Peter Keough

[Terence Stamp] and Vanessa Redgrave, as well as supporting actors Christopher Eccleston and Gemma Arterton, raise Paul Andrew Williams’s entry in the golden age genre from mawkish to genuinely heartwarming.

More than an hour passes before Khaled and Wikström’s stories intersect, and though it would be an exaggeration to say each redeems the other, in this film the other side of hope is not despair, but decency.

An effusive, sad, visually gorgeous, and illuminating portrait of the artist.

Egoyan ekes out an engaging and meaningful potboiler.

What Meet the Patels could use is a little more meat.

In a year when black filmmaking has surged with Oscar-touted films such as “The Butler” and the upcoming “12 Years a Slave,” Murray’s Things Never Said has a quiet eloquence of its own.

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.

Oblique, often beguiling, and portentously cryptic.

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.

Code Black shows the passion, frustration, and skill of those who work to heal despite the system, but it remains in the dark about why that system is broken and how it can be fixed.

Will print books ultimately disappear, replaced by digital versions? The ever-entertaining and insightful Fran Lebowitz offers anecdotal evidence to the contrary. She notes that on the subway she sees many people in their 20s reading actual books. So perhaps there is hope a new generation will revive the bound medium.

As he gets older, Todd Solondz outgrows the cheap shocks and easy nihilism and stumbles toward a mellow misanthropy. He compares his new film Wiener-Dog to “Au Hasard Balthazar” (1966) and “Benji” (1974), though it tends more toward the latter than toward Robert Bresson’s masterpiece.

Like [The Purge and The Conjuring], Adam Wingard’s sly, diabolical, and oddly moral You’re Next draws on the home invasion/haunted house scenario, but outclasses them with its wit, irony, and technically proficient terror.

The small Indonesian island of Bali still evokes images of a tropical paradise where Westerners can escape the discontents of the so-called developed world. Much of that romance lingers in Bitter Honey.

Though overloaded with narration, “Honey” triumphs visually, with stunning shots of bees in flight, tracked in slow motion, “Winged Migration”-style, by who-knows-what technical wizardry.

More problematic for Hudlin is the nature of the case — only by proving that a rape victim is a liar can Friedman and Marshall win an acquittal for their client. Fortunately, the case (in the film, if not in real life) is resolved in such a way that racism and misogyny are found equally guilty.

[A] peripatetic and ultimately poignant documentary.

Perhaps it’s just as well that other issues remain in the background and the film focuses instead on the bond between Leavey and Rex. Not only is it a compelling metaphor for a woman finding independence and empowerment, it dramatizes a primal emotional relationship that proves heartbreaking and triumphant.

It’s only the first week of January, but it will be hard to beat Hong Kong director Ding Sheng’s Railroad Tigers for the best opening credit sequence of the year.

Channeling Nye’s own gift for making complex ideas simple and clear, the filmmakers edit together these various aspects of Nye’s life with deceptive ease, drawing on interviews and archival material and following him throughout his hectic schedule. This is not hagiography, however; they don’t back off from examining some of his more controversial endeavors and characteristics. That includes his fondness for the spotlight and his ambition, which in a couple of instances has backfired on him.

The film manages to be both crudely hilarious and bluntly satiric while also establishing sympathetic characters, a sharp contemporary wit, a sly, dry absurdism.

Rendered heartfelt and compelling by an outstanding cast.

Who knows what they’re fighting about, but given the ecstatic ballet of fists and water, tossed bodies and smashed decor, centered by Leung’s majestic impassivity, it doesn’t really matter.

Von Trotta comes closest to the object of her search when she looks at images from his movies. Especially images of the seashore.

The result is nonstop, epistemological slapstick.

Vitkova brings a distinct gender sensibility to her story, especially with her recurring imagery of milk and blood.

Not your everyday dilemma, but as depicted in this lushly detailed and passionately performed melodrama, the mores and traditions of this sequestered, seldom depicted group take on a broader relevance.

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).