Manohla Dargis

Immaculate doesn’t try to reinvent anything but instead cheerfully embraces the familiar, which is part of what makes the movie enjoyable.

Mr. Jennings and Mr. Goldsmith have held onto a genuine sense of childlike wonder, which works as a nice corrective to what might otherwise come across as an overabundance of hip.

If the screenwriter and director had followed their cinematic instincts fully, they would have collaborated on one of the more satisfying political thrillers in years; instead, they've managed to create three-quarters of one.

There is something heartening about Mr. Burton's love for bones and rot here, if only because it suggests, despite some recent evidence, that he is not yet ready to abandon his own dark kingdom.

In this context Ferrell seems more than just comic relief. He's a reminder that the greatest, deepest laughter doesn't come at the expense of some other guy, but from the glints of self-recognition we get when the screen becomes our mirror.

A surprisingly affecting mood piece.

The movie opens with the defendant bashing in the victim’s head and then burning the corpse. A trial seems almost beside the point, a view that the writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda goes on to dismantle with lapidary precision.

Effectively fashioned, as jolting as it is polished, as well as a surprising, insistently political work of commercial art.

Here, a pulse, wit, beauty and a real sensibility have been slipped into the fray, alongside the clockwork guffaws, kabooms and splats.

One of the strengths of Breach, a thriller that manages to excite and unnerve despite our knowing the ending, is how well it captures the utter banality of this man and his world.

Hilarious, unnerving and remarkably intimate portrait of multiethnic adolescent life that lends vigorous new meaning to the term "teen movie."

Since Mr. Wright and Mr. Pegg are essentially parodying self-parodies, they have also smartly kinked up their conceit by setting most of the film in a sleepy village that might as well be called Ye Old English Towne, thereby wedding one of the most irritating British exports to one of the most absurd American ones. Think of it as "The Full Monty" blown to smithereens.

It won't make you bleed, just howl.

A lovely, drifty first feature that feels less like a documentary and more like an act of rapturous devotion.

Mr. West shows a real gift for the genre, particularly in his ability to generate dread with pinpricks rather than bludgeoning shocks, something even veterans twice his age have difficulty achieving. After years of vivisectionist splatter, here is a horror movie with real shivers.

Even a starring role in the American version of the British show "The Office," which has given Mr. Carell a higher profile, conveys neither his sheer likability nor his range as an actor, both crucial to making this film work as well as it does.

More than anything else, Ask the Dust feels like a compendium of desires - for a city, for a woman, for youth.

One of the best films to open so far this year, but greeting each new work from a favored director as if it were equally brilliant can't be good for anyone, the director included.

Soderbergh's smart, spooky thriller about a thicket of contemporary plagues - a killer virus, rampaging fear, an unscrupulous blogger - is as ruthlessly effective as the malady at its cool, cool center.

Mr. Doueiri creates characters, emotional colors and political contradictions that have the agonized sting and breathe of life.

Funny, audacious, messy and feverishly inspired look at America and its discontents.

There is pleasure in such useless beauty, of course, and pleasure too in drifting with the jellyfish amid the wild blue yonder of a great filmmaker’s imagination.

It's possible that Maggie Gyllenhaal will never become a major star, but there isn't an American actress in movies today who holds the screen with as much deep-seated soul.

The film is at once breathtaking and ridiculous, and it's the tension between these two extremes, as well as Carax's own intoxicating style, that makes it essential viewing.

With In the Pit [Rulfo] isn't advancing any totalizing theory, a treatise on transportation or an argument about alienation; he is, rather simply and elegantly, revealing the secret human face of a seemingly inhuman world.

If the cast is distractingly pretty, the performances are also quite fine and, in the case of Gordon-Levitt, exceptional.

Narrative ambiguity can be fruitful but also a cop-out, as too many would-be art films tediously demonstrate. Here, though, the movie’s vagueness dovetails with both François’s and especially Émile’s confusion, and importantly, it also serves as a counterpoint to their unshakable love for Lana.

There's undeniable pathos to many of these encounters, and because the director has a wonderful feel for color and knows how to throw a frame around the world, there's also unmistakable beauty.

Then too there's the sheer pleasure of hearing these words spoken by an actor like Mr. Fiennes, whose phrasing is so brilliant, you might be tempted to close your eyes if his physical performance weren't equally mesmerizing.

This movie opens itself to you with its feeling for people, its grace notes and a few bravura moments that close the distance between characters beautifully.

As his attention to detail and beauty shots prove, Mr. Maringouin has a terrific eye: he brings you close to Mr. Strel, sometimes within panting distance, without forgetting the larger, lovelier world.

A hugely appealing documentary about fans, faith and an enigmatic Age of Aquarius musician who burned bright and hopeful before disappearing.

The Legend of Tarzan has a whole lot of fun, big-screen things going for it — adventure, romance, natural landscapes, digital animals and oceans of rippling handsome man-muscle. Its sweep and easy pleasures come from its old-fashioned escapades — it’s one long dash through the jungle by foot, train, boat and swinging vine — but what makes it more enjoyable than other recycled stories of this type is that the filmmakers have given Tarzan a thoughtful, imperfect makeover.

The only news here — and, really, the greatest surprise — is how thoroughly this ribald, at times predictably unflattering movie humanizes its protagonist, a classic American striver.

A spasmodically funny and bleak film about the love that speaks its name.

The film is accessible, pleasant, dreamy, a touch goofy and melancholic. Its modernist gestures are little more than stylistic tics, but there's an image of snow falling on two clasped hands that is almost rapturous. The role of the artist remains, for Mr. Resnais, the role of a lifetime.

Part of what makes a great documentary great is the subject, and though the film never scrapes below the surface of the schoolteacher -- we never find out if he lives alone or has children of his own -- Lopez pulls as hard on the imagination as a fictional character.

Kim works like a pointillist with lots of short scenes and daubs of textured nuance that build the portrait incrementally.

In a free-for-all like this, where the laws of gravity and dictates of narrative logic are left to eat dust, it doesn't matter when anything takes place or why.

Mr. Plummer stumbles beautifully, poignantly and often, leering and searching through a haze of memory or, with concern edged with panic, calling for "a line, a line" much as Richard III calls for a horse.

When Jenkins is true to himself, he soars; he stumbles, though, when he’s overly faithful to the novel or doesn’t trust the audience.

Bethlehem is emphatically political, as perhaps any movie about warring Israelis and Palestinians must be. Yet its ideas are more complex than is suggested by either its schematic story or fast-moving genre elements.

[Ms. Shawkat] and Mr. Arteta, a sensitive observer of life’s everyday churn (his credits include “Beatriz at Dinner”), do some lovely work in a movie that reminds you that sometimes all you need in realist fiction is a glimpse into another person’s being — but with heart and intelligence, good craft and technique.

Ms. Dean relates Lamarr’s ventures, those onscreen and off, with savvy and narrative snap, fluidly marshaling a mix of original interviews and archival material that includes film clips, home movies and other footage.

Mr. Willis has always been an acquired taste, but for those who did acquire that taste, riding shotgun on his good times and bad, it's a pleasure to see him doing what comes naturally.

Choreographed by the film martial-arts veteran Sammo Hung, the fights are spectacularly designed and performed, relying more on muscle and skill than wirework.

Picks up where the early François Truffaut and his comrades-in-cinema left off -- with a playful, liberatory style, and a song (actually, a few) in his heart and on his actors’ lips.

With its fragmentation and mysteries, Upstream Color offers itself up as a puzzle as well as a philosophical toy that you can spin and spin until the cafe closes and kicks you into the night.

A central work in the new, boldly politicized Iranian cinema.

About as non-narrative a film as you're likely to see in commercial theaters. This makes it a curiosity and, less charitably, something of a gimmick, but mostly it makes it a challenge.

The casting of the two leads is a nice surprise in Red Eye, as is its modest scale. One of the ironies about the film is that its relatively small-movie feel allows Mr. Craven to focus on the sorts of things - the performances and little bits of business from the extras - that a director like Michael Bay doesn't have time for, partly because he is so busy blowing stuff up.

Endearingly ridiculous.

Guaranteed to infuriate anyone with strongly partisan opinions about the region. The film offers up simultaneous critiques of Palestinian and Israeli extremism, but the most radical thing about it is that it's often disquietingly funny.

The world that Mr. Guadagnino creates is at once seductive and aspirational, and another reminder that movies have always excelled at stoking consumer desires.

His (Ralph Fiennes) Voldemort may be the greatest screen performance ever delivered without the benefit of a nose; certainly it's a performance of sublime villainy.

A cold, funny number about the erotics of money and the seduction of death.

What helps make The Departed at once a success and a relief isn't that the director of "Kundun," Mr. Scorsese's deeply felt film about the Dalai Lama, is back on the mean streets where he belongs; what's at stake here is the film and the filmmaking, not the director's epic importance.

Through everyday actions and gestures -- in Hussein's awkward exchanges with other people, in his tender fumbling of his fiancée's purse -- Panahi shows a man for whom life has become increasingly arduous, alien. The filmmaker captures, in other words, what Bresson called "the force in the air before the storm."

A first-rate, seemingly sweat-free entertainer, Mr. Boyle always sells the goods smoothly, along with the chills, the laughs and, somewhat less often, the tears. He’s wickedly good at making you jump and squirm in your seat, which he does often in Sunshine, but he tends to avoid tapping into deep wells of emotion.

At times, Colin and Mitch’s trip to Iceland feels like a lark, for them and for the filmmakers. Yet there’s no denying the deepening effect of a movie in which two older men, with their creases and sags, white and thinning hair, inhabit so much screen time.

A delicate wisp of a film with a surprisingly sharp sting.

Bonitzer evinces an appreciable warmth toward his creations that you feel even from the analytic distance he establishes.

Works its charms slowly but steadily.

[A] deceptively sincere movie about masculinity and its discontents that Mr. Gordon-Levitt, making a fine feature directing debut, shapes into a story about a young man's moral education.

Belly dancing isn't always the most thrilling of dances, but it's a blast to see these women shaking and rolling because they're so thoroughly in charge of the male clientele and their own sexuality.

While A Single Man has its flaws, many of these fade in view of the performance and the power of Isherwood’s story.