Manohla Dargis

Brutal, urgent, devastating -- the documentary The Devil Came on Horseback demands to be seen as soon as possible and by as many viewers as possible.

A carefully organized and sanitized war picture from Sam Mendes that turns one of the most catastrophic episodes in modern times into an exercise in preening showmanship.

A true rarity, Murderous Maids is an intelligent, moral shocker.

At once fuzzy-wuzzy and industrial strength, the tacky-sounding Kung Fu Panda is high concept with a heart.

Too often the ideas here, visual and otherwise, feel haphazard — outer and inner space, Pattinson’s head, sexual taboo, apocalypse now or maybe then — more like material for a vision board than a fully realized vision.

Alas, Tereza, whose interior life remains largely obscured from start to finish, isn’t a compelling vessel for whatever Mascaro is trying to do in this movie. And, as it drifts from one place to another, one encounter to another, one sketchy idea to another, so may your attention.

Like Hitchcock, Mr. Wong is at once a voyeur and fetishist par excellence.

Exactly the sort of good bad movie that Hollywood does best -- it's big, worthless fun.

Woodard’s performance gathers its astonishing force incrementally, in subtle choices and inflections that you might not even register as actorly decisions.

Visually sumptuous if disappointingly hollow account of Hughes's early life.

Chukwu revisits the past while doing something extremely difficult. She makes this grim American history insistently of the moment — and she does so by stripping the story down to its raw, harrowing emotional core.

In both its intellectual reach and the elegant simplicity of its form, A Talking Picture bears resemblance to Andrei Sokurov's "Russian Ark."

This film paints a haunting portrait of existential solitude, one in which the images speak louder and often more forcefully than do any of the words.

Neville was inspired by Josh Karp’s engrossing book “Orson Welles’s Last Movie,” which goes into greater detail than Neville can in 98 minutes. Karp also pays closer attention to Welles’s artistic process, which in the documentary can seem little more than pure chaos.

What Mr. Ai seeks is to go far beyond the nightly news; he wants to give you a sense of the scale of the crisis, its terrifying, world-swallowing immensity. And so he jumps from one heartbreak to the next.

While compromised by the uplift and affirmation that mainstream animation regurgitates like a mommy penguin, it also shows a remarkable persistence of vision. Even in a story about singing-and-dancing fat and feather, Mr. Miller can’t help but go dark and deep.

Mr. Herzog is also no ordinary filmmaker. It is the rare documentary like Grizzly Man, which has beauty and passion often lacking in any type of film, that makes you want to grab its maker and head off to the nearest bar to discuss man's domination of nature and how Disney's cute critters reflect our profound alienation from the natural order.

Ms. Waterston, a Modigliani in motion and often in black, easily holds your attention, but it is Ms. Moss, with her intimate expressivity, who annihilates you from first tear to last crushing laugh.

As the requisite love interest, Amy Smart gives the film's only professional performance, while co-star Eric Stoltz, as the story's villain, walks somnolent through the scenery with what seems to be barely suppressed mirth. Given the deeply unpleasant plot machinations and amateurish direction, the actor's amusement is understandable.

The larger problem is that there’s not enough here — in story terms or in the filmmaking — to sustain even the movie’s 90 minutes.

Mr. Szifron creates inhabited worlds with comic timing and visual flair, but you can hear him chortling as he shovels his people into the grinder.

There is evil and it helps keep the world running, our clothes and food coming. This is the greatest, most difficult, most unspeakable violence laid bare in Rathjen’s measured, insistently political movie.

24 Frames can’t help but be affecting because it is Kiarostami’s final movie. But it’s intellectually uninvolving, and its technical limitations prove frustrating.

The movie works best when it doesn’t over-explain and instead lets the land and the characters, the wide open spaces and the performances — especially Newton’s meticulously controlled turn — speak for themselves.

The Red Riding trilogy looks fine blown up on the big screen, though it’s easier to watch at home, where the remote offers fast relief from a grim fiction that, with its murky palette and unyielding cruelty, serves up a nihilistic vision that is unyielding, hermetic, unpersuasive and finally self-indulgent.

Mr. Polanski’s work with his performers is consistently subtle even when the performances seem anything but, which is true of this very fine film from welcome start to finish.

The movie has texture but no depth, tears but no snot. Who are these people, I kept wondering.

While this The Jungle Book is lightly diverting, it is also disappointing, partly because it feels like a pumped-up version of Disney’s 1967 animated film, with more action and less sweetness. It also feels strangely removed from our moment.