Peter Keough

It takes a woman to make a great film about the all-male bastion of the French Foreign Legion. Claire Denis did so in her elliptical desert updating of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” in “Beau Travail” (1999), and her fellow French director Sarah Leonor nearly equals that feat in The Great Man.

More conventional in approach than Linklater’s 12-year filmmaking odyssey, “Identity” demonstrates its boldness not with stylistic originality but with political acuity.

It consists of a series of episodic encounters, misadventures, and musings redeemed in part by the presence of two scenic wonders, the unspoiled 2,190-mile grandeur of the Appalachian Trail and the spectacular crapulousness of Nick Nolte.

Much of Meru is about that second attempt, filmed with such grandeur and intimacy that sometimes attempting to figure out how they made the incredible shots almost spoils them.

Like her subject, Kempner’s film doesn’t try to be flashy or stylish. She adheres to the Ken Burns school of old footage, photos, period ads, newspaper stories and cartoons.

A fascination with serendipity, irony, and absurdity like that in Werner Herzog’s documentaries propels “Friends” into unexpected territory.

No Escape is a tense but utterly predictable exercise in Western xenophobic paranoia and guilt.

F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton starts out strong, peaks quickly, and then gets tangled in complications and compromise and falls apart.

Religious allusions aside, Alleluia is like “Psycho” combined with “Bonnie and Clyde,” with Norman and Norma Bates as the conjoined criminal couple on the run.

Unfortunately, the material flounders from the broadly farcical to the bombastically melodramatic. Race and ethnicity aren’t so much the problem as gender is. Despite Gainsbourg’s efforts, her character becomes a caricature.

In addition to directing outstanding performances, Edgerton also suggests psychological processes by means of space, architecture, and décor, exploiting the walls, doorways, windows, and mirrors of the new house to indicate the status of a relationship or self-image.

Like a great silent movie, it creates its pathos and comedy out of the concrete objects being animated, building elaborate gags involving everyday items transformed into Rube Goldberg devices that sometimes entrap the characters, or, when properly manipulated by them, provide a means of achieving their goals.

In the end, this feeble effort remains tainted, however unfairly, by the creator’s personal life. Maybe Allen should have titled it “Rationalizing Man.”

Will miracles never cease? Alas, they do. Pausing pregnantly between clauses to add to their trite profundity, Quentin recites the moral of the story, and it’s as phony as the towns of the title.

David Sedaris contributes a story about talking to a hotel clerk over the phone, which doesn’t add much to the discussion but is very funny.

Though the outcome is a matter of public record, it still unfolds like a suspenseful tragedy. Suffice it to say that the wheels of justice turn slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.

This walkabout ends less dramatically and not as tragically as the one in Roeg’s film, but perhaps with a greater poignancy. And Gulpilil, four decades of hard living later, is as magnificent as ever.

Subtlety and irony are not among the film’s virtues.

In Dito Montiel’s treacly, programmatic film, Williams succumbs to a recurring neediness, earnestness, and sentimentality.

Unfortunately, director Bill Condon and screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher are clueless, and come up with an incoherent, implausible, contrived mishmash.

Despite the self-conscious derivativeness and allusions, Tsai’s debut already demonstrates the contrariness and motifs that have distinguished him as a unique, difficult, and transcendent filmmaker.

Occasionally the camera gets jumbled around, blacks out, and hisses with static as if it had been tossed in a dryer. Then it regains composure and reveals — an old playbill! A figure in a mask with a noose! The birth of a new franchise and the death of a great genre.

The film is engrossing and entertaining if sometimes trite and manipulative and totally bogus.

Unlike “Something in the Air,” or even “Saint Laurent,” Eden is utterly apolitical.

As a directorial debut, Losing Ground astonishes with its assurance, subtlety, and style.

It is hard to rate Vikander’s acting abilities from this performance. Her sly automaton in “Ex Machina” had more emotional range.

All this desperation and squalor reeks of authenticity. Many of the actors are from the streets themselves, and such locations as a crash pad rented out by a dotty lady could never be dreamed up by a Hollywood screenwriter.

A bittersweet, wryly comic, keenly observed look at senescence.

Alonso sustains an atmosphere of otherworldly immanence in a vivid setting, with a style involving long takes with characters posed as if in tableaux vivants.

Though the narrative of “Marnie” bogs down toward the end, this does not diminish its spell.

There’s no end in sight, and that’s what’s really insidious.

The film is stuck in the inconsequential rut of the series. The characters are static, and the comedy is situational rather than dramatic.

More disappointing than the film’s inertia and amorphousness is its sacrifice of the real-world themes of class, money, corruption, and power. Unable to decide what story he wanted to tell, Téchiné hedges his bets and loses everything.

Such miserable people; why should we care? Maybe because Ceylan does. By staging this petulant misery in a snow-filled world of melancholy, unearthly beauty, he underscores their tragedy.

Bonello takes on the point of view of Saint Laurent himself, exposing a visionary world seen from within that is as strange and wonderful as that of a magnificently stitched garment turned inside out.

Related with stolid majesty, with long shots of brooding landscapes and close-ups of opaque faces, the film provides poor preparation for the subversion of genre conventions to follow.

The duo provide a bit of wit and warmth amid the contrived subplots and the self-satisfied moralism.

A 2009 film only now getting theatrical distribution in the United States, it is perhaps Farhadi’s richest, most complex and ambitious.

So despite Tcheng's effort to add a metaphysical layer to the film, it pretty much repeats the narrative seen in many other documentaries about the fashion world, from Wim Wenders's “Notebook on Cities and Clothes” (1989), to “Unzipped” (1995), to “Valentino: The Last Emperor” (2008).

Plympton will be cheated if Cheatin’ doesn’t at least get nominated for a best animated feature Oscar.

The film at times genuinely touches on the bittersweet magic of first love.

As a suspenseful true crime story, 24 Days succeeds. As a warning against the ever present dangers of anti-Semitism, it is eloquent and disturbing. It’s in combining the two that Arcady mishandles the case.

A sometimes clever but ultimately clichéd comedy.

The film is so bizarre, contrived, manipulative, and meretricious that anything is possible.

It’s an awkward balancing act. The result is more Benigni than Bertolucci, and though Diliberto achieves moments of poignancy and touches on insightful psychological truths, it doesn’t look like he’ll be winning any Oscars soon.

When the two veteran actors team up in Vermont writer-director Jay Craven’s wry, uneven Northern Borders, adapted from Howard Frank Mosher’s novel, they mesh so well they almost hold the rest of the movie together. But their nuanced performances underscore the weakness of the rest of the cast, and Craven’s erratic tonal shifts from the whimsical to the sentimental trip up the episodic plot.

It tries to bridge the gap between pop culture and cultural elitism, between high art and the common commodity that everyone else buys tickets to see. A worthy goal, but it results in a movie that has none of the virtues of either.

Though programmatic in its plotting, “Effie” does aspire to obliqueness in its imagery. In “Mr. Turner,” Leigh evokes the painter of the title in the film’s stunning visuals. In “Effie,” the pseudo-medieval lushness and literalness of the Pre-Raphaelites permeates much of cinematography by Andrew Dunn.

Whether or not Hawke got any answers to his questions about the purpose of being artist, seeking them under the guidance of a teacher like Bernstein resulted in this work of art.

The young cast comes through with appealing, naturalistic performances. But Weber’s programmatic, preachy story and emotional manipulation is so blatant that it verges on the fatuous.

It would violate a taboo to relate how this movie magic, masterfully orchestrated by Weinstein and Measom, is done. Their film is as smooth as Randi’s patter and demonstrates how the documentarian’s camera is quicker than the eye.

As powerful as it is as social commentary, Gett triumphs most as an examination of human relationships.

Has there been a more tormented or intense study of the ambivalence of revenge than Penn’s performance in Eastwood’s “Mystic River” (2003)? Penn might not agree with Eastwood’s politics, but when it comes to probing a killer’s soul he couldn’t find a better model.

In balancing the more objective cultural history of delis with a personal profile, Anjou serves neither well. Perhaps he should have chosen one course or the other.

The vividly realized squalor, cruelty, and ugliness engulf everything, including the narrative.

Churns out dread, suspense, and hellish splendor with its derelict cityscapes and breakneck action.

Almost all mainstream movies steal from other movies, but the better ones get away with it because they possess some distinctive identity. The best that Ken Scott’s Unfinished Business can come up with is Vince Vaughn — as the straight man.

In a way, Lipes’s documentary resembles Jonathan Demme and David Byrne’s “Stop Making Sense” (1984) — in which Byrne goes on stage solo with a beat box and the rest of the Talking Heads gather one by one — as much as it does Wiseman’s films.

The Mauritanian-born Abderrahmane Sissako, one of the great filmmakers of sub-Saharan Africa, does not need to resort to propaganda in Timbuktu to denounce fanaticism. He has poetry. With subtlety, irony, and even humor, he gradually prepares the viewer for the horror to come.

“Shadows” has its share of lines that will be repeated by fans ad infinitum (a favorite: “Yes, now Google it”).

Though it initially shows signs of overcoming its creakiness, “Capital” loses value when its screenwriters try too hard to be clever.

To its credit, despite a rough start (witch burning and all that), Seventh Son does not succumb to misogyny.

If you close your eyes you’d think it was a commercial for a “Great Love Songs” DVD collection.

I have not seen the film “Fifty Shades of Grey” but I doubt that it evokes the mystery, wit, and eroticism that Peter Strickland’s sumptuously claustrophobic fable of women in love does. All without nudity, bad dialogue, or the requisite wooden acting.

One of the advantages of time travel in a found-footage film is that it makes the chronology and causality so confusing that the problem of who’s shooting what becomes secondary. On the other hand, it doesn’t allow fast-forwarding through all the boring bits. For starters, I could have done with far less Lollapalooza.

If nothing else, Beloved Sisters is one of the most visually striking biopics around. Too bad you have to wade through so much verbiage in order to enjoy it.