Rachel Saltz

Somm, though an entree into a little-known world, rarely finds a second dimension.

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

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 movie, as the title suggests, is set up to be Piku’s story: How will she make a life? But the filmmakers let Mr. Bachchan overwhelm the story. Ms. Padukone, an always likable performer, remains in his shadow, just as Piku remains in Bhashkor’s, liberated but without real agency.

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.

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.

If the movie gets a bit gooey at times that’s probably an occupational hazard when considering the sublime. And Ms. Honigmann’s restraint — there’s something classical in her style, too — keeps the film from floating away. When it threatens to, something piercing or traumatic brings it back to earth, where any account of art belongs.

May not be fully satisfying as a documentary. But it has what any good movie needs: a star — the ever-game soprano Natalie Dessay.

Well made, and for once the talking-heads format is satisfying.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

This is a sympathetic, even sweet, account, but it’s too soft.

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.

“Re-emerging” can be pedestrian as filmmaking, though it remains interesting as long as it remains in Nigeria.

Edmon Roch has a great story to tell in Garbo the Spy, and he recounts it with the flair of a Hollywood spy movie: "Garbo" is dramatic, entertaining, even funny in parts.

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.

A mix of gently outraged populism and low-powered romantic comedy, Vishal Bhardwaj's Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola might have been better with a chunk lopped off its two-and-a-half-hour runtime.

Nureyev, directed by the brother-and-sister team of Jacqui Morris and David Morris, suffers from a common documentary-film problem: great story, not-so-great storytelling.

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.

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.

Ms. Rohrwacher combines a documentary impulse (effective in family scenes) with a more allegorical one. Her film gets clunky when allegory has the upper hand, and that means Corpo Celeste often stumbles, along with its 12-year-old heroine, Marta (Yle Vianello).