Manohla Dargis

The light is beautiful in Jockey, an enjoyable old-warrior movie with a surprising sting, even if the bones and story are creaky.

Ms. Berg has created an unnerving, sometimes infuriating documentary. She makes smart choices throughout as she weaves together this chronicle of faith and abuse.

Mr. Godard treads on dangerous ground by linking the historical suffering of Jews and the Palestinians, but his sympathy for both people is so manifest, his sense of history so deep, that the film defies reductive readings.

Reveals its secrets slowly and with coy deliberation. The storytelling has the quality of a striptease, so that by the end of the film, Le Roux looks radically different from how he appears at the start.

It has sweep, romance, violence and spectacle, but what makes it finally work as well as it does is that it largely avoids the ennobling clichés that turn characters into ideals and movies into exercises in spurious nostalgia — well, that and Mads Mikkelsen.

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

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.

What keeps the movie from tipping into full-blown exploitation like "City of God," which turns third-world misery into art-house thrills, is Mr. Fukunaga's sincerity. What keeps you watching is his superb eye.

Films about environmental catastrophes tend to wax preachy, putting pedagogy and scolding above art. This one, for all its sorrow and the throb of righteous anger it provokes (only about 50,000 antelopes remain), is more than anything a work of creative imagination.

It’s too bad that the filmmakers don’t allow an occasional breath of air into the sepulchral proceedings or ease up on the increasingly heavy-handed lessons.

Presence is another ideal trap to trip for a filmmaker who enjoys challenges and changing it up artistically as much as Soderbergh does.

As I, Tonya skips here and there and thickens the plot, it becomes increasingly baffling why the filmmakers decided to put a comic spin on this pathetic, dispiriting story. No matter how hard the movie tries to coax out laughs, there’s little about Ms. Harding, her circumstances or her choices that skews as funny.

If only the whole thing didn't collapse in on itself, and quickly become a parody of artistic reach and terminal folly.

There’s an elemental, almost primitive quality to the Tavianis’ condensing that, at its most effective, dovetails with the prison’s severely circumscribed material reality, as if the high walls, barred windows and suffocating rooms were manifestations of the characters’ states of mind.

Maestro is as ambitious as Cooper’s fine directorial debut, “A Star Is Born,” but the new movie is more self-consciously cinematic.

Lord and Miller, almost by default, accentuate the positive to the detriment of the very movie that they’ve painstakingly created. Like a lot of Earthlings, they seem more at home in a far-out fantasy than on our ordinary, terrifying planet, which is why this particular message of hope ends up being a bummer.

The result isn’t another ho-hum documentary likeness in which all the elements neatly and often flatteringly stack up. “Jim & Andy” is instead a complexly layered and textured Cubist portrait, one that’s been constructed from fragments of its two title subjects and their work.

The laughs in Spike Lee’s corrosive Chi-Raq burn like acid. Urgent, surreal, furious, funny and wildly messy, the movie sounds like an invitation to defeat, but it’s an improbable triumph that finds Mr. Lee doing his best work in years.

The filmmakers (the script is by John Kare Raake and Harald Rosenlow Eeg) cook up the sort of unpleasantness that turns the better disaster pictures, like this one, into nail-biters.

In Love Lies Bleeding, Glass borrows liberally but not mindlessly. Instead, she takes familiar themes and more than a few clichés — romantic doom, family trauma — and playfully bends them to her purposes.

The limitations of Calvary are summed up by the insistent, dialectical chatter that almost mechanically pings and pongs between lightness and darkness, glibness and seriousness, insincerity and honesty, faithfulness and despair.