Mark Jenkins

In giving equal weight to all subjects, “Older” flirts with triviality.... But Fegan punctuates some commonplace observations with more peppery ones.

Set to Jeremy Turner's spare and mournful score, Narco Cultura is ultimately more pensive than lurid.

As the wily leader of the Japanese forces, grizzled Kurata Yasuaki has more presence than Zhao, who’s bland in non-action sequences. But Zhao’s ability to deliver dialogue is less crucial than his skill at leading hundreds of extras through elegantly choreographed, sumptuously photographed chaos.

Autism aside, writer-director Rachel Israel’s debut film is a fairly typical, low-budget New York romance, complete with an excursion to Coney Island. What distinguishes it are Israel’s empathetic characterizations — she’s known Polansky for 15 years — and the winning performances, not only by the leads but also by the supporting players.

The documentary adroitly demonstrates that Robert Fisk is still motivated by the boyish curiosity that drew him to journalism.

Kore-eda is himself a father now, which may explain why his work has gotten sunnier.

Would be more satisfying if it were a more definitive look at Guantanamo's workings. All Cote and Henriquez can provide is some glimmers of insight about just one of the men held there. But that's enough to make their movie enlightening, compelling and, finally, heartbreaking.

Arguably the most dynamic Asian action film since the 1990s peaks of John Woo and Tsui Hark, The Raid: Redemption works as sheer gladiatorial ballet.

This lack of generosity toward the supporting players is one of the movie’s major weaknesses. The other is that the episodic story leads to no significant discovery, either narrative or psychological.

Enzo Ferrari was a real person, not just a narrative device. No matter how ardently he sang of speed and danger, there must have been more to his character than Ferrari manages to find.

Austrian documentarian Michael Glawogger's Whore's Glory is no "Pretty Woman." But neither does it qualify as an expose.

The movie revisits the themes (and some of the same characters) of Amy Berg's chilling 2006 chronicle "Deliver Us from Evil." But it reaches further, expanding from one American diocese to Ireland, Italy, the Vatican and the career of the current pope.

Jesse's nobility is one of the primary reasons Liberal Arts is so hard to take.

Two things distinguish writer-director Elegance Bratton’s lyrical debut feature from its predecessors: a clanking, droning, energizing score by experimental rock band Animal Collective and a central character — based on Bratton himself — who’s Black and gay.

Herman's House would benefit from more background material on Wallace, notably about the alleged weakness of the murder rap against him. In the end, though, neither Sumell nor the film is concerned with that. Their goal is to make palpable — and palpably horrific — the fact of living 23 hours a day in caged isolation.

Big Star was essentially Chris Bell's band, and emotionally, Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me is Bell's movie. Joining rock's dead-at-27 club via a 1978 car crash, he left behind a fine, then-unreleased album and two siblings who tell his story movingly. As they recount his final years, the sadness in Bell's songs comes to seem eerily prescient.

Fremont has the demeanor of a kitchen-sink drama but is laced with deadpan absurdism.

Any film about a flashy criminal threatens to glamorize its protagonist, but both Mesrine episodes are careful to detail the many goofs made by the crook and his accomplices.

A fine overview, with enough new material to please Gould buffs. But the film fails to demonstrate that conventional biography is the best path to its subject's inner life.

The film’s structural shortcomings will matter less to most viewers than the personality of the central character, Michal.

Well-made and likable, without any major missteps. It’s also just a little bland.

Yes, The Rocket is a sports movie, with an outcome that's easily foreseen. The cultural specifics of this Laos-set tale, however, are far less predictable.

Blade goes for the carotid while offering a classic look and a comic-book story. It’s part Kurosawa, part “X-Men,” part “Ichi the Killer.”

Quietly, the film makes the case that "enhanced interrogation techniques" were no enhancement. Interviewing jihadis "by the book," one interrogator testifies, yielded better information than violence and deprivation.

The new Red Dawn's body count is as high as its predecessor's. But the fatalism in all of Milius' projects - even the silliest ones - has weight. That's not the case with the remake, whose portrayal of violence derives more from video games than from history.

In the Chinese martial-arts film The Final Master, the fighting is more lucid than the plot. That may be characteristic of the genre, yet this smart, stylish movie diverges from the expected in many ways, most of them enjoyable.

Post Mortem is - intentionally - not an engaging movie. And Larrain sometimes overplays the existential anguish, notably during a few scenes of joyless, mechanical sexual release.

It was frantic sex that earned Shame an NC-17 rating, but this arty drama is mostly slow and methodical. And thoroughly unsexy.

British documentarian Mark Cousins’s The Storms of Jeremy Thomas is a fine introduction to the 70 or so films produced by the titular London-born impresario. It’s barely an introduction at all, however, to Thomas himself.

Donald Cried succeeds on its own modest terms, but watching its title character can be painful. This is not a movie for people who’d just as soon forget their own teenage mortifications.

The documentary’s resulting mix of intimate portrait and raw street warfare proves visceral, dynamic and sometimes upsetting — although Sharp and Bwayo say they excluded the most horrific footage.

The brawling itself is every bit as inventive and exhilarating this time around... The script and acting, however, prove less successful.

Like most mysteries, this one relies heavily on coincidental discoveries, even if they arrive via Gmail or FaceTime, rather than more traditional means. But the plot’s contrivances are less problematic than the movie’s insistence on maintaining its artifice even after it becomes a hindrance.

Succeeds as a character study, while gently raising questions about human use and misuse of animals.

Shot entirely in Hackney — a mostly ungentrified London borough — My Brother the Devil has a strong odor of authenticity.

The Empire State's eminent domain laws are unusually loose, but most of the rest of this story is pertinent far beyond New York. Change a few names and add the next credit bubble, and a Brooklyn-style Battle could be headed to a neighborhood near you.

His latest, the earthy yet subtly evocative 11 Flowers, is in the same mode as the one that's best known in the U.S., 2001's "Beijing Bicycle." Both are simple, resonant tales of youths who have something taken from them.

In the movie’s first hour, all the blood is medical. Then the director stages a big shootout, mostly in slo-mo, that’s more clunky than epic. Before that misstep, though, Three is singularly entertaining.

If nothing else, while watching Ruppert, you'll believe he believes this stuff.

The movie's principal liability is that most of the music is highly derivative. Ghobadi spends a lot of time on songs that are more interesting sociologically than musically.

Oddly, Countdown to Zero ends by suggesting that viewers get those nukes abolished by texting their disapproval to a phone number listed in the credits -- as if the governments of China or North Korea (or the United States, for that matter) are just waiting for a gentle rebuke from civic-minded documentary viewers.

The Attorney can be melodramatic, and first-time feature director Yang Woo-seok is not yet a singular filmmaker. But the movie is carried by its rousing pro- democracy message and a lively performance from the versatile leading man.

The documentary's most memorable vignette is suitably unnerving: a visit to northern China, where the threatened disappearance of bees has already come to pass, leaving workers to pollinate fruit trees ... by hand.

Rodeo looks like a documentary but finally makes a reckless swerve toward the mythic.

This is the story of two young people whose aspirations are of absolutely no interest to their elders. Zero Bridge is a fitting found title for the movie, but Tapa could also have called it No Exit.

The moments when the guitarists teach the others their best-known riffs are fascinating.

It's a surprisingly nuanced and sober tale of brotherhood and betrayal.

Despite its fanciful premise, Never Let Me Go looks and feels utterly real.

Confrontational and hyperactive, Enter the Void is a difficult film to experience. That's not because Noe is somehow inept. The Argentina-born French writer-director knows exactly what he's doing and what effect his swirling camera, exuberant colors and strobelike effects will have.

Boy Erased is a showcase for Hedges, who played a closeted boy in “Lady Bird” and who plays a teen with a different sort of burden in the upcoming drama “Ben Is Back.” In each of those roles, the boy-next-door actor finds just the right combination of ordinary and anomalous.

Moka is a stark, moody mystery that doesn’t actually contain much mystery. Instead, it excels as a character study and a dynamic face-off between two formidable actresses: Emmanuelle Devos and Nathalie Baye.

The result is complex yet lighthearted, as diverting as it is meditative. Resnais uses contrapuntal editing — one of his trademarks — as well as artificial settings, special effects, split screens, cinematic references and anachronistic devices to keep viewers tipsily off-balance.

The film’s themes mature from adolescent pettiness to adult regret, with several epilogues set well after the main events of the story.

What works best here comes between the movie’s heavy opening and its lightweight conclusion.

Over the nine months the movie chronicles, about half the refugees leave the school building. Many return to the Fukushima area, but none to Futaba, which is still radioactive and officially off-limits.

Greengrass employs a handheld camera effectively, as usual, to simulate confusion, panic and terror. He cuts away from the most horrific moments of slaughter.

Sergio Leone learns to speak Korean in The Good, the Bad, the Weird, an exuberant tale of greed, vengeance and, well, weirdness.

DeNoble aside, Addiction Incorporated finds most of its heroes in Congress, the White House and federal agencies.

While Europa Report recalls such small-ensemble stuck-in-space flicks as "Moon" and "Sunshine," it's basically "The Blair Witch Project" relocated to the vicinity of Jupiter.

After watching this Welsh racehorse drama, even those of us who’d struggle to pronounce the word may find ourselves feeling a bit of hwyl.

Reich has a good sense of humor, as is virtually required of an adult who's less than 5 feet tall — he has Fairbanks disease, the same condition that accounts for Danny DeVito's stature — so he's pretty much guaranteed a laugh when he hops to his feet and asks if he looks like an advocate of "big government."

While the story pivots on an actual girl-who-cried-wolf incident, this elegantly constructed movie is about much more than that.

The movie has more sensibility than sense, but it seems cunning next to such silly tough-girl fare as "Kick-Ass" and "Sucker Punch."

While 52 remains something of a mystery, The Loneliest Whale renders him less of a metaphor.

Directed by Neil Burger, whose "The Illusionist" also pulled an upbeat coda out of a hat, Limitless is entertaining for much of its running time. It's glib, and it's overly fond of hyperdrive pans, psychedelic montages and swift rack-focus shifts.

If this vaguely cyberpunk, occasionally comic Australian flick were named after its own qualities, it would have been called “Knockoff.”

Kawasaki's Rose is the first Czech or Slovak film to address the issue of collaboration with the former Czechoslovakia's bygone secret police. That history must still be raw for some who survived the era, as it is in "The Lives of Others."

There are some amusing (and even poignant) moments between Franky and the two girls, who are the movie’s most interesting characters. But all the parents come across as stiff and hollow, and so does Ballas.

What's the difference between an action figure and an action star? Very little in G.I. Joe: Retaliation, which features no performances of note, even from such combat-tested thespians as Bruce Willis, Jonathan Pryce and Dwayne Johnson.

Provocative yet far from definitive, Pink Ribbons, Inc. is a critique of "breast-cancer culture." It could even be called a blitz on pink-ribbon charities and their corporate partners - though to use that term would be to emulate the war and sports metaphors the documentary rejects.

The tight time frame gives the movie a welcome urgency, but it doesn’t prevent its second half from becoming lurid and melodramatic.

As a form of life-coaching, this documentary is, in fact, kind of a dud.

This movie is rarely more than merely competent, but it should stir lovers of justice as well as dog fanciers.

Quietly astonishing documentary.

Obliquely but evocatively, “Desperate Souls” ponders the many roles of the cowboy: gay icon, cinematic hero and symbol of American manifest destiny from the Rockies to the Mekong. Yet the documentary acknowledges that neither Schlesinger’s film nor its era could change everything.

Puzzle has some gentle fun with the clash of staid and hip.

Deeply silly in a classic mode, The Fairy continues the French new wave of near-silent cinema.

It's even harder being the semi-supportive wife, which is what generates most of the electricity in this slight but entertaining documentary.

To judge from his film’s style, it also seems likely that Dewey just doesn’t have the patience for a subtle approach.

Many of the White House scenes are jarringly motley, as Whitaker maintains Gaines' dignity against a series of performances that range from bland (James Marsden's JFK) to cartoonish (Liev Schreiber's LBJ). It comes as a relief when Daniels reduces Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford to TV clips — though that strategy makes the film even more of a stylistic jumble.

That the same performers keep returning in different roles, playing Peruvian and Japanese flyers as well as American ones, only adds to the sense of man as machine. Everything, and everyone, must run like clockwork. Yet no apparatus is foolproof.

Music drives the movie, and the producers popped for the real stuff: Robert Johnson, Moby Grape and - curiously - the Sex Pistols are all here. The soundtrack is so overstuffed that it relegates Beatles and Dylan tunes to the end credits.

A veteran film editor making her first feature, Israel emphasizes the area's low-key beauty.

German history and culture are among Sokurov's concerns in this visually compelling, intellectually scattershot movie.

Circumstance is best during its simpler, more naturalistic moments. In one, Mehran rebuffs a junkie who stumbles into the mosque, only to see that an Islamic hardliner is more compassionate.

The movie's violence, although gruesome, flirts with slapstick, and the story appears bound for domestic comedy when all the major characters sit down for Thanksgiving dinner at June and Chet's grand Victorian farmhouse. But the meal becomes more freak show than satire.

The Salt of Life is easygoing and naturalistic, but clearly a work of imagination.

The French Minister boasts robust pacing, screwball-comedy banter and an exuberant central performance. For most American viewers, though, the movie could use footnotes to go with its subtitles.

The film, while unfailingly entertaining, feels a little small for its subject.

Teresa's doggedness parallels the movie's own. Paradise: Love would be more compelling if it had a second act in which either its protagonist or one of her boy toys came to some sort of realization. Instead, Seidl's strategy is to reiterate and escalate, which is finally more exhausting than illuminating.

Overly long and occasionally clumsy, Air Doll can't be counted among Kore-eda's best. But much of it is lovely and expressive, and it's one of those films that can haunt viewers long after they've left the theater.

Wild Grass is an elegant vessel for outlandish thoughts and troubling impulses. In his rejection of cinematic naturalism, Resnais has made a movie that's both utterly contrived and compellingly lifelike.

Brand's character, who combines Bono's moral sanctimony with Keith Richards' supernatural hedonism, ultimately doesn't add up.

Although it’s intended as a satire, director Feng Xiaogang’s movie has a literary tone, a leisurely pace and relatively few laugh-out-loud moments. It captures not only Lian’s frustration, but also the exasperation of the authorities who must deal with the demanding woman during her 11-year quest for justice.

A Brilliant Young Mind is less stuffy than the usual cinematic ode to British smarts and schooling. But that still can’t save this tale of eccentric genius from being profoundly conventional.

The movie evokes its time and place so potently that it almost doesn't matter that Hamilton's script proves unequal to her vision.

Canner's eye-opening, entertaining account of the search for the little pill that supplies the Big O is looney-tunes enough without the cartoon asides.

Renoir doesn't present a particularly dynamic tale, and its attempts at stage-like drama — notably the sometimes epigrammatic dialogue — can seem overdone. But the performances are assured, the ambiance impeccable and the themes resonant.