Stephen Holden

Because the waves get progressively higher in Riding Giants, Stacy Peralta's historical surfing documentary, some of that thrill is sustained throughout this overlong but entertaining movie.

Focusing on the magazine and not its offshoots, the film is uproarious, not for what its many talking heads say but for its astonishing procession of brilliant, boundary-breaching illustrations and captions (augmented by some animation), many of which are as explosively funny today as they were when first published.

This is a scary but inspiring film with real heroes and villains.

The movie's dramatic climax is a father-son confrontation of stunning cruelty. Although the movie stops short of outright tragedy, it is suffused with a grief born of rifts that may never be mended.

Yes, it's all terribly hokey. But once you accept the premise as a conceit that allows the director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, to offer an intimate, utopian vision of the animal kingdom, Two Brothers succeeds as an inspirational pastorale and passionate moral brief for animal rights and preservation.

The film is inspiring because it has a semi-happy ending attached to a love story.

There's no escaping that "Dominion" is finally an act of commercial scavenging. You may retrieve the eggshells, coffee grounds and banana peels from your trash and assemble them into a cute, novelty gift basket. But if you bend down and take a whiff, your nose is still met with the scent of garbage.

Surprisingly Rocky Balboa, is no embarrassment. Like its forerunners it goes the distance almost in spite of itself. It's all heart and no credibility except as a raw-boned fable.

Compelling, finely balanced immigration drama.

The film's most upsetting scenes are its interviews with residents whose livelihood has been decimated and whose health has been compromised.

Mr. Trump comes across as an insensitive, lying bully who will do whatever it takes to realize his dream of creating what he promises will be the world's greatest golf resort.

Paul is not a sociopath like Tom Ripley, and the movie does not convey the same diabolical Hitchcockian sense of being manipulated by a slightly sadistic master puppeteer. As the story sprawls across the screen, it darts from one incident to the next as though it were inventing itself as it goes along.

As a personality profile, Senna is sketchy at best. Born into a well-to-do family in São Paulo, Brazil, Senna pursued the sport from a young age with a maniacal zeal. He comes across as a fatalistic daredevil and as a man of the people, his wealthy background aside.

Has the feel of a clinical case study elevated into a subject of aesthetic and philosophical discourse.

The Sessions is a pleasant shock: a touching, profoundly sex-positive film that equates sex with intimacy, tenderness and emotional connection instead of performance, competition and conquest.

This sentimental but riveting film has no qualms about playing on our emotions.

The rainbow connection is a smooth, unbroken arch.

As this powerful, minutely documented film reveals, the tragedy wasn’t caused by the failure of the Peoples Temple to realize its goals. In many ways, it was succeeding as a self-sufficient community.

The remarkable if overlong Korean film Oasis strips away much of the sentimentality and goody-two-shoes attitudes that the movies traditionally display toward disabled people.

As the movie's frenetic visual rhythms and mood swings synchronize with the zany, adrenaline-fueled impulsiveness of its lost youth on the rampage, you may find yourself getting lost in this teeming netherworld.

At its heart is an incandescent performance by Ms. Oduye, who captures the jagged mood swings of late adolescence with a wonderfully spontaneous fluency.

It is the kind of hearty, blunt-force drama with softened edges that leaves audiences applauding and teary-eyed.

A political thriller based on fact that hammers every button on the emotional console.

Eureka never comes to life. -- In pursuing its aesthetic agenda so single-mindedly, the movie leaves the characters behind in the muck.

The connections made in Photographic Memory are more tentative than those found in Mr. McElwee's earlier films, which also seek answers in roundabout ways while maintaining an acute eye for light, color, space and atmosphere.

Witty, exquisitely fine-tuned screen adaptation of Nick Hornby's 1995 novel

Even at 143 minutes, For Greater Glory cannot satisfyingly fill out the stories of a half-dozen secondary characters, and there are frustrating gaps in the biographies of Gorostieta and José. The jamming together of so much history and melodrama makes for a handsome movie that is only rarely gripping.

Awesome also describes this 16-hour, four-opera masterwork about the creation and destruction of the world, a work that Wagner considered unstageable in his time.

There is so much to admire in The Weight of Water, Kathryn Bigelow's churning screen adaptation of a novel by Anita Shreve, that when the movie finally collapses on itself late in the game, it leaves you in the frustrating position of having to pick up its scattered pieces and assemble them as best you can.

By the end of this reflective, wise, often hilarious movie, you feel as though he (McElwee) has slapped a huge chunk of raw, palpitating life onto the screen.

[A] wonderful, lighter-than-air movie.

In the enchanted limbo between waking and sleeping, Zathura feels both real and unreal, like a dream you could shake off at any moment.

Mighty Fine chugs along heartily until it abruptly stops on the edge of cliff, leaving you feeling shortchanged. It is a couple of crucial scenes away from feeling complete.

This attenuated two-and-a-half-hour reflection on marriage, adultery, parenthood and the casualties of sexual warfare unfolds like a brooding autobiographical epilogue to Mr. Bergman's much stormier 1973 masterpiece, "Scenes From a Marriage."

If Sweet Home Alabama, directed by Andy Tennant from a screenplay by C. Jay Cox, has the ingredients for a classic screwball comedy, the movie is in such a rush to entertain that it barely connects the dots of its story. But it still has its effectively goofy comic moments.

Leaves a movie that wants to be a searching moral examination of human motivation under stress frustratingly opaque at the center.

The physical beauty of Li’l Quinquin tells me that beneath what could be interpreted as contemptuous misanthropy is a bedrock of stern compassion.

Ms. Chaplin, in one of her most touching screen performances, imbues Anne with a world-weary melancholy that makes your heart sink.

One of the most insightful and wrenching portraits of the joys and tribulations of being a classical musician ever filmed.

Indignation might be dismissed as a small, exquisite period piece, but it is so precisely rendered that it gets deeply under your skin.

Almost in spite of itself, The House of Mirth is powerful, at times even moving.

In what has been called the Year of the Documentary, "My Flesh and Blood" stands beside "Capturing the Friedmans" and "The Fog of War" as an unforgettable experience.

Powerfully gritty.

If it weren't so overpopulated and desperate to shock, Nowhere might have succeeded as a maliciously cheery satire of Hollywood brats overdosing on the very concept of Hollywood. But the movie is so hectically paced that it doesn't have time to develop its characters or to flesh out the tales it sets in motion. Even comic books are better at telling stories.

Remarkable concert documentary.

An ingenious contraption that holds your attention for as long as it whirs and clicks like a mechanized Rubik’s Cube. After it’s over, however, you may find yourself scratching your head and wondering if there was any purpose to this sleek little gizmo.

Skarsgard and Headey deliver perfectly meshed lead performances in a small, beautifully acted film that will make you squirm.

A witty, sociologically astute reflection on the attraction between opposites.

For all its narrative glitches and its homemade quality, Thirteen evokes the rhythm, texture and tone of Nina's world in a way that a more carefully scripted film never could.

An unblinking portrait of a complicated, solitary gay man who has outlived his working years.

Welcome to Leith wisely resists the kind of gimmickry that might have resulted in a stylistic hybrid of “The Blair Witch Project” or “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

Blistering.

One of the rare documentaries you leave wishing it was a little bit longer.

Putty Hill doesn't strive for overt social commentary. It drops you into a world that the director, who grew up in the area, knows firsthand: a suburban fringe of stasis, downward mobility and lowered expectations.

Lullaby, the directorial debut of Andrew Levitas, a jack of all artistic trades, is the kind of manipulative, cliché-infested hokum that alienates moviegoers by its insistence on hogging all the tears.

Breathe conveys an uncanny insight into the psychology of late adolescence, when lingering childhood fantasies can combust with burgeoning adult sexuality in a swirl of uncontrollable feelings.

As informative and packed with cultural lore as it is, The Komediant is dramatically diffuse.

Eddie Miller (Robert Forster), the stolid protagonist of Diamond Men, a small, finely acted slice of American life, is the sort of character the movies normally shun like the plague for lack of glamour.

What makes the pain of this film bearable is Daniel’s unquenchable decency, courage and perseverance.

As La Ciénaga perspires from the screen, it creates a vision of social malaise that feels paradoxically familiar and new.

Had it had the concision and symmetry of a classic French farce, Après Vous could have been an irresistible laugh machine.

The role of Jimmy is one of Mr. Jackson's scarier characters, and this brilliant actor inhabits all four corners of his jittery, avaricious personality. When he and Sydney finally clash, the movie makes its darkest, cleverest turn into film-noir nightmare.

This comic jigsaw puzzle is crammed with deliriously funny little bits.

Louisiana's delta country has never looked more darkly, lusciously sensual than it does in Eve's Bayou, a Southern gothic soap opera, written and directed by Kasi Lemmons, that transcends the genre through the sheer rumbling force of its characters' passions.

What's really so appealing about the characters is their resemblance to everyday children. They're wildly energetic, competitive and (sometimes dangerously) impulsive. But they also learn from their mistakes, and their instincts are good. More power to them.

"We are not pickers of garbage; we are pickers of recyclable materials," Tião, an impoverished Brazilian catadore, or trash picker, declares to a talk-show host in Lucy Walker's inspiring documentary Waste Land.

Morris, instead of evoking the solemnity that surrounds most films that touch on the Holocaust, has directed Mr. Death as the blackest of comedies.

The movie uses the talent show Afghan Star as a prism through which to examine the fragmented tribal culture of Afghanistan as reflected in the backgrounds of four finalists (two of them women) and the public responses to their performances.

If Mr. Hellman's movie only partly fulfills its promise as a gripping neo-noir mystery, his stylistic hallmarks lend it a singularly haunting atmosphere.

Instead of being contemptuous and sardonic, the portrait of inchoate adolescent longing in Paradise: Hope is poignant.

While most films in which the angry past confronts the guilty present degenerate into mawkish reconciliations, Emile errs on the side of restraint.

What ultimately sinks this stylish but heartless film is a flat lead performance by the eternally snippy Meg Ryan.

It works just fine as a sophisticated wildlife documentary with a submerged narrative. But if you enjoy the challenge of solving difficult mysteries, Hukkle presents a tantalizing case waiting to be cracked.

It is hard to imagine that any other actress could muster the stubborn ferocity that Isabelle Huppert brings to the role of Maud.

Zero Days has a similarly balanced outlook along with a critical political viewpoint that avoids hysteria and demagogy. Its strongest protest is against what Mr. Gibney sees as the dangers of excessive American secrecy.

Because Stevie has none of the glamour of "Hoop Dreams," with its portrait of gifted teenage athletes struggling for glory, it is not nearly as likable a film; but in its earnest, plodding way it is every bit as deep.

Often feels like two movies loosely sewn together. By far the most compelling of the two is its portrait of Ms. Boyd, a woman who for all her quirks and self-dramatizing flourishes, emerges as a noble spirit on the side of the angels.

The movie partly resists the temptation to follow a predictable feel-good route to a fairy-tale ending. That said, it has enough conveniently timed little triumphs to send up warning signs.

Seduced and Abandoned may be the year’s most entertaining put-on.

Underneath it all, The Gift is a merciless critique of an amoral corporate culture in which the ends justify the means, and lying and cheating are O.K., as long as they’re not found out.

Victoria is a sensational cinematic stunt.

Throughout the movie, you have the feeling of being dragged along on an impromptu journey by a filmmaker who is traveling without the benefit of a GPS device.

May be the first movie about a painter to transcend the gushy clichés found in movies that try to unravel the mysteries of artistic creation.

The characters in Alamar may be playing versions of themselves, but the writer, editor and director Pedro González-Rubio has constructed a film in which the journey has an overarching mythic resonance that evokes fables from "Robinson Crusoe" to "The Old Man and the Sea."

With its casual deadpan attitude, Buzzard offers a nightmare portrait of arrested development and anomie for the age of inequality.

Until the end, when it begins to go soft, the movie takes two strands of soap opera convention -- a life-changing accident and an adulterous affair -- and spins their suds into gold.

A cinematic tone poem as much as a biography.

The movie offers a revealing case study of the relationship between politics, celebrity and the media in today’s polarized social climate.

This calm, hardheaded film never sacrifices its toughness for a swooning, misty-eyed moment of hope.

So inept on every level, you wonder why the distributor didn't release it straight to video, or better, toss it directly into the trash.

A visually enthralling 40-minute tour of the southwestern Pacific depths.