Joe Morgenstern

The actress gets immeasurable help from the writing: Lisbeth's anger is matched by her intelligence and her physical prowess, which enables her to administer as well as absorb pain in megadoses. But none of it would register without Ms. Rapace's singular combination of eerie beauty and feral intensity. She's a movie star unlike any other.

This stop-action animated feature is downright sweet and tender, as well as all the other things we've come to expect from him -- funny, bizarre, graphically stunning and blithely necrophilic.

Paddington 2 is “The Godfather Part II” of Peruvian bear movies, a sequel that surpasses the superb original.

Mr. Wiseman’s film shows us, without telling us, that American cities continue to be laboratories for rebirth and innovation. The spirit of this one is embodied in its mayor, Marty Walsh.

What do the Coen brothers want of us? More specifically, what do they want us to think of the repellent people in this pitilessly bleak movie?

What Mr. Hoffman has done here borders on the miraculous.

Armando Iannucci’s absurdist comedy reveals this in an extremely loose manner of speaking, with malice aforethought, straight-faced glee and formidable sharpshooting that occasionally misfires. It isn’t history but free-range fiction, a venomous farce containing nuggets of fact, and if its subjects bear any resemblance to present-day dictators and authoritarian mugs or thugs around the world, then the movie has hit its archetypal target.

The movie is, by turns — and sometimes simultaneously — darkly comic, blazingly profane, flat-out hilarious and shockingly violent, not to mention flippant, tender, poetic and profound.

Quest is intimate, warm yet unsentimental and agreeably rambling, at least for a while. It’s an extended visit, squeezed into 104 minutes, with intensely likable people who are doing their best to hold things together, and, if possible, get a bit ahead.

Overlord feels like a small but vivid tragedy inside an epic container.

The filmmaker has put two familiar pieces of music to such glorious, full-throated use toward the end that I can’t resist mentioning them: Donovan’s “Deep Peace,” and “Unchained Melody” done in close harmony by the Fleetwoods. For Nathalie in the uncertainty of the here and now, peace and harmony are great ideas too.

Real life is not the movie's concern. Mr. Anderson's lovely confection — that's a pastry metaphor — keeps us smiling, and sometimes laughing out loud. Yet acid lurks in the cake's lowest layers.

The simplest thing to say about A Star Is Born is that it’s all right. Not all right as in OK with a shrug, but thrillingly, almost miraculously right in all respects.

Vincent is played masterfully by Aurelien Recoing, who gives him a sort of as-if anomie; this haunted hero is so detached that he may not realize he has no real life to be detached from.

A feature film that's often astringent on the surface, yet deeply and memorably stirring.

[Sordi] lifts buffoonery to the level of high art.

What might have been predictable or sentimental in other hands becomes startling in the film’s approach, as well as beguiling, unsparing, terribly moving and occasionally very funny.

Inside Job has the added value, as well as the cold comfort, of being furiously interesting and hugely infuriating. It's a scathing examination of the global economic meltdown that began more than two years ago and continues to affect our lives.

The first few minutes of Leave No Trace are as entrapping as the spider webs the camera notices in passing. They catch you up in a suspenseful wilderness tale that opens out to an urgent drama of conflict, beauty and growth.

No screen portrait of a king has ever been more stirring-heartbreaking at first, then stirring. That's partly due to the screenplay, which contains two of the best-written roles in recent memory, and to Mr. Hooper's superb direction.

All of the performances are superb. Ms. Smit is a special revelation. This is only her second feature, though you’d never know it from the alacrity and intensity of her scenes with Ms. Cruz.

By turns funny, elegiac and thrilling, it’s a tale of brotherhood and family that takes in the harsh beauty of the land, the elusive nature of right and wrong and the quirky delights of human connections in a time of bewildering change.

I'm still left, though, with an unshakable sense of Up being rushed and sketchy, a collection of lovely storyboards that coalesced incompletely or not at all.

The movie has a beating heart, and a big one; it’s not just sincere, but that rarest of birds in the jungle of mainstream entertainment, a heartfelt epic.

Brooklyn grabs us, holds us and moves us on its own. Emotionally it’s a killer.

Apart from a singer named You who plays Keiko, the members of the cast are non-professionals. You may find that hard to believe when you see this astonishing film, as I hope you will.

This evocation of the mission half a century ago is as good as it’s likely to get — meaning not just good but magnificent.

Casts a spell and then some -- a ringing testament to the power of motion pictures.