Peter Keough

Visually, this translates into thrilling action sequences of lone knife-wielders hewing down ranks of adversaries with balletic precision. If preserving this means sacrificing a scruple or two, it’s worth the trade.

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

Though at times Siddharth can resemble a well-photographed report on India’s social and economic ills, Mehta subtly employs different styles to sustain the poetry, poignancy, and drama.

Like “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006), the Oscar-winning film about climate change, it is a call to action. As a screed, it builds a credible, engaging argument, presenting evidence, statistics, talking-head testimony, whimsical charts, poignant personal stories, and animated illustrations of digestive processes to make its case.

Plá’s comedy is black, but his moral position isn’t black and white.

Drawing on the memories of family members, friends, and collaborators, and tapping into a trove of archival material, including tapes of James’s raucous, raunchy live shows, Jenkins keeps pace with his subject’s breakneck progress. Along the way James encounters opportunities that are missed or exploited and tragedies that are averted or courted. He transforms hard times into artistic success, and squanders success in debauchery.

It is epic in scope, intimate in detail, and otherworldly in its dimensions, like the Bayeux Tapestry with special effects and a stentorian soundtrack.

A grade A, meat-and-potatoes genre flick.

In Brad’s Status, Stiller becomes the face of white male privilege — and its comeuppance.

Slowly it emerges that Gaga is Naharin’s “dance language,” a way of expressing one’s inner being through external movement. Gaga is dada — for dancers.

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

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.

The fundamental problem with this Macbeth is that it insists on reducing the mystery of motivation to the pop psychology of a magazine article.

Filmmaker Joe Berlinger isn’t so much inspired as disgusted by the notorious gangster in his newest documentary.

As for the performances, only homely Giovana has heart and depth. The two boys lack chemistry, even in chemistry class, due in part to the trite dialogue, or at least as it is translated in subtitles.

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

Fatal Assistance has few answers, and adds little clarity.

Though not as graphically powerful as other documentaries on similar subjects, such as Fredrick Wiseman’s “Meat” (1976) or Georges Franju’s “Les Sang des Bête” (1949), the emphasis on the disastrous global impact of these practices is more disturbing .

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).

Despite the music, and no matter how the film’s editors slice it, the attempt to get a rise out of the audience by way of the endangered child device verges on emotional pornography.

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.

Starting with a premise that a smart-aleck high school sophomore might take pride in, the film rallies late to make some points about patriarchy and female empowerment, but not before a barrage of clichés, tweeness, and inanity.

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

Lassgård won’t let you off easy: A scene in which Ove weeps hopelessly before the magnitude of his loneliness will bring tears to the eyes of anyone who has suffered a loss. His Ove is a man indeed.

Akerman, though, is her own best spokesperson as she discusses her films at locations where they were shot.

A film that ultimately says more about banality than evil.

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

Though sometimes it seems like a promotional video, the film offers a glimpse into the vagaries of class, culture, celebrity, and social mores since the hotel was first established back in 1930.