Mike Hale

The best film by Isao Takahata, who started the studio with Mr. Miyazaki, this is a comic allegory about battling packs of tanuki (Japanese raccoon dogs) joining forces to fight human real estate developers. It’s earthy and rollicking in a way that his co-founder’s films aren’t.

One of the many pleasures of the Norwegian director André Ovredal's clever and engaging mock documentary Trollhunter is the way it plays with the idea of the supernatural rule book.

Mr. Takahata’s broad, cartoony family comedy whose smeary watercolor washes and Peanuts-like line drawings don’t follow Ghibli’s house style. The family’s misadventures are standard stuff, but the art is continuously inventive.

As it is, it’s the best non-Miyazaki, non-Takahata Ghibli feature. A girl prevents a cat from getting crushed by a truck and gains favor with a nocturnal kingdom of hipster felines, in a story with echoes of Alice in Wonderland and the novels of Haruki Murakami.

Mr. Morgen was given access to Cobain’s archives — “art, music, journals, Super 8 films and audio montages” — and his exhilarating, exhausting, two-hour-plus film, both an artful mosaic and a hammering barrage, reflects years of rummaging through that trove.

In her director's statement for Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, Gail O'Hara writes that "this one's for the fans." Rarely has that been more true.

Absorbing and amusing for as long as it looks back at those Hollywood westerns, recounting their sins against American Indians.

If nothing else, the directors, Duane Baughman and Johnny O'Hara, deserve praise for devoting this kind of attention to a foreign leader and to the internal politics of another country (as opposed to how those politics affect the United States).

A sad and engrossing look at a haunted landscape.

It all adds up to an entertaining 88 minutes, despite the film's ramshackle construction and its once-over-lightly approach to political, cultural and athletic history.

Surprisingly old-fashioned. It seems to be having an argument with itself: the dazzling but often antiseptic immersiveness of the viewing experience is countered by storytelling suffused with nostalgia for a simpler, messier, livelier period in Chinese film.

Only for those with a truly bottomless appetite for gore and fan-boy humor.

His film is no more profound than its forerunners, but it’s quicker, funnier and less pretentious.

The courses of colonialism and racial strife were radically different in America and Australia than they were in Africa. That doesn't make Mr. Freeth's cause any less just, but it does mean that Mugabe and the White African needs to be approached with care.

It's an interesting story, well told, though Mr. Jendreyko overworks some documentary fallbacks: gnarled fingers, the view from a moving train.

The Disappearance of Alice Creed will keep your attention, but you may walk away thinking you've seen something like it before: "Sleuth," with more sex and violence.

The film builds in interest and intrigue as it goes along, helped immeasurably by the directors' choice - canny or fortunate or both - of the astonishingly good-natured and likable Jacquy Pfeiffer, an Alsace-born, Chicago-based chef, as their chief protagonist.

Mr. Ryoo (“The Unjust,” “The City of Violence”) isn’t known for his sense of humor, but Veteran is amusing throughout, even if the funny scenes are more subdued or go on a beat or two longer than American viewers are used to.

A conventional but delightful tale of self-discovery and heroism from Mr. Miyazaki, it feels like Disney one moment, Truffaut the next.

It was created under different circumstances and it is, perhaps inevitably, a less powerful work than “When the Levees Broke,” more diffuse in its storytelling and more uncertain in its point of view.

While it could stand to lose 20 minutes and several plot twists, Mr. Na’s debut manages to be thought-provoking and adventurous while providing solid thrills.

While I Am Secretly an Important Man skims the surface of Mr. Bernstein's life, it's a surface with more than enough texture to keep you interested.

Winston Churchill: Walking With Destiny is a handsomely produced, television-scale documentary with a split personality.

Shinobu Terajima, a major figure in Japan who won the best actress award at the 2010 Berlin film festival for Caterpillar, is effective as the wife, though Mr. Wakamatsu is more interested in scoring political and historical points than in shaping her character.

Between Mr. Ziman's music-video skills and his close approximation of the kinetic style of Michael Mann (a scene from Mr. Mann's "Heat" has a key role in the plot), it's easy to overlook the formulas and just enjoy the ride.

It's significantly smaller and more casual than "Mystery Train" or "Lost in Translation," movies its premise calls to mind, but in some ways it's more layered and complex.

The Robber may have less on its mind than its sheen of seriousness would suggest, but the view is gorgeous.