Kyle Smith

Five people did escape, and they contribute their stories to the spellbinding documentary.

Ms. Reijn’s film is brilliantly evocative, exploring the shameful, shadowy parts of a complicated woman’s psyche, the ones she would never discuss and doesn’t fully understand herself.

Moreover, in attempting to update the play to a buzzing CNN world, Ralph Fiennes proves that as a director, he makes a fine actor.

The movie about his life and legend, written and directed by Sean Mullin, has two purposes and succeeds delightfully at both.

A Most Violent Year is a small picture, but each brushstroke is laden with detail and craftsmanship.

As things pick up in the second half, the splendid photography and tempestuous John Adams score cannot quite conceal that the film is uncomfortably close to being an extravagantly elongated, Fendi-clad episode of "Dynasty."

Nor does the movie try to use the game to make some larger point. Here's one: Even at its best and luckiest hour, Harvard can aspire only to equal Yale.

Silence comes to us billed as 30 years in the making. Unfortunately, it plays like 30 years in the watching.

There’s a more interesting, less strident film under the surface, but it never manages to get out.

The oddly compelling documentary Moving Midway is an engineering tale combined with a family history and a ghost story.

The film could have been improved if it had been less aggressively limp. But the post-adolescent, pre-adult moodiness is spot on: Everyone's favorite author is a bitter recluse, and the soundtrack heaves with the suicide sounds of Joy Division. Trier's intent is to reproduce a sweet, hazy vision of the agony of youth. Ever so elliptically, he succeeds.

Instead of a theme park, it’s more of a cathedral—solemn, sober, beautiful and forbidding. Greig Fraser’s photography and Hans Zimmer’s score are full of majesty.

Bidding to be the “Terms of Endearment” of zombie movies, Maggie sucks all the life out of an idea that just won’t die.

Pity the boxing movie that thinks it can be both "Raging Bull" and "Rocky."

The doc consists of interviews with the absurdly grandiose Jodorowsky (whose fans include Kanye West) plus acolytes like current director Nicolas Winding Refn and film nerds, all of whom walk us through storyboards and tell us how awesome this “greatest film never made” would have been.

Sure to be a favorite with racists, Beasts of No Nation sheds no light whatsoever on Africa’s civil wars but turns its gaze on black people brutalizing one another with machetes, howitzers, rifles and anything else that comes to hand. I picture Calvin Candie, the plantation owner in “Django Unchained,” yelling, “Yeah! Git ’em!”

In these days when flat-out comedy features are scarce, it’s one of the most welcome tenants at the summer multiplex. A mid-movie snowman gag puts the new one over the top, bestowing on it the honor of being mentionable alongside its predecessors. It sets the lunacy level to “inspired.”

It has a dogged all-night charm and a sense of who its audience is.

If you can overlook Andie MacDowell's Mitteleuropa accent as a Jewish Holocaust survivor (I know: big if), the cinematic roman a clef Mighty Fine has some quiet charms.

For two hours of breathless drama, you forget you’re watching actors grunting like chimps and hope two rival civilizations can work together.

The lean, athletic Mr. Herzog, 83 years old, seems as spry and eager as ever, and his global enthusiasm remains a force of nature in itself. Ghost Elephants takes its place as yet another of the director’s essential forays into the wild and unknown.

Honorable, worthy and windy, Fences is essentially a PBS episode of “Great Performances” that is inflated for the big screen without ever quite belonging there.

This strange and eerie noir is more a collection of knockout scenes than a fully realized story.

None of it rings true; those who seek a serious dramatic inquiry into the inner workings of the church should look elsewhere.

Carney’s film (unlike his disappointing previous effort “Begin Again”) is mad, irrepressible youth incarnate, by turns as exuberant as “The Commitments” and (nearly) as heartfelt as “Once.”

All three of these attractively awful figures are to egotism approximately what the sun is to light, which makes for a delightful triangular battle for supremacy not unlike the one in All About Eve. Clever plotting—an early, seemingly throwaway scene in which Félix does some goofy martial-arts training turns out to be critical—and inventive character details enhance the wicked fun.

Priscilla is gorgeous and at times intoxicating, but like Ms. Coppola’s previous efforts, it could do with less woolgathering and more character development.

Indignation is devastating, haunting and important.