Manohla Dargis

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.