John Anderson

The length of his film is an essential element in Mr. Bayona’s message about desperation and hope and, dare one say it, the resilience of the spirit. The soiled, ailing, sunburned husks of men who emerge from the mountains are heroes, though they look every bit like ghosts.

There’s not a lot of mystery to Bye Bye Barry, unless you count the puzzle posed by a person like William Sanders, who is spoken of by his son in nothing but admiring and affectionate terms and must have inspired something in a child so devoted to being the best at what he did.

Mr. Domingo is a force of nature in this film, delivering a complex, highly sympathetic portrayal, but he also determines what the movie actually is, while preventing it from going awry.

Much of what makes “The Boy Who Lived” special are the inexplicable ways people respond to the unexpected, and the randomly tragic, and whether they stick around when it would be much easier to vanish, as if by wizardry.

The audio recordings left by the first lady were clearly intended for posterity, and as such are discreet and politic but always revelatory, even by omission: LBJ’s legendary philandering, for instance, is never mentioned.

It is the understated, matter-of-fact tone of the story that sucks us in, and the two central performances that help make this effort by Ms. Moss such a singular addition to the monster catalog.

Watching Mr. Brooks’s career roll out in a compressed form is quite a treat, though Mr. Reiner seems to race toward the finish to include everything that he needs to get in.

The seductive visual rhythms of “Mr. Chow” are the result of Ms. Tsien’s editing (with Anita H.M. Yu and Eugene Yi), accessorized to no small degree by the magical animation of Rohan Patrick McDonald.

Based on the Le Carré memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel allows Mr. Morris to exercise his extraordinary gift for making the interview format irresistibly cinematic, and feels like a collaboration of kindred spirits.

The writing sometimes collapses into overkill, but sometimes it is precisely on point.

The film is better couch fare than most of what we will see at any time of year.

The divide between Mr. Sutherland and the rest of the cast is striking: The way Friedkin shoots him, and the nature of his portrayal, are in sharp contrast to the more stage-bound performances of his co-stars; it may have been intentional, though it doesn’t really work.

As directed by Menhaj Huda (“The Flash” TV series), Heist 88 is tidy, economical, forward-moving and not out to expand anyone’s visual vocabulary.

You can hear many an echo emanating from The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, sometimes to the point of cacophony. But there’s music here, too, and it is more than a requiem.

In exploring the issues that were and are involved, the film goes far deeper, as it were, than the seagoing Cold War caper thriller it naturally wants to be.

Writer-director Alejandra Márquez Abella never makes the slightest suggestion that José isn’t going to get where he’s going, but neither does she make A Million Miles Away into any kind of ethnic agitprop.

The tone is funereal; the tears are abundant. But the evidence that the organization knew that criminals were infiltrating its leadership—the documents referred to in the title were commonly known as the “perversion files”—is substantial and goes largely unchallenged.

He may not be the most charismatic news anchor in the history of TV but Mr. Kumar has nerve, arguing with bellicose callers, singing to them while they rant (and promise to kill him) and sometimes getting them to sing along. As captured by Mr. Shukla, he also works tirelessly on behalf of something that you suspect wouldn’t be quite so despised if it weren’t also the truth.

The lack of oversight revealed in BS High is appalling—Ben Ferree, a former investigator for the Ohio High School Athletic Association, is one of the film’s biggest assets, a somewhat removed, detail-oriented observer who debunks Mr. Johnson’s claims at every turn.

A lot of culture, East and West, receives glancing blows from The Monkey King, which was directed by Anthony Stacchi, whose 2014 stop-motion animated feature “The Boxtrolls” is a classic. And an entirely different animal from The Monkey King.

In several marvelously postmodern moments it recognizes its own glucose level. And the results are genuinely hilarious.

Ms. Gadot is magnetic, will probably make a delicious Evil Queen in “Snow White,” and is spinning her wheels in the snow of the Alps, the dust of the African desert and the lava sands of Iceland in an effort to place the cornerstone, so to speak, in the construction of yet another kinetic movie series.

What Mr. Mungiu puts together, in tandem with the ornate private lives of several main characters, is an anatomy of race hatred.

There are clashes of philosophy and practical action that need sorting out, and After the Bite treats both sides with respect.

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.

One of the more charming aspects of The Jewel Thief is how little animosity is shown him by members of law enforcement, whom he frequently humiliated but who can’t help but harbor respect for someone so good at what he did.

While inseparable from Ukraine and its echoes, the film argues quietly but convincingly that its story is not specific to its time and place, necessarily, but is rather about how traumatized children everywhere might respond, react and/or rebel.

Putting a bona-fide imbecile at the center of all this leads, inevitably, to far-too-predictable situations in which he will do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, sob uncontrollably, and generate no sympathy at all.