John Anderson

The unlikely, bittersweet, bristling comedy Support the Girls is easily one of the best films of the year, and the most sympathetic to women, despite having been made by a man. How can this be? Luckily, Andrew Bujalski’s remarkable movie — with its killer performance by Regina Hall — is not just about women. It’s about men being idiots. And no one is arguing ownership of that narrative.

The film acknowledges the bones of Johnson’s story—a very thin narrative in terms of things actually happening, though the things that happen are enormous. The execution is nevertheless lush, sometimes startlingly beautiful, and painterly and evocative of Johnson’s elegiac theme about a bygone America. The Old World is never old until it’s gone, but in Train Dreams one feels it passing.

A film like About Endlessness invites comparisons not to other movies, but to other media. The Preludes of Chopin or Debussy, for instance, brilliant flashes that don’t need to go anywhere, but might. Or something like Baudelaire’s “Paris Spleen,” an intriguing whole composed of incongruous poetic fragments.

The performers—not just the miraculous Ms. Pugh but Ms. Cassidy; her mother, Elaine Cassidy (who plays Anna’s mother); and Tom Burke, as the journalist-love interest Will Byrne—give memorably complex portrayals in a tale where elements theological, maternal, political and pictorial are transformed alchemically into narrative gold.

Museo is in part a caper film, a heist film, and while it leans on such classics as “Topkapi” and “Rififi” the robbery has its own signature and is done in a visual style that’s hypnotic.

It might have taken one actress to make a movie so reliant on others. It certainly took a director with a supreme confidence, not just in the talents of her performers but in the power of gesture.

It also happens to feature a pair of performances that eclipse all else around them.

Felix (Duvall) simply wants to host his own goodbye, maybe have a band, and the reasons why are the reasons Get Low is essential viewing. That, and the acting.

It’s a masterpiece — an overused word, but not the wrong one.

There are not a lot of moments in documentary cinema that equal Citizenfour. Ms. Poitras was already at work on a film about government surveillance when Mr. Snowden presented himself, and she’s something of a lightning rod, too, one with little evident sympathy for Obama administration data mining.

The characters are really minimalist masterpieces, sculpted, polished and uncompromisingly female.

Thoroughly entertaining, startling and highly erotic film.

Anderson, who makes as impressive a directing debut as has been seen in some time, creates a perfectly modulated mystery that doesn't even feel like one. It's a character play, and Hall, Reilly and Paltrow are so convincingly damaged they take on the properties of fine china.

The pulp-fictional hero is inhabited by the charismatic Andy Lau who, together with Chinese stars Bingbing Li, Ms. Lau and Tony Leung Ka-fai, makes Detective Dee the most purely entertaining film of our vanishing summer.

With A Hidden Life and the story of Franz Jägerstätter, the director has found the ideal vehicle for his cosmic inquiries, and has created a film that is mournful, memorable and emotionally exhilarating.

The aesthetics of Mr. Wiseman’s visual storytelling have seldom been so prominent or important as in “Menus-Plaisirs.”

The creative process is always an elusive thing for filmmakers to capture, but amid all the startling visuals and the splendid acting, Polina rises, gloriously, to the challenge.

As a work of nonfiction, it deserves its own nomenclature. "Docu-poem" is too inelegant; "masterpiece" works, although it's been used before.

Much of the fun of Marjorie Prime is in figuring out where it’s going, and why. It would be shameful to reveal much more of the journey save to say that the people who make it do a splendid job.

Infectious and inspiring, despite one's best efforts to resist its charms.

While there seems to be a glut of b-ball documentaries right now, “Underrated” is, much like its subject, a highly graceful, even artistic entry into a muscle-bound medium.

The filmmaking is fluid and electric; the acting, precise; the archetypal storytelling, seamless and brutal. What happens in “La Jaula de Oro” might enrage audiences, and probably for a variety of reasons. But there’s no getting away without it leaving a mark.

Frank is a genuine original in a summer sea of sameness, and a darkly comedic manifesto against the cultural status quo.

Mr. Kauffman is interested in pure storytelling, the rise and fall of his various characters, which covers at least the last 10 years; he has created a beautiful film in terms of its aesthetics and affection for the machinery and people. But he is also telling a cautionary tale about the cluttering of space, and the pursuit not just of profit but power.

Containing as much forward motion as any film in recent memory, Good Time is as heartbreaking as it is exhilarating, and that’s no small thing.

Director David Mackenzie's gripping, convincing and convincingly violent convict drama owes its authenticity largely to the experiences of ex-prison therapist Jonathan Asser, who wrote its screenplay. But the opening 10 minutes are a virtuosic example of virtually wordless filmmaking.

In a film of grand acting, flamboyant color, vaulting ambition and global conflict, the more slippery gestures contain much meaning.

There is an implicit story within—about the ancients building with marble for eternity and us moderns building with concrete for a virtual moment. But it isn’t just beauty Mr. Kossakovsky is concerned with here. It is how humans view their world and, more importantly, themselves. And their place in the universe. And their disposable landscape.