Rachel Saltz

These are vivid, flawed, even introspective characters. And they're classic American strivers. With rodeo, but not just that, they hope to go beyond where they have been.

These interviews form the backbone of !W.A.R., and like the film, they're passionate, contentious, funny, sincere, politically attuned.

Patang ("The Kite"), Prashant Bhargava's first feature, has a lovely, unforced quality. That's because Mr. Bhargava lets his story, set during the annual kite festival in Ahmedabad, India, tell itself, unfolding slowly as he follows filmmaking's most basic and most sinned-against dictum: Show, don't tell.

As a director, Mr. Dolan has a freewheeling style, and he’s self-dramatizing enough to want to call attention to it without being too much of a visual show-off.

Though the political backdrop often overwhelms or distorts the family drama, Mr. Bhardwaj provides the occasional sharp reminder of how cinematically he can construct Shakespearean moments.

This history is too recent to seem dry, and the film gets an added emotional punch from interviews with former tenants, whose memories mix fondness with anger and loss.

By keeping its focus admirably tight, the sober and sobering Israeli documentary The Law in These Parts presents a devastating case against the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

This is an excellent story, and Ms. Draper tells it clearly and stylishly, teasing out the interesting angles and repercussions.

Avoiding flabby subplots, Mr. Dholakia keeps Raees taut and suspenseful, even at two and a half hours, though it probably has a song too many

Pitched somewhere between allegory and documentary, the film looks at its characters in a dispassionate, almost deadpan way. They’re something more than specimens under glass but something less than fully rounded people.

Gerhard Richter may not fling paint at the canvas, Jackson Pollock-style, but as Corinna Belz shows in her documentary Gerhard Richter Painting, he can be his own kind of action painter.

India’s Daughter is a portrait of a place and time. And for all of its horrors, the movie has a positive message, too: Out of tragedy — and this case is just one of many — can come galvanizing change.

The filmmakers retain a touching faith that most Americans won't tolerate injustice when they know about it. This film is meant to teach them.

It's very much a Hindi film, but updated and delivered with conviction and style.

The writer-director Anusha Rizvi, making her feature debut, shoots her story efficiently and with visual panache, but after a compelling setup her script runs out of juice.

Mr. Wexler has found interesting people and useful, funny and sometimes crackpot-seeming information.

Big Miracle gets off to a shaky start, but once revved up, it becomes an involving work-against-the-clock-and-the-odds action movie.

It holds your interest, even if Jean-Marie remains what he must be to Mr. Cohen: an enticing puzzlement, his faith a mystery.

Through it all, Mr. Taylor’s creative mysteries remain intact; a master of the casual and the vernacular (a good way to learn about movement, he says, is to watch football halftime shows), he nonetheless approaches the mystical.

By turns frustrating and moving, Ali Samadi Ahadi's documentary The Green Wave, about the Green Revolution in Iran, gets a jolt from footage shot by the people for the people on the people's cellphones.

These mostly silent home movies often have the tug of nostalgia, especially those that show domestic life... But images can be slippery, showing something different from what their creators intended. Even as Mr. Lilti constructs a history...he seems to show its fissures.

If A Coffee in Berlin has its own kind of formula and a romanticism that reads as both youthful and obscuring, it nevertheless absorbs you and makes you wonder what Mr. Gerster will do next.

As filmmaking, “She’s Beautiful” is meat and potatoes: It gets the job done without frills.

With its light silent comedy, Mr. Wenders’s film presents movie history as a meeting of the inventive and the inevitable — a playful lark.

Mr. Khan is this movie’s best weapon. Playing a familiar character type, the world-weary detective, he gives a performance, full of small, sly details, that doesn’t seem familiar at all.

It also shows, perceptively and often sweetly, a broader slice of young, urban, educated life in India as the three deal with careers, love and happiness.

If the movie feels old-school (with new-school production values), consider its pedigree. It's no wonder: Shaolin is a reimagining of the 1982 "Shaolin Temple," in which Jet Li made his debut.