; it’s a serious stunner.

Seduces us with its leisurely pace and felicitous details into believing that something miraculous is afoot in a mundane rural community.

Mr. Haigh’s previous feature was “45 Years,” a drama of marital distress, starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, in which the strongest feelings went unspoken. The words in his new film are pungent in themselves, but they’re given greater power by Mr. Plummer’s remarkable performance.

This ingenious and beautiful film by Mia Hansen-Løve isn’t for chewing so much as savoring. The more you think back on its mysteries, the more pleasure it bestows.

Though his movie wraps challenging ideas and ingenious visual conceits in a futurist film-noir style, it's pretentious, didactic and intentionally but mercilessly bleak in ways that classic noir never was.

Every once in a while a movie grabs you, unsuspecting, and hustles its way into your heart. Jeremiah Zagar’s We the Animals does that. This exquisite debut feature, based on a poetic debut novel by Justin Torres, is a tumbling evocation of a volatile family, narrated by one of three young brothers living in upstate New York with their Puerto Rican father and white mother.

Ms. Buckley brings her own truth to this mostly synthetic confection, and it’s a beautiful thing to behold.

Every sport, and every sports film, must have its superman. The role is filled here by Laird Hamilton, who, we are told -- and, more astonishingly, shown -- took "the single most significant ride in surfing history." Seeing is believing.

Room 237, which goes into national distribution this weekend, may be the surpassingly eccentric — and enormously entertaining — film that Kubrick deserves.

Given the nature of the production — it was made for grownups, not children, in an era when life moves much faster than it did in Mr. Rogers’s day — sticky sweetness threatens at every turn, along with naked contrivance. Yet the movie bets on goodness, and wins.

For those with a hunger for surprising, affecting films, I say seek this one out by all means. Mr. Kuosmanen’s direction of actors is impeccable; he and his stars deserve one another fully.

This modest little fable from Israel, in English, Hebrew and Arabic, has spellbinding resonances, yet never breaks the spell by blowing its own horn.

Desert One, a superb documentary by Barbara Kopple, snatches high drama from the jaws of devastating failure.

The result is a movie more concerned with movie-making than with the stuff of Sterne's great book, but a movie that's good for lots of laughs if you share its fondness for actors and for fatuous actors' banter, which I do.

Many movies these days are too long; this one, at 90 minutes, feels too short. That's because its purpose is so sharply defined: a tight close-up, in black and white, of a single, seminal moment -- a black and white moment -- in American history, and American journalism.

The heart of the film, though, lies in what remains closest to Mr. Crosby’s heart—not the bum one with the eight stents but the musical one that has been churning out new songs and albums with improbable, unquenchable zest. True to its subject, who has been true to his muse, David Crosby: Remember My Name is about music in a revelatory way.

A work of singular beauty and a significant technical achievement, the film makes water audible — the thumps and groans of calving glaciers sound like the planet coming apart — and almost palpable; heaving mountains of blue-black waves in an Atlantic storm convey stupendous mass and titanic energy as in no motion picture I’ve seen before.

As Crowhurst's situation grows desperate, the scope of the film expands -- from a good yarn to a haunting, complex tale of self-promotion, media madness, self-delusion and, finally, self-destruction.

Like earlier Dardenne films, Lorna’s Silence is naturalistic, yet this one, beautifully shot in 35 mm film by Alain Marcoen, achieves a poetry of bereftness.

Clouds Of Sils Maria. swirls with provocative ideas, but they’re talked about more than dramatized

Coraline is distinguished, if you can call it that, by a creepiness so deep as to seem perverse, and the film finally succumbs to terminal deficits in dramatic energy, narrative coherence and plain old heart.

While the film itself isn't perfect, who cares about perfection in the face of abundant life, authentic screwiness and lovely surprises by the busload?